Celebrity Homes: Discover Jessica Lange Garden

Celebrity News | Oct 3, 2016

Celebrity Homes: Discover Jessica Lange Garden: In between Fay Wray and Naomi Watts, King Kong’s main squeeze was Jessica Lange, making her film debut in 1976. It was not an auspicious beginning. The critics savaged Dino De Laurentiis’s version of the ape epic—and Lange disappeared from the screen for another three years.

She came back with a vengeance. In 1982 the actress received both a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of movie star Frances Farmer in Frances and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Dustin Hoffman’s dream girl in Tootsie. She earned three more Oscar nominations, for her work in Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985) and Music Box (1989), and she won an Academy Award for her characterization of a military officer’s mentally unbalanced wife in Blue Sky (1994). And in April she will receive a Lincoln Center tribute for her body of work. “She reaches into characters to suggest the strength of vulnerable women and the vulnerability of the strong,” Caryn James once wrote in The New York Times.

“We had to kind of reconstruct it,” says the actress. “There was quite a bit of work to do on the house. There was more work to do on the property.” That’s a somewhat coy way of describing the two acres of scrub that had to be cleared away, the walls and steps of locally quarried limestone that were installed to terrace the sloping grounds, and the nine years of intensive gardening that would go into beautifying them.
Lange—who had never gardened before but believes she may have inherited a green thumb from two aunts, whom she remembers studying plant catalogues in the dead of Minnesota winters—started out modestly enough: “I was going to work on one little area, a tiny horseshoe garden by the house that hadn’t been planted or designed or anything.” Taking her cue from English cottage gardens, she planted a loose ring of lilies, ferns, daylilies and clematis around a mosaic birdbath in the form of a skirted farm girl.