The nature of Fallingwater

The first Saturday in May is Members' Day for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which runs Fallingwater (built by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufman family), as well protects natural "land, water, life" in the Commonwealth. You can read about how we came to join WPC at this blog post. The first and last time I RSVP'd for us it was either 2019 or 2020, and I decided at the last minute not to attend because the weather threatened to be wet +/- COVID. This year spring (re)arrived in time for a beautiful, no-tolls drive through rural southwestern PA, some hiking, and a picnic lunch.

The trip down turned into a kind of scavenger hunt: 

Back to my office to pick up the lunch I hadn't eaten Friday because my coworkers brought food for Cinco de Mayo (I won't be back for over a week)

Past the motel where we spent a Saturday night when our power went out and Dear Husband feared he wouldn't be able to sleep without air conditioning, and I wanted wifi to finish a work project that was on a submission deadline

Then the diner where we had breakfast the next morning

The bakery in Elizabeth where DH rescued me one Saturday morning after I locked my keys in my car

So many farms, so few barn stars

The Youghiogheny River, on which we kayaked once

Despite having left the house at 4 minutes after 7, we arrived juuust in time to check in, stand in line for the restroom (singular), and inhale a quick cold breakfast before our 2-hour "nature hike" departed in the chilly sunshine. The 20 of us grouped and regrouped trying to avoid cars and other hikers / birders, went over this creek near the gardener's house, before we arrived at the octagonal visitor's center and were assigned to naturalist Jim as our leader.

First, he took us to the bird's eye view of Fallingwater, we was new for us.

Then we went to the classic vista downstream from the house, where everyone wanted photos, of course.

Next we wandered over to the main drive and bridge crossing Bear Run, where we identified some different plants. Below left is devil's walking stick, whose leaves grow on top of a tall skinny stem with poisonous thorns. (That's a baby plant--the parent plants reached way above our heads!) The WPC planted it intentionally along the side of this path to try to dissuade visitors from tromping through the underbrush to take photos of the house from the edge of the streambed. Next to it is trillium, of which the pic to the right is a better photo of a blooming one.

We paused to snap photos of Bear Run, the house, the angles, and the water.

Did somebody say, angles?

Here our guide Jim is demonstrating for us the "fountain" in the entranceway which actually functioned as a sort of outdoor mudroom: you probably can't see the bar of soap on a chain hanging under the spigot so the family could wash off after hiking or horseback riding.

What I like about this feature is that it replicates the water running down the hillside in the background, which is the back wall of the driveway winding its way up the hill to the 4-car garage next to the guest house and servants' quarters. Indeed, along the path there were rivulets and occasionally little spontaneous waterfalls.

The Mother and Child statue by Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) was completed in 1941 and originally faced the "plunge pool" you can see in teal below. It fell over during a flood in 1956, so it was reaffixed facing outward "toward nature." Thankfully they added a chain, because floodwaters toppled it again in 2017. I particularly like the juxtaposition of the calm water and the rushing stream in this image. The mother raises her arms in a sun-worshipper pose, or maybe she's saying, "Bring it on!"

Wright's indoor gardens didn't always have enough sunlight to flourish, but it looks like this one does.

We didn't reserve inside tickets this time, which is fine because we were enjoying the warming weather on this spring morning. I like the second shot below as I integrate myself into the scenery.

I confess I had hoped we had signed up for a "moderately difficult," continuously moving, 2-hour hike making a big loop through the larger grounds. It was not, but Jim did take us to Paradise Outlook, which is named for a young man who fell to his death while hiking in the early 1960s (not here, I think). He said the snakes like to sun themselves on the rocks.

Here is marsh marigold in the "quarry" where the flagstones for Fallingwater were cut. It's just a shallow, wet indentation in the hilltop, nothing deep, and no particular vantage point of the nearby waterways.

These pink lady slippers require a certain kind of soil and are pollinated by bees crawling into the flower on one end, picking up pollen, and dropping it off again at the other end of the petal tunnel.

We also got to walk around the guesthouse and servants' quarters, which are finished in the same high-quality detail as the main house (Kaufman's orders).

Here is a mayapple plant starting to blossom. They don't fruit until they're old enough to have bifurcated their stem.

The swimming pool was fun to photograph.

I liked this view of the stepped roof over the walkway between the main house (below/left) to the guesthouse (above/right) and the way it simultaneously frames and divides the redbud tree.

Then it was back to The Barn, where were late to the start of the annual meeting, so we opted for an early lunch that we had brought, including two new flavors of Ramune (explanation in this blog post). As you can see by the fact that we had shed our layers, the temperature had increased since we had arrived to almost 70 degrees.

We took the Turnpike back toward town so we could purchase some red raspberry bushes from a woman on FB Marketplace for our little backyard plot that already hosts two prolific rhubarb plants and (hopefully) that volunteer tomato bush. Later we picked up several flats of native species of flowering plants (wild blue indigo, a honeysuckle, and foamflowers). I've got a purple bell pepper plant coming in another week as well, as we try to take care of our own little corner of nature.