These tree-like shrubs produce grayish-green, palm-shaped foliage that smells almost as fragrant as its blue and violet flowers, which bloom from early summer into early fall. The Chaste Tree (Vitex agnus-castus) isn’t a tree at all but rather a fast-growing shrub in the Verbena family.
The second species on our list of trees with purple flowers, like the first, is a bit of a misnomer. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Chaste Tree This shrub has a fragrant smell and will attract many different pollinators. Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. When one associate called him “an old amateur”, Wright, who worked until his death aged 91 replied, “I am the oldest.” He remained a fiercely committed individualist, refusing to join the American Institute of Architects. It was Edgar Jr who donated Fallingwater, along with 1,750-acres of the Laurel Highlands and an endowment of $500,000 (£388,000) to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.Īs for Wright, Fallingwater – you can find his initials in the name – sparked a revival in his career, and one that allowed him to design and build against the grain of European-influenced Modernism for the next 20 years. Their son, Edgar Jr, who had been an apprentice to Wright in the early ‘30s, inherited the house, sharing it with his life partner, the Spanish-born architect and designer Paul Mayén who shaped the visitor centre, café and gift store that opened in 1981. In 1952, Liliane committed suicide at Fallingwater.
Today, the Kaufmanns have long gone, yet the interiors are much as Wright designed them. This was one sure way, he believed, to ‘client-proof’ his latest masterpiece. Wright, who designed every last detail of the house, had much of the furniture built into its walls.
#PURPLE TREE HOUSE WINDOWS#
Views of a “leaf-laden tree of bare interlacing branches”, seen through frameless windows were, she wrote in a letter to Wright, “a more-than-satisfactory substitute for curtains and draperies.” Fallingwater was certainly a very different architectural proposition from the Kaufmann’s Neo-Norman mansion in Pittsburgh. Damp seeped up from the rushing water causing mould while roof-lights leaked.Įven so, even Liliane, who had been sceptical of the design came to appreciate the beauty of Fallingwater and its setting. Its daring use of cantilevers led to a row between architect and client – Kaufmann had them reinforced further and Wright threatened to resign – and indeed the great cantilevered river front of the house began to sag as soon as the concrete formwork was removed. Kaufmann had thought of a house overlooking the waterfall at Bear Run, but Wright insisted, “I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it.” This highly original and beautiful mountain retreat was commissioned by Edgar J Kaufmann, a wealthy Pittsburgh department store proprietor and his wife – also his first cousin – Liliane Kaufmann who did much to bring chic Parisian couture to the American Midwest. Since it was handed over to the care of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963 and reopened as a museum the following year, some five million visitors have driven out to this remote Pennsylvanian home at Bear Run, 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, to marvel at the building that re-ignited Wright’s career. Built over a waterfall and with the bedrock it was anchored to rising up through the living room floor, it belongs inexorably to the Appalachian landscape it adorns. An internationally recognised masterpiece, Fallingwater is as close to the ground and nature as architecturally possible.
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