The Sunken Garden was designed in 1915 as a finale to the formal gardens. This architectural garden is unusual among the Allerton gardens, with no central path and limited plantings other than turf and hemlocks located inside the upper wall.
Prior to 1915, this area served as Robert’s garbage dump. When he decided to create a garden here, he asked his architect friend, David Adler (who later employed John Gregg in his Chicago offices), to help design it. William Lodge (of Lodge Park north of Monticello) supervised the work.
They moved the dump and enclosed the area with an oval cement structure. This was one of the first poured cement walls in Piatt County. Because the forms used were not properly made, all the board marks showed and the laborers needed to plaster it over to make it appear more uniform.
Finally finished in 1917, the garden continued to change over the next two decades. Initially, only the lower wall was constructed, with pines planted around the perimeter behind the wall. Two rustic gazebos were located at the ends with adjacent steps providing access down into the garden. There were also steps on the east side and a ramp on the west side. The gazebos went through several iterations before they were eliminated when a major redesign of the garden was undertaken in the late 1920s, utilizing John Gregg’s architectural talents. At that time the upper walls were added, making the garden more enclosed, and much of the original sculpture was removed. By 1931 John designed new stairways in the clean, modern Art Deco style with pylons soaring twenty-four feet from the upper terrace. The pylons were topped by guilded Japanese Guardian Fish, replicas from originals that Robert and John saw on the roof of Nagoya Castle in Japan. (These tiger-headed fish, or “kinshachi”, symbolized protection from fire.) Today, several of the Guardian Fish are replacements for the originals.
Charles Laing, the Chicago stone mason who carved the replicas ofAdam, Primitive Man, and The Three Graces, carved the goldfish in the Sunken Garden, using the Chinese Parterre goldfish as models. Although the original fountains had holes in the mouth, Laing didn’t drill the holes all the way through in the Sunken Garden goldfish. Copies of the Chinese Goldfish replaced the Fu Dogs, which were moved to the Fu Dog Garden in 1931.
The last major change was the addition of lattice on the upper walls in the late 1930s, allowing vines to grow up and hang down. Besides the addition of an ADA path around the northern perimeter of the garden, there have been few changes since then. Today, this garden serves as the estate’s most popular venue for wedding ceremonies.
Text in-part courtesy of Maureen Holtz.
