Landscape architecture professor emeritus Terence “Terry” Harkness (1940–2025) designed the Gelvin Garden. Krannert Art Museum Council’s lead gardener Gloria Rainer worked closely with him over the past 15 years and recently shared this remembrance.
Terry Harkness was my friend. Is it any surprise our budding friendship began while digging and planting in the garden at the museum?
My first awareness of Terry was around 2010, when a group of KAM Council volunteers responded to a plea to help bring the Gelvin Garden into better condition. We were working in the garden one morning a week, focused solely on removing weeds. I became aware of a man who regularly rode down Peabody Drive, past the garden, on his recumbent bicycle. Each day he observed us working and I noticed he was not just giving us a passing glance. He seemed to be engaged in a sustained appraisal of what we were doing. After many weeks, he finally stopped, rather than just riding by. It was Terry.
Of course, he was very interested in our work because he had created the initial landscape designs in 1990, when the garden was being planned. Later he told me he didn’t think our volunteer group would last long doing this tedious work—instead, we impressed him with our dedication to and persistence in our work in the garden. It comes as no surprise that at that moment, Terry became another volunteer committed to making the museum’s garden beautiful again.
Terry’s focus, however, was not on the extensive weeding project. Rather, he was focused on upgrading the plant material—transplanting plants, bringing in additional plants needed to provide more interesting texture, structure, and color to the garden, and doing careful and expert trimming of the boxwood hedges. He frequented nurseries near and far, often returning with a shrub or two, or a grouping of plants, or even a plant variety he found interesting, to add to the garden. And quite often these additions were a gift from him.
You may have noticed the bald cypress trees planted on the east side of the museum. All four of those now well-established trees were the result of Terry finding the trees one at a time, hauling them to the garden in his black-and-gray truck, and planting them. The planting part was not always easy—due to the difficulty in digging a proper hole by hand in inhospitable soil and manhandling each tree into that hand-dug space to plant them. Sometimes I was recruited to help in that process. The last bald cypress tree he brought to the garden was large and especially difficult to maneuver. Somehow, we managed to drag—and ultimately slide—the heavy, awkward tree into the prepared hole. After planting that tree, I put my hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and said, “We are never going to do this again!” It was simply too difficult and too dangerous. Terry reluctantly and grudgingly agreed to this request.
Terry often appeared at the garden very early in the morning, situating his truck with two wheels up on the sidewalk beside the parking lot, typically well before any of the other garden volunteers arrived. He liked to work in the quiet and coolness of the early day. I understood this preference. And on some occasions, I was convinced he worked early in the morning in order to complete a task he felt strongly about but was unsure if I would agree to. Everything he did seemed carefully considered and intentional.
These last few years Terry needed to step back from actively working in the garden, but all of us who work there have continued to feel his presence. I was privileged to have personally experienced Terry’s generous heart and his passion for beauty expressed through thoughtful landscape design. The Gelvin Garden at Krannert Art Museum proudly stands as part of his inspired legacy.
—Gloria Rainer
Photo by Julia Nucci Kelly, 2021.
