Garden Conservancy Open Days is back with 2 Cornwall gardens

On Sunday, visit two private gardens in Cornwall and West Cornwall, open to the public through the Garden Conservancy Open Days program, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $10 per garden, and children 12 and under are free. Call 8888422442, or visit www. gardenconservancy.org /opendays for more information. An additional Litchfield County Open Day takes place on Sept. 8 in Southbury and Washington.

Gardens featured on Aug. 25 include:

Something to Crow About Dahlias, 34 Furnace Brook Road, Cornwall. The garden has grown in the past 18 years to include more than 2,000 plants. It showcases 175 different dahlia varieties producing countless blooms of every shape, color, and size. When in full bloom, the long rows stretch down the gently sloping garden, putting on a spectacular and riotous display of color. Tovah Martin recently described the garden as a “fullspectrum version of Oz, totally outrageous.” Every year, new varieties are introduced, allowing for a new business selling tubers and freshcut stems.

Roxana Robinson — Treetop, 218 Town St., West Cornwall. On the grounds of a family Arts & Crafts house

built in 1928 is an idiosyncratic hillside garden incorporating granite ledge, steep ravines, placid greensward, and a wooded slope leading down to a lake. The gardens themselves are separated into two areas. First the wellmannered, level terrain of “Sissinghurst,” with a decorous palette of blues, pinks, silvers, and purples, stone paths, and emerald lawn. Then “Margaritaville,” a wild and rocky ravine with a riot of giant ferns, orange Tithonia, scarlet Crocosmia, red salvias, and yellow nasturtiums. Around the gardens are deep woods full of ferns and birches; within the garden is a small homemade frog pond. Here nature plays a larger part than nurture. The owner’s grandfather was a nature writer, her parents were birdwatchers, and the owner writes about the natural world in her novels. The gardens are an attempt to make peace between the wild and the domestic, a response to the powerful surrounding landscape of dense woodlands, steep hillsides, boulders, and ravines.

All Open Days gardens are featured in the 2019 Open Days Directory; a softcover book that includes detailed driving directions and vivid garden descriptions written by their owners, plus a complementary ticket for admission to one private garden. The directory includes garden listings in fourteen states and costs $25 including shipping. Visit www.gardenconservancy.org/opendays or call the Garden Conservancy tollfree at 8888422442 to order with a Visa, MasterCard or American Express, or send a check or money order to: Garden Conservancy, P.O. Box 608, Garrison, N.Y., 10524. Discount admission tickets are available as well through advance mail order.

The Garden Conservancy is a national nonprofit dedicated to saving and sharing outstanding American gardens. Since 1995, the Garden Conservancy’s awardwinning Open Days has welcomed more than one million visitors into thousands of inspired private landscapes — from urban rooftops to organic farms, historic estates to innovative suburban lots — in fortyone states. Digging Deeper — sitespecific Open Days special programs — invite participants to take a closer look at the garden world. Hundreds of volunteers help this robust annual program showcase regional horticultural and stylistic expressions in a national context, celebrating the rich diversity of American gardens.

Garden Conservancy / Contributed photo On Sunday, visit two private gardens in Cornwall and West Cornwall, open to the public through the Garden Conservancy Open Days program.