• The 'French Garden' was one of the eleven themed Indoor Display Gardens created by Doris Duke and meticulously maintained in greenhouses at Duke Gardens.
• The Duke Gardens Foundation's board of Trustees has closed and removed them "to conserve resources" — contrary to garden and landscape design history advocates calling for their preservation as landmark gardens.

Commentary on history and future

Spring 2008

• Note: these eleven gardens are now lost, as far as it is possible to know. The trustees have permanently closed Duke Gardens. Saying "renovated gardens will reopen" was deliberately misleading and sloppy language that concealed the truth. Some sort of garden will be at Duke Farms. Doris Duke's indoor display gardens will not.
• The glorious indoor display gardens of Doris Duke's Estate in NJ will be destroyed unless the Trustees are persuaded to reconsider before May 25th, 2008: see the Flickr group Save Duke Gardens. Please use the Save Duke Gardens web site to easily email your newspaper and the Trustees if you wish these gardens to remain intact.
• These gardens are a labor of love and a work of art. Doris Duke spent years creating them, and would sometimes spend 16 hours a day working in them. They are being dismembered only 15 years after Doris Duke's death, on the 50th anniversary of their creation, by the Estate's trustees, who do not feel the gardens fit in with a modern Green vision. — Really ?
• The Trustees tell us the Gardens will re-open in a couple years. But what this really means is that a different orchid conservatory will reopen. Not this elaborate set of interconnected Indoor Display Gardens. They will be lost.