Located on four acres overlooking the magnificent Churchtown Dairy, the garden at Livingston House has been a labor of love for the owner for over a decade. After caring for the beautiful, natural garden left by the previous owner, Peter Bevacqua was engaged in 2012 to imagine and design a new vision for what the garden could become based on a love of classic English gardens such as Great Dixter and Hidcote Manor (albeit on a much smaller scale!). The garden was laid out as a pattern of different rooms for the visitor to discover, each dedicated to a different concept connected with pebbled paths lined with hydrangeas and navigated with a large wall of red tumbled brick. The generous raised bed vegetable garden borders the small orchard of plums, apples, pears and peach and leads to an Italianate terrace planted with a wonderful weeping ginkgo, roses, lilacs, clethra and buddleia. Here you can enjoy a view of the tree lined tennis court with its magnolias and arborvitaes and extensive field of wildflowers. A path along the lawns and the space around the pool takes you to a different place entirely. High grasses, cool limestone, potted citrus and crisp green lawn evoke a deliberately contemporary space. From here you can disappear through a gate cut through towering viburnums to the tree filled field where the owner’s dogs run along paths and roll in the natural vegetation. 

Join Berkshire Botanical Garden on August 9 from 5 – 7 for Cocktails in Great Gardens. BBG members $40, nonmembers $55. Directions to the Hudson, New York property will be provided upon registration. Visit www.berkshirebotanical.org.