The river garden at Quarters One was lined with irregularly hewn flat limestone slabs and planted with irises, elephant ear plants, and annual flowers. It contained three waterfalls.
With the addition of a Japanese-style flared roof and lattice panels, this small building – originally built as a summer house almost by the river – took on a Japanese feel. This photo was taken in 1919 and later colorized.
Quarters One’s formal gardens included pergolas and gravel walkways.
Quarters One’s formal gardens included cutting gardens, or those cultivated specifically so that flowers could be cut to provide bouquets and other arrangements inside the residence.
This remnant of limestone wall is pretty much all that remains of the three-level river garden at Quarters One. It is located northeast of the mansion.
The interior of the veranda attached to Quarters One was filled with blossoming tropical plants.
This colorized postcard from Quarters One shows a metal fountain surrounded by elephant ear plants. The room with many windows to the left is the veranda which was removed in 1972.
This photograph shows the interior of the tea house as it appeared on September 5, 1919, decorated for pre-Labor Day events. Wicker furniture was of the type shown in a number of catalogs of products imported from Asia in the early 1900s.
Anyone walking around the grounds of the massive Quarters One residence on Arsenal Island may notice a small wall of limestone in the lawn to the northeast of what was once the home of the Arsenal Commander.
The wall appears to have been part of a larger landscape, although looking around you can see mostly grass and trees. No feature of the landscape stands out.
But you would be right – the wall was once part of a large “river garden” with trees, ponds and streams built in 1919 under the leadership of Adelita Jordan, wife of former commander HB Jordan, and at least once called Japanese Garden as it once included a tea house perched on the edge of the river.
It is not known exactly when the garden disappeared.
The river garden and other landscape features now missing from the Isle of Arsenal – formal flower gardens, cutting gardens, greenhouses, veranda filled with tropical plants, and WWII Victory Gardens – are highlighted by Beth Cody, gardening enthusiast and small business owner from Kalona, Iowa, who published a 66 page booklet titled “Quarters One Gardens”. The booklet was an outgrowth of information she gathered while researching Midwestern Japanese gardens for the Muscatine Art Center, as reported in the Quad-City Times on October 31.
Cody found virtually no written documentation of the gardens on the island, but was able to piece together a probable history based on photographs from the US Army Sustainment Command, Davenport Library, Putnam Museum, and Augustana College, and newspaper articles about social events taking place in the gardens. She also unearthed information about a Japanese landscape architect named TR Otsuka, whose work depicted in a contemporary nursery catalog closely resembles the river garden on Arsenal Island. This led Cody to conclude that he was probably the architect of the River Garden.
