Estates of Grace: New England Gardens Steeped in History

There was a time when I drove through the gates of a 434-acre Hudson River estate each weekday, down an allée of black locusts that heralded the arboretum’s grand specimens. In any moment of work stress, I could step outside my office into the finest example of Andrew Jackson Downing’s landscape ideals. Those vistas, formal grounds, and woodland paths were a cure-all.

Ever since, I’ve sought out historic gardens here in New England with power beyond their plantings. These blooming worlds with old “bones” were conceived to amuse and surprise, as open-air art and a backdrop for socializing. My favorites are waiting for you, a tonic in these less leisurely times.

Gardens at Eolia | A Garden with Grassroots Support

“No red plants,” Mary Harkness instructed Beatrix Farrand, a famed early 20th-century landscape designer, emphasizing her distaste for scarlet flowers at her Goshen Point estate. Farrand shaped the Gardens at Eolia in Waterford, Connecticut’s Harkness Memorial State Park from 1919 until 1929, then returned annually to refresh them for almost two decades more. Only a handful of Farrand’s more than 200 American gardens survive, and this series of seaside installations, including an alpine rock garden, nearly vanished, too. It was saved by the Friends of Harkness, founded in 1991 to lobby for ambitious restoration.

Today, garden volunteers help with tasks ranging from pruning apple trees in March to winterizing roses in November. On any Wednesday, Friends members can show up at 9 a.m. and join this crew, learning as they help sustain Farrand’s legacy. All while breathing in the almondy scent of the East Garden’s famous heliotropes, enlivened by Long Island Sound’s salt spray.

With the state park’s Gatsby-era mansion and languid lawns, you may be more inclined to dream away your time here. Bring a blanket, and stop at Ivy’s Simply Homemade in Waterford for the makings of a perfect picnic supper. Evenings are when the west-facing Italian Garden, flowering in sunset shades of bright yellow, deep purple, and dusky orange—without a speck of red—takes on a glow that attracts portrait photographers. friendsofharkness.org/harkness-gardens

Best Time to Go: Shop for heirloom heliotrope and other annuals and perennials at a massive annual plant sale, held the Saturday after Mother’s Day.

Gardening Tip: “Fertilize roses in the spring with all-organic Rose-tone,” suggests Friends of Harkness horticulture chairman Randy Fahey, who nurtures 90-plus rose plants. “It’s really good stuff.” A half cup suffices, but you’ll want to use a full cup for a really showy rose.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden | A Late Bloomer

In Seal Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden defies occasionally harsh coastal conditions with its explosive color clusters and contrasting foliage. In 1926, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife, Abby, challenged Beatrix Farrand to marry their passion for Asian statuary with an English-style cutting garden. Through letters, sketches, and photographs, the two women’s collaboration took imaginative turns, blending East and West and incorporating architectural features that frame scenes, like gilded wood ’round an Impressionist painting.

The public has been invited into this living museum on a routine basis only since 2018, when the Land & Garden Preserve took ownership of the property at the bequest of the Rockefellers’ son, David. Reservations are required to wander through outdoor “rooms” cherished by the Rockefellers. And the season here is brief: just nine weeks. Mid-July visitors see delphiniums like New Millennium Series ‘Pagan Purples.’ These born performers tower over annuals and perennials. Then come the Lilium hybrids with their overwhelming fragrance. Then dahlias and gladiolas. By the last few open dates in September, fall-blooming perennials are in their yellow-and-orange glory.

All this comes with vistas of the mountains of Acadia National Park as you wander surrounded by centuries-old statues. You can stay for hours if you’d like, listening to the meditative music of water features and the splish-splash of frogs … walking the Spirit Path, with its watchful Korean funerary figures carved from granite … even venturing into the evergreen woods between the walled garden and a terrace that is all that remains of Eyrie mansion, pine needles cushioning and quieting your every step. gardenpreserve.org/abby-aldrich-rockefeller-garden

Best Time to Go: The Rockefellers retreated to their summer home in early August, and the garden has historically been considered to be at its dreamiest then, when lilies start to bloom.

Gardening Tip: “Before I worked here, I never used tree branches as plant support,” says Cassie Banning, director of farm and gardens. As the Rockefellers’ gardeners did, her team artfully cuts gray birch branches and installs them around plants to keep them from leaning or breaking as flowers grow heavy and summer storms sweep through. These natural props are quickly camouflaged as snapdragons, phlox, and other stunners grow sturdily to three or even four feet tall.

