After Samuel Insull purchased the first parcel of land in what eventually would grow to a vast estate, he lived in a spacious, elegantly furnished house near what is now Milwaukee Avenue. Photographs show some landscaping immediately around the house, but most of the property remained open prairie or farmland. The photo to the left was taken from the roof of Insull's house looking north toward Libertyville. Notice the limited new tree plantings near the house. The open prairie of the Illinois landscape dwarfs the orchard and border trees. After the trees and shrubs filled out, later photos of the house environs show a pleasant but still modest landscape effect. In 1914, as Insull’s wealth and status in Chicago’s business community continued to grow, he decided to build an Italianate mansion with a much more extensive and elaborately landscaped estate. Insull hired respected landscape designer Jens Jensen to rework the estate grounds.

Jensen was a landscaper with a “philosophy.” He believed in using native plants rather than exotic ornamentals. His groves and beds had curving edges rather than straight formal lines. He favored tree and shrub plantings over flower gardens. He often included water features –ponds, islands, bridges and waterfalls – in his designs. His open lawns, edged thickly with Hawthorns and other trees, widened, narrowed and twisted as one walked through them, offering changing views of the mansion house. Believing that nature should provide a setting for communal activity, he often built council rings for story telling and theater into his landscapes. All of these features were incorporated into the design of Insull’s estate.

Despite his belief in recreating the natural setting, delicately reshaped, Jensen sometimes accommodated his clients’ preference for the manicured, patterned look of French and Italian estates by installing traditional formal gardens near the estate house. At the northwest corner of Insull’s new mansion, Jensen’s plans show both a sunken circular garden and rectangular garden patch intersected by grassy pathways. The latter was labeled for vegetables and “picking gardens,” presumably for cut flowers for the mansion rooms, and the circular sunken garden was labeled for roses. One definitely formal neoclassical feature of the new “back yard” was a grassy proscenium framed by impressive columns and a pergola. Apparently, Mr. Insull requested this performance stage to provide a creative outlet for his wife, Gladys, who had a promising career as a actress before marrying Samuel. She entertained party guests after dinner on this outdoor classical stage.

Over the course of the next decades, some of the plantings in Jensen’s original design disappeared through neglect or design. The property was vacant from 1932 when Mr. Insull lost it until 1937 when Mr. Cuneo, Sr. purchase the core of the estate. Some of the plant circles were overrun by scrub growth. The grassy walks through the vegetable garden eventually became sidewalks with a central fountain, while the gardens themselves were seeded with grass. The fountain in the sunken garden was replaced and ornamental flowers planted inside a barberry hedge. Wanting to extend the Italian design of the mansion to the south lawn, Mr. Cuneo hired Italian gardeners to thin the trees and shrubs, plant some ornamental beds and set up rows of statuary in the meadow which slopes to the pond. Several small golf greens were built around the perimeter of the large meadow in front of the mansion. A tall arbor vitae hedge with a rose garden was planted around the pool area.

In the two months before opening as a museum in July of 1991, Mr. Cuneo, Jr. ordered extensive renovations of the rear garden areas. What had been the vegetable/perennial garden during the Insull years was restored, this time as a formal flower garden with a boxwood shrub border, statues and large trees around the central fountain. The sunken garden was replanted as well, and ornamental restraining walls were installed in the rose garden tiers by the pool. Flowering Clematis vines were planted to drape the columns near Mrs. Insull’s stage with brilliant color every summer. The large central room of the greenhouse, which had been built several years earlier in anticipation of public access, was planted with tropical vegetation around its rock waterfall, circular stream and bridge. The White Fallow Deer pen, which had been moved into a roughly wooded area several years earlier, was cleared so the public could view the deer and goats. The following year one of the flower circles was reclaimed with an arbor vitae tree border and peonies. A bird house with peacocks, pheasants and various bantam chickens was built. The gardens continue to evolve with new plantings and rotating colors in the flower beds each year.

As with any property with a long history, the Cuneo estate embodies the tastes of its several owners and relics of its many years of use, whether it is Mrs. Insull’s stage or Mr. Cuneo’s Italian villa statuary. But even with these alterations, Jensen’s original plan provides the underlying shape of the estate with its ponds, meadows, woods, gardens and colonnade. Strolling the garden pathways to the sound of splashing fountains or traversing the open lawns lined with statues and edged with flowers and woods, today’s visitor can recapture the beauty and quiet of Jensen’s pastoral retreat enjoyed in years past by the Insulls, the Cuneos and their privileged guests.

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