Back Issue
July/August 2000

Connecticut's Historical Gardens
by Barbara Bradbury Pape

Landscape historians call the period of the 1890s to the 1940s the Golden Age of American Gardens, when hundreds of significant estate gardens were planted across the country. During this time, it became popular to plant a so-called "Grandma's garden," which was a re-creation of the imagined gardens of times past with old-fashioned favorites like lobelia, hollyhock, phlox and foxglove.

For the middle class, recreating "Grandma's" garden was a kind of fashion statement of American values, as having a garden created by Fletcher Steele was for the wealthy. As historian Mac Griswold writes in her book, The Golden Age of American Gardens (Abrams, 1991), "A beautiful garden had the same social utility as a good house, a box at the opera, or magnificent dinner parties."

Landscape architects like Steele, Warren Manning, Beatrix Jones Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman, and the famous British designer, Gertrude Jekyll, were in enormous demand. The relationship between the country's wealthiest, many with homes in Connecticut, and this generation of garden designers has left the state with a rich legacy of gardening.

Unfortunately, many of these landscapes have not survived. The grand examples of the 1920s often became locations for tennis courts or swimming pools in the 1950s. One of Beatrix Ferrand's formal gardens, for instance, was replaced with sod in order to make an outdoor seating area. Others, like the one belonging to Fairfield's Standard Oil heiress, Annie Burr Jennings, ended up as a subdivision. Others literally went to seed after years of neglect as the expense of these labor-intensive outdoor rooms became too great.

However, in Connecticut a surprising number of historic gardens remain so that we can experience them first-hand, along with the houses they frame. The following historic gardens are among those open to the public:

The Bowen House: "Roseland Cottage"
556 Route 169, Woodstock
860-928-4074
Owned by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
Summer Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 11 am-5 pm until October 15.
Guided tour of the house: $4 adults. There are tours every hour on the hour; the last tour begins at 4 pm.

The Bowen House, located on the Common in Woodstock, is known as "Roseland Cottage" for the many climbing roses that Henry and Lucy Bowen loved. This Gothic Revival summer home was designed by Joseph C. Wells, and the design of the entire property is based on the work of Andrew Jackson Downing.

The quintessential characteristic of Downing's garden design can be seen in the shape and placement of 21 flower beds, outlined by formal hedges of boxwood (66 yards of it), as installed in the parterre garden of 1850. The design shows the popularity of Victorian carpet bedding where each little area contains specimens of one color (purple heliotrope, for example) or different plants arranged in colorful ribbon patterns (such as red, white and salmon geraniums). Restored in 1978, the property continues in the tradition of labor-intensive gardening with the current staff and volunteers planting nearly 4,500 annuals per year.

The Glebe House Museum & Gertrude Jekyll Garden
49 Hollow Road, Woodbury 06798
203-263-2855
Summer hours: Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sun 1-4 pm until October 31; Saturdays during June, July & August, 10 am-4 pm. Guided tour of the museum: $5 adults. Tours are continual.

The Gertrude Jekyll Garden was designed in 1926 at the height of the American Colonial Revival. It was not installed, however, until the mid 1980s after the plans were rediscovered in Berkeley, California, by garden history student Susan Schnare. The original plans were commissioned by Annie Burr Jennings on behalf of the Seabury Society for the Preservation of the Glebe House.

Jennings traveled to England to have tea with Jekyll and to convince her to design an old-fashioned "cottage garden" for the mid 18th century Glebe House, where the Episcopal Church in America got its start. Though Jekyll herself had never seen the house or even been to America, she finally agreed.

Jekyll today is recognized as the originator of the herbaceous border, a type of garden that revolutionized landscape design here and abroad. Unlike the formal beds of the Bowen garden at Woodstock, Jekyll's plans for the Woodbury garden call for the coordination of perennials in a naturalistic, relaxed framework.

Jekyll designed three gardens in the United States, and today the only existing one is at the Glebe House. Still considered very young, it has sweeps of colors: the "hot" border with its reds, yellows and oranges, and the "cool" border with its pinks, whites, and blues.

The Hill-Stead Museum & Garden
35 Mountain Road, Farmington
860-677-9064
Summer Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am-5 pm. Guided tour of the museum and garden: $7 adults. There are tours every hour on the hour; the last tour is 4 pm.

The Hill-Stead Museum is the combined effort of a number of people who are of first importance in American design history. Theodate Pope Riddle, who designed the 1896 house for her parents with the help of McKim, Mead & White, was among the first female architects in America. (She also designed a number of schools in Connecticut, including Westover in Middlebury, Avon Oldfarms in Avon, and Kingswood-Oxford in West Hartford.) Hill-Stead is a grand Colonial Revival, overlooking old fields and meadows that are carefully landscaped in a naturalistic manner.

Riddle may have worked with landscape architect Warren Manning, an associate, in planning the estate's landscape, which takes advantage of the bucolic setting and views of the hills to the northwest. After her father's death in 1913, Riddle turned to another friend, landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand, for the design of a flower garden. (Farrand was the only woman founder of the American Society for Landscape Architects.)

Farrand's garden at Hill-Stead is based on her client's favorite colors combined in a sunken garden of roses, peonies, irises, delphiniums, phlox and columbines — many of the same flowers found in "Grandma's garden." Today the garden, reconstructed in 1986, is home to the summertime Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. The house with its great collection of Impressionist paintings and other family artifacts is open most of the year.

The Bellamy-Ferriday House & Ferriday Garden
9 Main Street North, Bethlehem
203-266-7596
Maintained by The Antiquarian and Landmarks Society.
Summer Hours: Wed, Fri, Sat and Sun; 11 am-4 pm until October 31.
Suided tour of the house: $5 adults
Guided tour of the gardens: $3 adults

Not all 1920s estate gardens in Connecticut were designed by premier landscape architects. The Ferriday Garden was created by Mrs. Henry McKeen Ferriday shortly after she and her husband purchased the property in 1912. The Ferriday's only child, Caroline Woolsey Ferriday, claimed that her mother, in a kind of fit of spontaneity, based the garden's design on the drawing room's Aubusson carpet.

Unlike the other gardens in this article, the Ferriday garden has remained intact throughout the century. Also unusual is that mother and daughter were personally involved in the garden's tending. It contains a wonderful collection of original roses, lilacs, and peonies and creates an outdoor room pleasing to all senses.

In its design the Ferriday Garden is a kind of cross between the formal designs at Roseland Cottage and the free-spirited borders made popular by Jekyll. There is a circa 1915 formal parterre garden, but it is planted in a naturalistic manner. Finding a wandering columbine or dianthus along a garden path is not surprising, here.

Barbara Bradbury Pape is the site administrator of The Bellamy-Ferriday House & Ferriday Garden in Bethlehem.

Connecticut Gardener
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Greens Farms, CT 06436
1-800-600-0476
email: editor@ conngardener.com