The Garden Conservancy will hold its Essex County Open Day on July 24 from 10 – 4.

The Glass House in Swampscott is a modernist home designed in 1957 by Martin Bloom, a Harvard graduate and student of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School. Carefully sited on an acre of wooded grounds, the house interacts with the landscape through walls of glass, framing views and blurring the boundary between indoors and outdoors. There are five distinct outdoor gardens/spaces wrapping around the house. The unassuming front yard garden gives way to a planting of bamboo anchoring the elevated deck. The back of the house has a rocky outcrop garden framed by mature trees. A bend in a stone path surprises a visitor with a moon gate that leads to two distinct courtyard gardens where conifers have the presence of living sculptures throughout the changing seasons.

The close interaction of the house and the gardens was recently captured in a piece by Tovah Martin, featured in the March/April 2021 issue of New England Home Magazine.  Register HERE.

Seaside Farm in Marblehead (below) is on a two-acre site on Peach’s Point overlooking Doliber Cove has a rich garden history. During the early 1900s, it was an Italianate formal garden with pools, formal rose garden, and statuary, part of an enormous estate owned by yachtsman Francis Crowninshield and his heiress, historical preservationist wife, Louise du Pont Crowninshield.

The current owners bought the property with its overgrown and neglected gardens in 1996. Three years later, after discovering the property’s rich landscape history, they hired Doug Jones from Boston’s Keith LeBlanc Landscape Architecture firm to restore the gardens. Based on period black-and-white photographs from 1937, new replicated iron railings were installed, caved-in concrete pools were rebuilt, and old roses were planted to recreate the garden. The original house no longer exists, thus certain landscape transitions presented challenges that have been handled delicately. The new house sits on the water and the gardens surrounding it have been done in a more contemporary style. The property has some enormous beeches that date to the original period. Register HERE.

• Pre-registration is REQUIRED for each garden. Pre-register for each on this website, except where specifically indicated otherwise. Children under 12 are free and do not need to be pre-registered if accompanied by pre-registered adult.
• Capacity is limited. Sorry, no walk-ins allowed; no paper tickets or cash payments will be accepted on-site.
• Masks are required, at the discretion of the garden owners, and social distancing is encouraged at all in-person events.