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The Smithsonian Archive of American Gardens

- the Garden Club of America Collection, Stonington Garden Club

The approach to and from the garden door of the house is from the central hallway. Adjacent is an area of natural flat stones, laid sometime after the War of 1812 bombardment that damaged the house. This stone area is the site for a summer table and umbrella. Repeating the Chinese feeling in the garden is an ornate red railing next to an area of chrysanthemums. The stone-lined pit beneath it is rumored to have been the hiding place for Captain Palmer's share of privateer's bounty taken during the American Revolution. The Wall Street entrance is a stone stairwell. Topping it, a low red wooden fence supports a lengthy climbing rose named 'White Dawn'.

Martha Snyder Garden

This 6 acre property was purchased by the current owners in the late 1970s, and in 1979, a plot plan was created by local landscape designer, Judy Nickerson. The gardens are located on a tidal cove that empties into the Long Island Sound, surrounded by marshland. The current owner's trip to Japan with the Japanese Garden Society had a profound impact on the property's landscaping that reflects hints of Japanese minimalism. The owners intended to create gardens that did not overshadow the view of the cove, but frame and highlight this element. The property features collections of vegetable, pollinator woodland and conifer plants. The owners deliberately fill any unplanted spaces with a variety of ground covers such as gravel stone, triple chopped leaves from the property, and organic mulch made from the property's many oak trees.
While 1 ½ acres are under cultivation and management, the rest of the property runs freely along the cove. The owners purchased the adjoining lot of approximately .5 acres in 2010 and it is now used to manage and cultivate unhealthy trees and eradicate invasive species. The owners used soft curving lines throughout the landscape of the property to visually soften the straight driveway entry. The driveway ends in a courtyard created by two buildings with a circular cobblestone-edged space that surrounds an immense red oak tree. A curved stone wall lines the east side of the cul-de-sac with a large gate in the center. The west side of the house features a large Japanese maple, gravel stone, and a collection of conifers. On the south side of the house, the owner's interpretation of a dry Japanese garden is constructed of gravel stone and a Japanese lantern peeking through miscanthus grass. The south side of the lawn along the cove features a drift of Pfitzer Juniper amongst high blueberry bushes that have performed for over 40 years. A curved granite wall runs north and south around one corner of the house until it meets the composting area that also contains raised beds, flower and herb gardens. Major hardscape features include a granite patio, swimming pool capped in granite, a pergola overlooking the cove, and many functional bird houses. A prominent decorative element on the property is an armillary approximately 10x10 ft. made of Cor-Ten steel. This piece was commissioned from a math professor at a small agricultural college in Vermont.

Bradgate Gardens is on a 4-acre property in Stonington, a waterfront town contiguous to Little Narragansett Bay off the coast of Rhode Island and the mouth of Long Island Sound off the coast of Connecticut. The gardens reflect a melded approach to celebrating English garden design while respecting the native plant material found in Southeastern Connecticut before European settlers populated the region. The overall garden was designed by English landscape architect Peter Cummin in 2008. The hardscape in the designs was adapted and built to maintain elements of traditional English garden design. The gardens' features include garden ornaments, pieces of sculpture, and gravel pathways lined with boxwood shrubs. The house is a straw-colored stone Georgian completed in 2011.
A local stone mason, Rob Murphy, built the large red brick cantilevered chimneys, the stone facade, the matching entrance columns, patios, bluestone walkways, terraces, and retaining walls. Murphy moved a portion of the old stone wall, which had bisected the property, to construct a front border wall. The front retaining wall overlooks a meadow, with two low stone planters around the center of the lawn, which is bordered by a 15" half-moon hedge. Rows of ball topiaries frame the columns at the entrance to the property.
Wide stone steps lead down to the dropped front lawn surrounded by perennial borders. A variety of flowers are ranged from front to back, most recently limited to plants with no animal appeal, including: hollyhock (Alcea L.), Culver's root (Veronicastrum virginicum Farw.), Ligularia, purpletop vervain (Verbena bonariensis), 'Gilbralti' bush clover (Lespedeza thunbergii), scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma), aruncus, speedwell (Veronica), wild indigo (Baptisia Vent.), crocosmia (Crocosmia Planch.), sage (Salvia), yarrow (Achillea), Leucanthemum, eastern purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) Moench), geranium, Bluebeard (Caryopteris x clandonensis 'Grand Bleu'), foxglove (Digitalis), White Cloud Calamint (Calamintha nepetoides 'White Cloud'), and lady's-mantle (Alchemilla mollis (Buser) Rothm.).
Several of the original trees were removed. Most of the other trees, principally maples, hawthorns, kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa Hance), serviceberry (Amelanchier Medik.), eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), American (Ilex opaca Aiton) and English (Ilex aquifolium) hollies, a blue spruce (Picea pungens Engelm.), a stewartia, and a Franklinia have remained. To the south of the property, the lawn is bordered by tall Japanese andromeda (Cryptomeria japonica) and Norway spruce (Picea abies Karst.).

