Horticulture Legacy at Biltmore House

Horticulture Legacy at Biltmore House

In the shadow of Biltmore House are some of America's finest formal and informal gardens. Here is the birthplace of the first scientific school of forestry in the United States. And it is here that this country's father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed his last and largest project nearly a century ago.

Olmsted had completed New York's Central Park and landscaped campuses at Boston University, Yale and Stanford before he was approached by young George Vanderbilt in the 1880s to transform the over-farmed, over-logged land surrounding the site of the house into a country estate.

After George Vanderbilt's early death in 1914, a large portion of the original estate was obtained by the U.S. government, forming the nucleus for Pisgah National Forest. Because Vanderbilt, along with German forester Dr. Carl A. Schenck, established the Biltmore School of Forestry here in America - this seems a fitting legacy to the man behind Biltmore Estate.

Today, Biltmore Estate's forests, grounds and gardens reflect Olmsted's plans from nearly a century ago. Estate staff manage approximately 5,000 acres of forest and woodland as well as maintain the estate grounds and greenhouses. Their jobs include pruning some 80 varieties of roses in the rose garden, planting 50,000 tulip bulbs in the English Walled Garden each year, raising and planting 20,000 bedding plants annually, and growing more than 1,000 poinsettias which decorate Biltmore House every Christmas.