Bruce Porter

Born in San Francisco, Porter left school at the age of fourteen, eventually becoming a self-taught landscape gardener, sculptor, and stained-glass artist. In 1889 he traveled to Europe where he trained under the leading artists of the British Arts and Crafts movement, including Edward Burne-Jones. Porter designed residential gardens for wealthy clients within the San Francisco  Bay Area, including William Bowers Bourn’s 654-acre Filoli estate. Porter, working alongside Bourn, architect Arthur Brown, and the horticulturist Isabella Worn, laid out the estate’s various formal garden between 1917 and 1929. His designs, inspired by different periods in British history, included Georgian style terraces and enclosed English Renaissance gardens defined by axial paths of Irish yews and hedges. His work at Filoli also consists of a bowling green, walled garden, woodland garden, and rose garden. His other notable designs are the courtyard of the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco, which he helped found, the Memorial Stadium at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Carolands estate in Hillsborough, California. In this last project Porter helped realize the estate plans created by landscape designer Achille Duchêne by selecting plant palettes and planting more than 35,000 trees. In addition to his landscape work, Porter earned a reputation for creating both murals and stained-glass windows for regional churches in San Francisco, Stockton, Coronado, Pacific Grove, and elsewhere in California. He is also remembered for his design of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial in San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square. He was a member of the Society of American Sculptors and Painters and was a co-publisher of the literary magazine The Lark, from 1895 to 1897. He died in San Francisco at the age of 88.