Bunny Williams
Point of Rocks Road
Falls Village, Connecticut

Interior designer and garden book author Bunny Williams’ intensively planted fifteen-acre estate features a sunken garden with twin perennial borders surrounding a fishpond. There are also a year-round conservatory filled with tender plants, a vegetable garden with flowers and herbs, a woodland garden with meandering paths and a pond with a waterfall. A working greenhouse nurtures early plants and an aviary houses unusual chickens and fantail doves. Recent additions include an apple orchard with mature trees, a rustic Greek Revival pool house folly, and a swimming pool with eighteenth-century French coping.

Helen Bodian
Carson Road
Millerton, New York

Helen Bodian’s interest in botanical diversity prompted the making of these four gardens, each allowing for experiment with scale, season and design. The main challenge was to find a way to display exotic and unusual plants, yet at the same time have it agree with a decidedly North American rural landscape. What has resulted is an informal overall scheme with paths cutting through the surrounding fields, connecting the gardens with each other and to the pond and forested ridges above.
      Each of the gardens contains as wide a variety of plants that design, climate and setting will accommodate. In May, the showiest is a large rock garden cut into a hillside next to the house, containing small shrubs, perennials and alpine flowers. Its palette changes weekly and from year to year, but among the spring flowers in bloom should be dwarf iris, cushion dianthus, species phlox and columbine, and if the timing is right, Tibetan mayflowers.
      The perennial garden, squared off between hornbeam and mixed shrub hedges, is the main feature throughout the summer, balancing a variety of larger, lesser-known shade and sun-loving plants. Then later in the summer, in a walled garden adjacent to the greenhouse, raucous color is the theme, mixing semi-tropicals, annuals and hot dahlias. And under a sloping field, a rustic kitchen garden becomes an annual adventure with untried varieties of cutting flowers and vegetables.

Mattila-Magowan Garden
Taconic Road
Salisbury, CT

A garden of infinite ingenuity, when Robin Magowan found himself faced with a landscape sitting on ledge, he decided to take the path of least resistance and work around the rock. One garden led to the next, and pretty soon this travel writer/poet had amassed a collection of just about every type of rock garden imaginable. Although the Magowan-Mattila garden boasts one of the most beautiful apple orchards you’ll ever encounter, and it also claims a liberal dose of perennial borders (bulbs included), the extensive alpine rock gardens will steal the show in late May. With a saxifrage-lined outcropping, a sloping boulder garden that serves as an alpine meadow, a scree for sun-loving plants, a crevice garden, and a faux-landslide wall beside a Japanese pond, this is one-stop shopping if you happen to be interested in stone and its creative employment. Got shade? Find plants that pertain flourishing on a north-facing slope. Got parching sun? There’s an ode to Turkish and Rocky Mountain plants that delight in bright sun. See gentians and heathers growing luxuriantly and, best of all, meet the extremely knowledgeable and charming gardeners themselves. Part poetry, heavily laced with humor, and generously seasoned with expertise, this is a rare opportunity to spend a few hours in the Alps without leaving Connecticut.

Twin Maples
Selleck Hill Road
Salisbury, CT

The Twin Maples property is a large tract of land, located high above the village of Salisbury. There are formal gardens adjacent to the house, which is surrounded by wildflower meadows and woodlands. The wooded areas along the entry drive have been planted with daffodils, and the native stands of maples and oaks have been enhanced by the addition of amalanchiers and redbud trees.
      The meadow areas on this property have been carefully cultivated under the direction of Larry Weaner, who is a specialist in native plants. They offer a succession of bloom from early spring until October. The woodland areas are completely natural and have many old stone walls from the earliest days of settlement on the land. The foundation of an old stone house and a well, dating from the 1700’s, are in a maple grove near the original “twin maples”, the trees which give the property its name.
      Cultivated areas near the Georgian-style house, built in the 1990’s, include a formal “green garden” with boxwood borders, gravel paths, and a long reflecting pool. Terraces surrounding the house feature container plantings, and the walled cutting garden, long perennial borders, and greenhouse nurture plants, flowers and herbs used in the house.
      The owners are dedicated to the preservation and natural enhancement of this beautiful property.

Photography by John Gruen         Web site by Virginia Anstett