Photo by Lucie Monk
The LSU AgCenter Botanical Gardens’ role as a horticultural research station often means that harvested crops are for sale to the public. Look for signs at the Essen Lane entrance announcing everything from satsumas, tomatoes, strawberries, and corn.
Ten years after Steele Burden’s death, Burden Museum and Gardens has embraced a more public-facing master plan
From Essen Lane, one of Baton Rouge’s busiest north-south thruways, one enters a gateway to a peaceful, green oasis, down a road lined with live oaks, crape myrtles, and specialty gardens of camellias, roses, gingers, and other themed gardens. One then approaches a conference center and event spaces—subtle statements of modern life, one step removed from the hustle and bustle. This landscape transitions at a bridge, progressing through a stand of trees along a rural Louisiana landscape. Driving through large fields and down an oak alley, one arrives at an agricultural Louisiana village where nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vernacular buildings—homes, workshops, church, commissary, along with period tools and equipment—demonstrate the life of the rural farmer in Louisiana.
It is a journey through space and time: from city to country, from the present to the past. Even before Interstate 10 was built, when it would have been hard to imagine how far east from its Mississippi River moorings Baton Rouge would grow, Steele Burden held this conceptual journey in his mind for his family’s 440-acre property, which today sits smack dab in the middle of the city surrounded by dense urban development.
Now, ten years after his death, a group of people—handpicked by Steele and his sister Ione and collectively called the Burden Foundation—are responsible for overseeing that the growth and maintenance of this valuable property remain aligned with the wishes expressed by the Burdens when they donated the property to LSU in the 1970s. The entire property, formerly known as the Burden Research Center, was recently renamed Burden Museum and Gardens and has adopted a broadened educational mission and accompanying master plan that complements the ongoing activities.
The property first entered the Burden family in the mid 1800s, when William S. Pike Sr. bought it and offered it to his niece and her new husband, John Charles Burden. The property was called Windrush Plantation, but it was never a plantation in the true meaning of the word. It was mostly a working farm on which the family grew agricultural crops and raised cattle. The original Burden home, which one can still see on the property today, was a modest, two-room house with a hallway. Windrush was passed down through the generations until, in Steele’s generation, no other heirs existed to inherit the property. Steele had two siblings: Ione Burden, who like him never married, and Pike, who did marry but never had children. Jeff Kuehny, director of the Botanic Gardens, explained that when Pike passed away, Ione and Steele felt an urgency to make certain decisions about the future of the place they loved so much.
“They took great pride in this property and [had] great love for it, so they wanted to see it maintained,” said Kuehny. “They thought about giving it to BREC [the city’s parks and recreation commission], but they didn’t want it to be a park. They didn’t want it to be an entertainment place.”
From 1930 to 1970, Steele was the landscape manager at LSU. A self- taught landscape architect, much of the campus’ landscape today—the live oaks and magnolias and everything in between—was his doing. Ione also had a strong connection to LSU; she was assistant to the dean of student affairs on campus. They decided to donate the property to LSU in the mid-1960s.
And with this act of donation, which took place over the span of two decades, came certain stipulations, Keuhny said: the property was to be maintained as a green space and could not be commercially developed or sold. The Burdens also envisioned a three-fold purpose for the property: horticultural research, extension education, and as a museum (thus including what is now the LSU Rural Life Museum whose beginnings had already been established before the act of donation).
The last of the Burden acreage was bequeathed to LSU in 1992, and it remains relatively unchanged from that time. The property consists of a series of trails through the Burden woods, the research and extension facilities, Barton Arboretum, the LSU Rural Life Museum, the Ione Burden Conference Center, and the Steele Burden Memorial Orangerie. Windrush Gardens, the twenty-five-acre garden in which Steele conducted much of his landscape experimentation before employing the strategies on LSU’s campus, includes the Burdens’ original family home, a second, larger home that was built by Pike Burden, and a garden studio.
Steele Burden was a bit of a renaissance man, a “thinker and visionary” as Kuehny put it. “He was a multi-talented person and he always had an artful eye. He was great at visualizing landscape; he never drew anything on paper. It was always in his head. And he rarely changed what he came up with, so he would go out with chalk or flour and mark out a garden, and that’s the way it would be.”
