Cranbrook House Formal Garden

James Scripps Booth was the oldest child of George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth. Born in Detroit and raised in their home on Trumbull Avenue, James was already twenty years old in 1908 when his parents moved into Cranbrook House. Throughout his life, James Booth divided his time between his twin passions for art and engineering. As a designer and engineer for the Scripps-Booth automobile company, James Booth spearheaded work on innovative vehicles from 1913 to 1923, when he left the company to pursue an independent career as a mechanical engineer and professional artist. From June to September of 1917, James Booth produced a series of sixteen pastel drawings of the grounds and gardens of his parents’ home, Cranbrook House, for his father, George Booth.

Summer is in full bloom in this view of the terraced gardens on the north side of Cranbrook House. Tall lilies stretch up out of the beds, and the terracotta urns on either side of the staircase brim with greenery. Though most of James Booth’s drawings of the Cranbrook estate reveal the relative barrenness of the estate at this period, with newly planted saplings in place of the full-grown trees that tower over the grounds today, this view of the flowery garden terrace is very similar to its appearance in the twenty-first century.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
August 2024