Columbia County, New York is just over the Massachusetts border in the Berkshires, and those of you in the area may wish to avail yourselves of another Garden Conservancy Open Day opportunity. Admission to each private garden is $5, tickets are not required in advance, and full details may be found at www.gardenconservancy.org.
Adams-Westlake, Ancram, New York
Two writers, garden writer Abby Adams (see The Gardener’s Gripe Book, below) and her late husband, crime novelist Donald Westlake (who wrote under the name Richard Stark), authored the various plantings on this former farm, in a pastoral Columbia County valley. The gardens have evolved over twenty years, reflecting the owners’ deepening involvement with the larger landscape. Ornamental gardens, perennial borders, a walled swimming pool enclosure, an ornamental frog pond, and a courtyard herb garden frame the 1835 farmhouse. A small orchard and a cutting garden/vegetable plot continue the farming tradition. Behind the house, strategically placed paths and sitting areas guide the visitor through the landscape to a deep natural ravine where a spring-fed pond faces a field of wildflowers. A winding creek has recently been liberated from its tangle of thorny multiflora rose, to be replaced by wild and native plant species. Above the ravine, high meadows offer sweeping views.
Grant & Alice Platt, 46 Tibbet Lane, East Taghkanic, New York
This garden, which won a Golden Trowel Award from Garden Design magazine in 2005, is nestled in the woods at the end of a country lane. It takes advantage of a widely varied landscape to create a series of informal gardens that attempt to exploit the beauty of the natural setting. The site contains woodland paths, which wander over bridges across a creek and past the remains of old stone walls and natural rock formations. Included in the gardens are sunny herbaceous borders, a rock garden, shade garden, and a park-like hillside garden. Out of sight but just over a rise is a path that leads to a swimming pond.
Directions:
From Taconic State Parkway north, pass Route 82/Ancram/Hudson exit and go 1.6 miles. Turn right onto Post Hill Road (from north, turn left). Go 0.8 mile to a silo at Nostrand Road. Turn left and go 0.3 mile to Route 27 (no sign). Turn left and go 1 mile to Taconic Parkway underpass. Go 0.5 mile to Tibbet Lane. Turn left. Proceed to parking area.
Helen Bodian, Ancramdale, New York (Please note this garden is open from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm only)
The setting is old farmland at a relatively high elevation, cradled in a cirque of hayfields, deciduous forest and meadow, and intersected by a dirt road. Over time, thanks to a desire to experiment with mood and style and unusual plants, the owners developed four separate gardens, each with its own character and season. In the process, they’ve tried to follow a rule that would unite all four: while displaying a love for botanical diversity and without confiding ourselves to natives, the plantings must nevertheless fit our landscape or play off the surrounding native flora. Starting next to the house is a naturalistic rock garden, scaled both to a shale hill suspended above it and to an elongated modern addition to the house. Across the road is a romantic garden in the form of an open square, and adjacent to that is the greenhouse and its walled garden. For those of you who have visited in the past, the all too labor-intensive, wildly colorful walled garden has been replaced with quite its opposite – a quiet, contemplative, modernist design containing a small pool. Finally, down a longish path, is a productive vegetable and cutting garden where we grow odd and unusual edible plants. The paths, which make patterns through the meadows and connect the gardens to one another, also connect to the outer landscape, leading from the gardens to pond and woods and up the hills to miles of forest trails.
