For more than 50 years this Victorian
Mansion was the home of Marie and
Joseph Schedel, it was built in 1888.
The house, located outside of Elmore, Ohio,
was occupied by the Schedels from 1930 to 1989.
It sits on a bluff overlooking the Portage
River and the property’s two
adjacent lakes. There is a total of 17 acres of land on the estate. Pictured below is a path winding its way down toward river. In the
background of the picture is the Schedel’s summer cottage called the “shack”.
The couple spent most
of their time there as the mansion was
too much like a museum for them. The Schedels had traveled to more than 100
countries and brought back ideas of nature and art to use in their home and
gardens. They had a special passion for
the orient and far eastern cultures, as evidenced in the Japanese section of
their gardens.
In the Japanese garden there is a large red Torii, as well
as lanterns and pagodas, waterfalls and a small pond. Here the cremated remains Dr. Schedel and his
wife lie under a pagoda. In the Japanese
Garden, as well as throughout the
grounds, are twenty different varieties of Japanese maples. They provide a beautiful splash of color with
their reddish colored leaves. We found a
small Japanese maple located in the bonsai shelter of the gardens. The structure houses a collection of
miniaturized pruned trees known as bonsai, the oldest one being 70 years of
age. The practice of expertly shaping the
small trees was started in ancient China,
but was perfected by the Japanese. Some
of the bonsai are pictured below. Here
we also found a dawn redwood, we had just seen a grove of those trees in
another part of the gardens. More on
that tree in my next posting.
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