Garden Portrait: Rocky Hills

I think the garden might tell that we had a rather good sense of proportions, of color, how to use materials in a different way, and not to be different necessarily, but try to assemble things in an interesting way. Henriette and William were living in New York City and they were looking to find a place, which at that point in time, the country of northern Westchester County, and they came upon Rocky Hills. I remember Henriette telling me that there were dump areas and it was kind of rugged land. So that's how they started and they started slowly reclaiming land till they got to a point where they had this masterful garden that they created. Henriette's background in the decorative arts and furniture design was the heart of how she built the garden. She arranged things in the garden as you would arrange furniture. She and her husband managed to do what they wanted to do design-wise without having it look forced. When I came here the first time, it just felt comfortable. It reads as a forest, if you will, but it's not totally man-made. By no means is it that, but it certainly has been embellished. You know, you see beautiful gardens with wonderful plantings, but there's something about this place that just there's so much depth and texture to it. One of the first times I was here, I took black and white photos because to some extent when you see black and white, you really see the texture of so many of the plants. Henriette had no professional gardening background. She had never studied landscape design. She had no idea about horticulture, but I think about her experience in interior design. She didn't know how to make furniture either, but she knew what to do with it. Certainly in the blue garden out back here, you stand back and you can see how things have been very, very carefully arranged as to size, shape. I always think of some plants that have great architectural character themselves as animals, and her zoo is right down here where she had all of the Alberta spruces. Arranging things in space, thinking architecturally, doing it with living objects. So it was never a specific plant that she would put in. There had to be the structure that came with it and what would be behind it, what would be underneath it. She had that ability to put combinations together of plants and colors and textures that I don't think most people could do from a horticultural standpoint. She was fearless and she loved these masses of oranges and purples and pinks, and that's how Henriette started the garden. She fell in love with the bright colors of those azaleas and she and Billy planted dozens of them. Totally loose, totally experimental, totally wild, totally Henriette. That garden looked good 365 days a year, it had such diversity. There were seas of yellow flowers all over as soon as the snow finally melted a bit, and then you roll on to spring bulbs and then the forget-me-nots and the azaleas going, and it's just one thing after another to the point where you walk out the door and this is just opened. Look at these, these have just come. It's just, it's just a, it's an unfolding that goes on. I've seen Rocky Hills in the wintertime, buttoned up for the winter, all tucked in, lots of burlap. I mean, Henriette was very precise about how the garden was put to bed. The move through this garden on foot is a really wonderful experience and all that becomes much more explicit during the winter months. There is lots of structure here, the stone walls, the barns, the rose gardens, the different topography, and all that just became much more evident when you could see past the foliage or when it was blanketed in snow. There was just really nothing quite like it. The best gardens always reflect the personality of the person who first made them. That's certainly true of this garden. And in the transition, all right, you're going to lose something of that, which is not to say the garden is going to go downhill. It might be taken slightly in a slightly different direction. I really do feel very much that being a custodian rather than an owner to some extent, that you just, it's your, it's your turn to take care of it for a while and then it'll, it'll go on to somebody else at some point, I hope. Gardens are changing art forms. When you look at Rocky Hills and the gardening story there, which spanned 50 plus years and is still happening today, I don't think Henriette would want that garden just frozen in time because she didn't. She was installing a rock garden, you know, two years before she passed away. A woodland garden like this will always be changing and new opportunities and, you know, storms bring silver linings and chances to plant new things where old things have been lost. I think that kind of changing nature of a garden is also an inspiration and is sort of an analog of this whole planet, that we can kind of change things, that human beings have so altered this planet, but they can alter it in positive ways.