Bradgate Gardens

The 1848 clapboard house on a half-acre lot has a quarter-acre of garden rooms that were renovated between 2005 and 2008 to complement the house and provide privacy from the busy village. Nearly 30 large boxwood were installed around two sides of the house while existing Alberta spruce, privet hedge and shrub roses inside the picket fence from earlier gardens were retained. The main garden overlooked by the porch was totally renovated by building new walkways, shrinking the lawn and adding a bench, and adding a yew hedge and new deep perennial borders. Trellises were built for the house and garage that support climbing hydrangea and roses. A diamond ivy topiary softens the fence bordering the terrace where volunteer fern and moss grow in the cracks between flagstones. A boxwood square with an armillary sphere in the center is the main feature in the kitchen herb garden, with plans for an espaliered tree. At one end of the lawn panel there is a painted Lutyens-style bench surrounded by spirea under kousa dogwood. In another corner there is a mature apple tree with shade-loving perennials growing beneath, including bluebells, Solomon's seal, anemone, ferns, hosta and lady's mantle. This garden has been visited during local garden tours.

Pandolfi Garden

The owners created their terraced vegetable, berry, herb and flower garden between a low stone wall along the sidewalk and the front of their brick house. The inspiration came from travels in Europe where they observed similar designs for home gardens – not estates. Lawn removal on the quarter acre lot began in 2013 with the digging of a ten-foot bed to grow tomatoes. By 2016 there were 18 raised beds brimming with vegetables, with companion planted flowers and ground covers filling in between the beds. Vining vegetables are trained up netting attached to two-foot by two-inch fir supports. Annuals flowers that are added for visual appeal and pollination include dahlia, bee balm, zinnia, sunflower, snapdragon, nasturtium and marigold. Beds along the sidewalk, at the foundation, and around a patio behind the house are mostly ornamental with hydrangea, azalea, perennials including lilies and iris, bulbs and many annuals. Tomatoes still are a main crop with about 200 pounds harvested every year.
The vegetable garden faces south with unimpeded sun and bordering tall conifers and stone walls add protection from winds as well as deer. The problem of controlling grass between the raised beds was solved by replacing it with ground covers that include creeping jenny, dead nettle, clover, buttercup, myrtle and crab grass. The planting plans for the raised beds were researched in Mel Bartholomew's books on square-foot gardening.

Brad and Phred's Garden

A childhood home of artist James A. M. Whistler, the Captain Amos Palmer House garden takes its name from a former owner, whose original marble tombstone stands in the garden among English ivy (his present grave is in the local cemetery). The entrance to the garden off Main Street has granite stairs that rise past a head-high fence topped by Chippendale fretwork. There is an outbuilding that acted as a summer kitchen and cool winter buttery and is now a potting shed. A wide stone path inset in gravel passes the house and enters the full rectangular garden, a winter garden built atop the hummock edged by Wall Street. The long side bed with perennial plants has rounded 'Newport Blue' boxwood and a small fishpond with a circulating waterfall over flat granite stones. The corner linden tree, planted after the hurricane of 1938, rises from a bed of ivy.

Captain Amos Palmer House

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