Edith Wharton’s The Mount | The Real Dirt

While Edith Wharton was penning her scandalous breakout novel, The House of Mirth, she was also creating a home and gardens that she proclaimed her greatest achievement and a source of comfort through times of loss. At The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, you’ll come to understand a woman who left us with not just stories but also a nonfiction prescription for designing spaces—including outdoor realms—that satisfy our need for structure yet honor the unpredictable beauty in nature’s gifts.

The Mount allowed Wharton to put into practice the anti-Victorian style she and architect Ogden Codman Jr. espoused in her first book, 1897’s The Decoration of Houses. Stand on the terrace (or have lunch at the Terrace Café), surveying the French-style flower garden and Italianate sunken garden, and you’ll notice that symmetry is among their dictates. In the Berkshires, spring arrives on its own timeline, but when the house opens mid-May, there will be tulips and the earliest annuals, as well as swaths of periwinkle-colored vinca, running as wild as the streams that give the grounds their musical score. Come late May, and on view through fall, a new selection of large-scale sculptures will accent the maple-lined entry drive, which Wharton’s niece, Beatrix Farrand, laid out.

Daily garden tours at 1 p.m. are reserved for ticket holders, but the nonprofit behind this multifaceted destination began offering free grounds admission during the pandemic; you can return whenever your spirit needs a boost. Wharton’s cherished gardens had grown over completely by the time a six-year restoration of mansion and grounds began in 1999, so pause, too, to appreciate how much effort went into ensuring her legacy has life beyond what’s nestled between book covers. edithwharton.org

Best Time to Go: Wharton wrote a garden should have “a charm independent of the seasons,” but to be especially wowed, come in late June or early July, when the Italian Garden’s climbing hydrangeas have flowered, and the ‘Bridal Veil’ astilbe, planted along the outside of the parterre, blooms in dancing clouds of ethereal frothy-white.

Gardening Tip: “You don’t really need a lot of flowers,” says Anne Schuyler, director of visitor services and interpretation. Only four or five plants, including the vines, give Wharton’s Italian Garden its dramatic atmosphere, beloved by brides. And don’t overlook posies that purists might consider weeds. Wharton mentions Michaelmas daisies among her likes, so although they grow naturally all through the woodlands, “our gardener has them in the formal flower garden, and they look great.”

Sakonnet Garden | Paradise Made Personal

PrivateSakonnet Garden in achingly scenic Little Compton, Rhode Island, is the sort of secret place you never forget once you’ve found it. To be considered historic, a landmark must be 50 years old, according to Google. Which means this remarkable destination—the product of John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli’s decades of passion, labor, perseverance, and experimentation—just squeaks in. Gwynne, a landscape architect and pioneer in naturalistic habitats who headed exhibit design for the Bronx Zoo, has nurtured the lot adjacent to his family’s summer home since 1974. He soon gained an accomplice, equally fascinated by and eager to tinker with plants, although Folcarelli’s background was in fashion retail.

To say the two have merged a Japanese stroll garden with a mini English estate garden oversimplifies. What started as a collection of plants in a deep thicket has become New England’s own Wonderland, and you are Alice. Once greeted, you’re off on an odyssey of shadow and light, through more than a dozen garden “rooms,” many named for their dominant tint: silver, yellow, pink. Folcarelli prefers to hand you a map when you leave, so embrace the sensation of feeling untethered in a world of eclectic specimen plants: even magnolias, camellias, and palms that push the limit of what can survive here. Rarest of all is a white Mertensia discovered by a plant hunter in the Pennsylvania woods—rare because Mertensia are all blue.

“Covid gave us a pause to think about how we wanted to share the garden,” Folcarelli says. In 2021, they began offering self-guided tours Thursday through Saturday from the first weekend in May through the first weekend in October, by online reservation. They’re compiling 50 years of observations and meticulous notes into what will be a glorious book of imagery and stories. And they continue to learn from the astonishing things outside their door.

“I think of it as a new garden,” Gwynne tells me, and while the prospect of a book delights him, he’s even more jazzed about ‘Felix Jury,’ a new young magnolia from New Zealand that, when mature, “will be a big hot-pink fantastic thing.” sakonnetgarden.net

Best Time to Go: Rhododendrons bloom from the second week in May through the second week in June. Gwynne always brought armloads of cuttings home from gatherings of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Rhododendron Society. What you’ll see now are the hardiest, least fussy, and quite simply most amazing rhodies.

