The gardens at Philbrook Museum of Art

The gardens at Philbrook trace back to the museum's origins as Villa Philbrook, the 1920s Italian Renaissance-style estate built for oil pioneer Waite Phillips and his wife Genevieve. The original landscape design was a collaboration between architect Edward Buehler Delk, who designed the villa itself, and landscape architect S. Herbert Hare of the Kansas City firm Hare & Hare. Together they created a design that combined Italian, English and French garden iconography and featured plants native to the area, drawing inspiration from Villa Lante, a 16th-century Italian country estate north of Rome. The result, spread across the estate's 25 acres, centers on a strict, geometric formal garden with triple ramps, walls, and gates that stretches past a balustrade walk, a grotto, and a mirror pond into a more contemplative area marked by a gracefully scaled tempietto, with a rear loggia featuring five arches and Corinthian columns overlooking the terrace and formal gardens. Beyond this formal core, the grounds unfold into more naturalistic areas. To the south of the property, gardens extending to a summerhouse were conceived later and completed in 2004, featuring native Oklahoma plants and a refurbished creek, and this area includes the bronze sculpture Thinker on a Rock by Barry Flanagan. That 2004 transformation stemmed from a major renovation plan completed by the landscape architecture firm Howell & Vancuren in 2002, with the approval and support of Elliot Phillips, son of Waite and Genevieve, refreshing the historic landscape for a new era. Today the gardens are cared for as living, evolving collections in their own right — including features like a Native Plant Garden — and docent-led and self-guided tours let visitors move between the manicured Italianate rooms near the villa and the looser, pastoral grove and creekside plantings further out.