By Anne W. Semmes
Greenwich is much endowed with gardens and garden lovers, and thanks to the Greenwich Botanical Center (GBC) this year its Grandiflora Garden & Landscape Tour had seven standout gardens to visit. With exclusive access and sunny skies two weeks ago on Friday and Saturday some 500 garden lovers strolled across the beautiful landscapes.
The first stop for this reporter was the Midvale Garden on Lake Avenue featuring a freshly built French Normandy style house of stone overlooking a picturesque pond but surrounded by handsome evergreen trees clustered to show off their varying colors of green. Thank landscape architect John Conte for the garden design that included the joyful flower-filled window boxes. Add the surprise of finding inside a greenhouse an elegant sitting area, perfect for a garden lover’s tea.
The second stop was further along Lake Avenue, Deer Park Garden, with a surprise welcome of an ancient Gingko tree. Other stunning nearby trees begged plaques for us to learn their names. This property lacked a viewable house but on view was a converted 1900’s horse barn used as guest house, with intriguing pathways leading to a carefully cultivated vegetable garden. Thank the vision of the renown Belgian landscape architect Francois Goffinet for an historic park-like setting. But he did not know this was originally William Rockefeller land hosting Rockefeller’s favorite imported German stags with high stone walls to keep them from straying.
The Grandiflora Tour Program is a garden lover’s collector item as it features garden owners describing their landscapes and history. Not included is the 65-year history of this Grandiflora Garden Tour kicked off in 1958, a year after the Garden Center was created as a part of the Montgomery Pinetum.
“This is our major fundraiser,” says GBC Executive Director Phoebe Lindsay. “We are definitely rebuilding this event after COVID.” Three years ago, in June of 2020, she shares, GBC did a virtual garden tour, with a film crew that went around the gardens! She’s happy with this year’s attendance numbers. “It shows us that people really are interested in visiting gardens and learning about gardens and seeing what different people do with their gardens. So that was very validating for us, and so we’re very hopeful for it for the future.”
So, one of the seven gardens was located in Pound Ridge, N.Y. “We’ve had one in Southport, and Westport,” tells Lindsay. “If we get a submission or reference of a really nice garden that happens to be beyond Greenwich’s borders, then we’re happy to entertain that. But we want it to be a manageable day for people, so that they aren’t spending tremendous amounts of time in the car.”
Lakeside Haven, on South Bedford Road in Pound Ridge was the third stop. There was much to love with this five-acre landscape reshaped and renewed by landscape architect Louis Fusco. Along a wildflower bordered driveway an architect’s pool design surrounded by woods first greeted us. The gracious house had ample windows to see the charming lake, with dock and sitting area to view the lovely water lilies. And we could dream of buying this house for sale!
Back to town we came to the fourth stop – the Barn Hill Garden off Middle Patent Road This garden had the longest history written by owner Susan Fisher, with its cattle barn, dating from the 1840’s now a house. Beloved by many visitors were the meadows – former pastures – that surround the house and vegetable garden, with a pool enclosed from the deer. A half circle peony-rich garden beside the house has another much-admired feature – an arbor covered by honeysuckle with a green bench tucked in inherited from Fisher’s great grandmother.
Next door was the fifth stop, the Red Barn, once part of the original Fisher farm property, with a garden and art gallery belonging to revered painter, Peter Arguimbau with thousands of ship paintings to his credit. And there too was a meadow graced with Queen Anne’s Lace and pink roses, and majestically growing red lilies before the Red Barn. Inside that barn artist Peter shared both his seascapes and landscapes, often of Greenwich water edge scenes, and his paints, from the colored powders to the oxides that he mixes with his glazes to get his luminous colors. Son Andre Arguimbau’s art of handsome hardwood tables were also on display.
“Art is the third element of our mission,” told Lindsay. “That was Mrs. Montgomery, Colonel Montgomery’s wife’s desire for their property, and thus also informed the mission of the Garden Education Center [now GBC], connecting people with plants and nature through art. And so certainly Peter Arguimbau as a local landscape painter exemplifies that.”
And it was art that grabbed again at the sixth garden stop, the Heather Garden on Round Hill Road, owned by Heather and Philip Mintz. There were lovely climbing red and white roses on the colonial clapboard white house with green shutters, and a lovely terrace garden featured rose “trees.” But it was the artistically designed topiary inset hedges that caught the eye and in front of them a pair of surely ancient stone lions with their heads down guarding the pool.
The last seventh stop was “in town” in Old Greenwich, the Earthly Delights Garden on Highview Avenue, proving you can pack in wildness in a small space. There were assorted and intriguing green plants in the front of the colonial front porch, with tall trees shading the back yard, with a connecting flower-strewn pathway. And tucked in the very back was surely an alluring oasis of a bench backed by a swarm of pink laurel for the hard-working garden firm Gro Pro as well as the garden loving owner Char Barnes.
