GREENWICH GARDENS
EXHIBIT CELEBRATES AMBITION AND DELIGHT OF GREAT ESTATES
Maggie Dimock places a finger on a sheet of paper torn from a pocket-size notebook. Her very precise cursive script on the paper, appropriately small for the page, identifies the pamphlet beneath it as describing The Orchards, later known as Seabury House off Round Hill Road in Greenwich. Dimock touches the notepaper with such reverence as if she were caressing a rare jewel.
Curator of exhibitions and collections at the Greenwich Historical Society, Dimock mounted an impressive exposition on the exuberant gardens of Greenwich that flourished when mansion-building transformed the town into a Gold Coast suburb. “Beautiful Work: The Art of Greenwich Gardens and Landscapes” runs through Sept. 5. She spent weeks gathering material that will “celebrate the ambition, industry and delight” of gardens that characterized the great estates of Greenwich,” she said.
And what magical landscapes they were, stretching from the shore to the wooded acres of the backcountry. Wrought out of rock and clay and thin soil by some of the best known landscape architects of the day, they were anchored by magnificent mansions filled with antiques and valuable paintings.
“It’s the era of the great estates,” said Dimock, “roughly between 1895 and 1930, so pre-Depression. The owners were wealthy folks who were trying to imitate the idea of pastoral life in the country. There was so much literature around that time that was aimed at teaching people how to live the country life, like a British magazine that featured ads on racing horses and hunting dogs.”
Titans of industry hired the best architects and landscapers of the day. For example, the humble Chelmsford home in Rock Ridge was later transformed into an impressive Dutch Colonial by the wellknown architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Landscape designer Charles Gillette mapped out the grounds and Bryant Fleming later added profuse flowering borders. Walhall, which overlooked Long Island Sound from its Riverside site, typified the dreamscape captivating society’s elite—a garden to show off new prosperity and social class while projecting a formal aura of old money.
Mansion owners vied with one another to emulate the opulent English, Italian and French gardens they discovered on their world tours, and Greenwich at the turn of the century became a botanical eden. Landscape designers like the Olmsted brothers, Marion Coffin, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Armand Tibbetts and the English eccentric Gertrude Jekyll shaped a common vocabulary of terraces, lawn, stately trees and banks of azaleas, boxwood and rhododendrons, and rose bushes and peonies galore. An army of immigrant stone masons and gardeners would trek miles from Port Chester to build walls without mortar, and to dig, plant, fertilize, prune and water until Greenwich blossomed like a monarch butterfly escaping its cocoon.
There was always sculpture to draw the eye and often a reflecting pool. Of course, there were humbler gardens during this period of Colonial Revival in town, such as the one at the Bush-Holley House that provided food for the writers and artists who boarded there.
Dimock’s exhibition doesn’t stop
at manse and garden, however. She endeavors to portray a way of life from about 1895 up to the Depression years and to inject an occasional note of humor. For example, she “just had to” show the 1918 Sears catalog hawking the latest fashion darling —coveralls for women. While the editors of the catalog gussied up its coverall-dressed models with pretty hats and dressy heels, Dimrock said there was a group of women called Farmerettes who donned coveralls as a work outfit and wore sensible shoes to hoe rows of vegetables.
“They were society daughters and teenagers from upper-middle and upper-class families who were sent to Sabine Farm, which was really an estate owned by publisher Henry Fisher, to farm and contribute [vegetables] to local food supplies,” Dimock said.
Dimock borrowed a pair of the coveralls from the professor of theater at Smith College who has a sizable costume wardrobe. They are on display alongside treasures of the Bush-Holley House, headquarters of the Historical Society: garden records and tools, paintings, drawings, landscape plans,
vintage photographs and furniture, like a colorful table screen made by the artist Elmer Livingston MacRae.
“MacRae was a very accomplished painter, who later started making furniture,” said Dimock. “We have this beautiful chair that he built, and it will be on display in the exhibition.”
Also on view are the garden records meticulously kept by Edward Holley with planting dates and harvests listing corn, potatoes, radishes, celery, lettuce, peas and beets.
“His son-in-law, Elmer MacRae, started keeping a garden calendar in 1918,” said Dimock. “He was so meticulous in his endeavors, he even took courses in agricultural education.”
Skip to the 20th century, when Fred Landman mapped out Sleepy Cat Farm on 13 acres off Clapboard Ridge Road with the help of landscape architect Charles Stick. It’s an incredible blueprint for what can still be accomplished today. All you need to start is to dream.
For more information, visit greenwichhistory.org.