Gardening Tip: If you’re at the beginning stage of garden installation, “start with the trees,” Folcarelli advises. They take longest to grow, and “you can always move them around.”

The Old Garden at The Fells | His and Hers

On sweeping acreage that slopes gracefully toward Lake Sunapee, Clarence and Alice Appleton Hay saw their garden dreams flourish. They’d inherited The Fells in Newbury, New Hampshire, in 1905 from Clarence’s father, John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, who later served as secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Alice wanted formal gardens, so once Clarence completed a landscape architecture course at Harvard, they set to work filling a high-walled, sunlit space with bright perennials. Now known as the Old Garden, it’s become shadier—more hospitable to ferns, hostas, lungwort, wild ginger, and Lenten roses—as surrounding woodlands have marched toward the walls.

Formality continued to win out: They added the Rose Terrace and the Perennial Border. But starting in 1929, Clarence spent 10 years indulging his own desire to introduce rare alpine plants from his travels into a large-stone-cobbled hillside facing south toward the lake. In the Rock Garden, with its lily pool ringed with irises and azaleas, the heartiest of these specimens survive. Clarence knew he was experimenting and wouldn’t be shocked to learn only about one-third of the original rockscape remains visible.

Now the nonprofit that manages The Fells is determined to restore and reinterpret the Rock Garden. The property needs all the human and financial capital it can muster. Your admission fee can help secure this notable garden’s future; your time and curiosity are even more valuable. thefells.org

Best Time to Go: The grounds are open year-round, and even before buds appear, new greenery magically begins to erase brown soil and gray branches. Along a woodland trail, fairy houses built last summer need sprucing up—the perfect job for nature-loving kids.

Gardening Tip: “Wood ash is the best-kept garden secret if you live in the Northeast,” says landscape director Holly Dunbar. While rhododendrons and hydrangeas thrive in New England’s naturally acidic soil, most ornamental plants do better when the pH is neutral. “Wood ash works similarly to garden lime and can raise the pH level,” she explains. “I recommend mixing clean ash from untreated wood into your beds in the fall.”

The Formal Garden at Hildene | A Mystery Lover’s Garden

From the aerial vantage point of Mary Harlan Lincoln’s sitting room, you can see how strikingly the formal garden at Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home resembles stained glass. Privet hedge that took root nearly 120 years ago forms shapes like soldered lead; flowers are the rich-hued glass. These days, the privet is sheared weekly to maintain its integrity.

Beginning in 1975, following the death of Mary Harlan and Robert Todd Lincoln’s granddaughter, Peggy Beckwith (Abraham Lincoln’s great-granddaughter and Hildene’s final resident), the property spent several years in limbo. In the 1980s, overgrown privet was tamed, beds and pathways were restored, and then … a plan for the formal garden was discovered. Jessie Harlan Lincoln likely designed this area between mansion and mountains, but curiously missing from the drawing is the signature privet. The only photographs are black and white. Without documentation, those who tend the garden today are free to think sustainably and playfully, while still coloring within vintage lines.

To appreciate all that’s growing here, wander behind the coach house turned Welcome Center to the cutting and kitchen gardens. There’s a butterfly garden, too, planted to attract native species. Volunteers also tend Hildene’s Giving Garden, which supplies the local food bank. There are trails through wild meadows and a floating boardwalk through the wetlands. A visit to still-working Hildene Farm is included with your admission.

Music from the original 1,000-pipe player organ beckons you toward the Georgian Revival mansion built in 1905 by Honest Abe’s only child to see adulthood. Before heading inside, stand within brick lines on the front lawn that illustrate the size of the cabin where the president was born. This contemporary landscape addition is a history lesson in a heartbeat, highlighting the contrast between Robert Todd Lincoln’s fortune and his father’s humble origins. hildene.org

Best Time to Go: It’s hard to top the first few weeks in June, when 100 peonies’ 1,000 blossoms make a pale-and-hot-pink splash. Among the peonies are two unique cultivars, recognized by the American Peony Society and named ‘Jessie Lincoln’ and ‘Hildene.’

Gardening Tip: If you’re a peony “parent,” try the Hildene Star staking method. Horticulturist and greenhouse manager Andrea Luchini explains that this technique requires five sturdy stakes and jute twine—or a kit from the Museum Store. Create a star pattern connecting the stakes, placed equidistant around the plant, then continue wrapping the twine around the outside of the stakes to make a full circle. Can’t picture it? Luchini and colleague Eric Rose demonstrate on Hildene’s YouTube channel.