Steele loved history, and he admired the landscape architecture of old plantation homes, a style that echoed the formal and semi-formal European gardens that focused on texture and form rather than riotous color. His landscapes—at Windrush Gardens, at LSU, and in the yards of individuals who’d had their homes designed by Steele’s friend, famous architect A. Hays Town—have themselves become a style of gardens, incorporating oak alleys, crape myrtles, statuary, and sugar kettles (the use of which Steele popularized and is a hallmark of his style), for instance.
Steele was also a visual artist; he painted landscapes and made “mud men,” little sculptures that often revealed his irreverent sense of humor, both of which he’d often trade for items that he couldn’t have otherwise afforded. “The interesting thing about Steele and his art is that people think that the Burdens were a wealthy family,” said Kuehny. But they weren’t; just rich in land, which must have been expensive to maintain.
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Though the property was essentially under the control of two different entities during Steele’s final twenty years (the LSU AgCenter, which oversaw Windrush Gardens and the property’s use as a horticultural research station, and the LSU Chancellor, who was the administrator of the Rural Life Museum), any proposed changes to the property could still be run past Steele. He was always very involved in the planning and project development that concerned the property. Kuehny explained that Steele and Ione had cleverly arranged comfortable retirements for themselves at Ollie Steele Burden Manor, for whose construction they donated thirty acres. When, in the late 1960s the state bought thirty acres from the siblings to build Interstate 10, Steele arranged for a tunnel to be built under the Interstate, essentially providing access from what would be his future home at Burden Manor to the property which he visited on a daily basis till his death in 1994.
But after his death, it became evident to the various entities now controlling the property, that ongoing development would need to be guided by some sort of master plan in order that it be approached with cohesion and, most importantly, to ensure that Steele and Ione’s vision would be respected and adhered to over the ensuing decades.
Not to mention the increasing intersections with the public. Kuehny explained, “We realized just with the Rural Life Museum [that] we were a destination whether we wanted to be or not. Instead of just doing research all the time, we thought, you know, we really should use this [property] to be able to help the public understand horticulture, nature, urban woodlands, and gardening because we have all that here. So, to continue that vision of the Burdens’, but include the public too and become an even greater destination along with the museum.”
And so in 2009, armed with the original vision of Steele Burden, all parties with a stake in the museum and research station embarked on a yearlong project to develop a multi-decade master plan. Suzanne Turner Associates (STA) was hired to complete a cultural landscape report, which provided a thorough historical analysis of the property under the care of the LSU AgCenter.
“The report recommends that any changes made to the site should respect the overall character of Steele Burden’s intentions and designs for the property and the fact that it was meant to create a place of rural scenery, in contrast to the urban and suburban context that surrounds it,” said Suzanne Turner, principal with STA. “The report also describes how Windrush Gardens, as Burden’s most important surviving garden design, should be restored and preserved as a significant historic landscape.”
The master plan involves broadening the interaction of the entire property with the public, particularly the horticultural enterprises that were previously dedicated almost solely to academic research. Windrush Gardens, the trails through the woodlands, the arboretum, and the conference center area with adjacent gardens are now collectively labeled the LSU AgCenter Botanic Gardens. But these aren’t gardens styled in the Victorian tradition—highly cultivated and curated landscapes whose function first and foremost is aesthetic. In the master plan, Burden’s Botanic Gardens are given a firm educational mission, and in that capacity, the landscape is adapted and improved to provide learning experiences to help children and adults understand native trees, swamp habitats, urban gardening, hortitherapy, and horticulture. Even the ornamental gardens serve beyond providing aesthetic pleasure; The All-America Selections display garden doubles as a research project through which staff can make recommendations to the public, for instance.
The name change came last and as a result of focus group studies that revealed that the public was thoroughly confused. What exactly were all the moving parts at Burden, how did they all work together, and what did those parts have to do with the residents of Baton Rouge? How was the public now expected to relate to the largest green space in the city, and what sort of expectations could they have in turn?
It was decided that a name change was in order, a rebranding—to use a rather clinical marketing term—that could encompass and anchor the multi-faceted enterprise that is now called Burden Museum and Gardens.
Kuehny recognizes that the public is confused, but he and his staff are working hard to spread the word that Burden Museum and Gardens is now an educational destination that welcomes the public with open arms.
Details. Details. Details.
Burden Museum and Gardens 4560 Essen Lane Baton Rouge, La. (225) 763-3990 discoverburden.com Upcoming Events March 22–30: Brush with Burden April 12–13: Master Gardeners’ Plant Sale April 25: Gourmet in the Garden
