The Garden Conservancy has announced its plans for the Berkshire County area Open Day on Sunday, July 31, from 10 – 4.  The first garden to be featured is Seekonk Farm, 296 Division Street in Great Barrington, featured in the 2008 book Great Gardens of the Berkshires. The eighteenth-century Seekonk Farm is set amidst New England fieldstone walls, antique iron gates, and a handmade fence. A natural arbor beyond an American elm and a large katsura tree invites one to a woodland path where Honey Sharp continues to labor on re-introducing native plants. Closer to the house, a lavender-edged walkway follows a small herb garden while the old-fashioned perennial beds now feature pale pink penstemon and dark fuchsia-colored sanguisorba rubbing shoulders. Leading to the pool garden are old-fashioned climbing roses spilling over a fence that borders the small vegetable garden. The pool garden enjoys a chartreuse, silver, and burgundy palette. Contrasting textures and shapes abound amidst the grasses, Japanese maples, smoke bush, ‘Black Lace’ sambucus, and small conifers. An old stone well cover, highlighted by rust colored lichens, remains a focal point.

Next, also in Great Barrington, is Wheelbarrow Hill Farm, 634 South Egremont Road. What captivated the owners about this house was its site, nestled in the trees on top of a hill with long views. With no flat ground for borders, they tried to use the trees and hill to frame the garden and the view. The tree line provided a place for woodland plants and shrubs. Flower beds terraced into the hill allow them to see the borders from above, below, and at eye level. Trees have been pruned and cut to frame the view. A kitchen herb garden is planted within a walled courtyard. A cutting garden sits at the base of the hill. Wildflowers and groundcovers grow on trails through the woods.

On to Stockbridge, to Fitzpatrick’s Hillhome (Please Note: open only from 11:00 am – 3:00 pm). Hillhome, pictured below, an historic and distinguished Stockbridge estate, was designed in 1918 by a protégé of Charles F. McKim who was known for the design of private country houses and U.S. diplomatic offices abroad. Its gardens, created from 1933 to 1935 by the well-known landscape architect Prentiss French, nephew of the sculptor Daniel Chester French, set off an impressive view of the Berkshire Hills. Leading to a long stone-paved and grass terrace is a heavy wooden garden door. At the northern end of the terrace stands a three-sided stone architectural structure resembling an arched ruin and created by moving an old mill, stone by stone, from West Stockbridge. This folly continues to provide a quiet and secluded space from which to enjoy the expansive views beyond. French made extensive use of massive stone retaining walls, thereby creating dramatic terraces in the steep hillside. Today, the walls contain charming alpine plants. Not to compete, however, with the view, the genius loci of the property, are the generally more restrained plantings and perennial borders. Be sure to visit the twenty-foot waterfall which splashes through serpentine paths leading down to an iris-bordered lily pond. You will reach it through a small secret garden at the southern end of the main terrace. In 1949, Hillhome was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Today, French’s original design remains largely intact.

Four Williamstown gardens complete the roster.  102 Ide Road features an expansive lawn and garden around a 1902 architectural gem of a residence with an exquisite porch for summer life and new carriage house and living space. . Seasonal gardens feature witch hazels, birches, hawthornes, and maples among other trees; deciduous hollies, hydrangeas, clethras, Chinese tree peonies, and comptonia among other shrubs join with ecclectic selections of bulbs, vines, and herbaceous perennials. Cultivated since 2005, the gardens while youthful in their fullness, do as gardens do in lovely places—appeal strongly seen with the clouds and sky, the moving sun and shadows of time, impressions and detail bringing alive scents and colors and textures for enjoyment. The lawn and gardens on the west adjoin those of Robert and Ilona Bell, open also to visitors through The Garden Conservancy. They form a wonderful background, provide an especially rich depth of field, and mutual pleasure. Tickets for this garden and the next at 152 Ide Road will be collected and sold at 152 Ide Road. 152 Ide Road is described as a romantic garden, surrounding an old carriage barn, divided into rooms to resemble the English gardens loved by the owner/gardener/garden writer/ English professor. The tour begins with a sunken, walled garden that leads to a formal pool with an island waterfall, water lilies, and the divine lotus that bloom in July. A rustic pergola connects the water garden to a trellised, ornamental kitchen garden. A white garden, surrounding clumps of native birch, pays homage to Sissinghurst. A folly, with broken stones and a dripping column evokes ancient ruins, while an aged cedar window on an old marble base frames the folly, the long hot border, and the Phillips garden to the east (also open to Conservancy visitors). Lushly planted pots, secluded seats, and carefully positioned ornamental trees and shrubs provide focal points that draw the eye from one space to the next. The large number of climbing structures covered with flowering vines (over sixty clematis alone) and the wide variety of perennials and annuals, arranged in surprising combinations of color and texture, will make this densely planted garden equally interesting to plant lovers and aesthetes. Pictures and additional information can be found online by searching Smithsonian archives+Ilona’s garden.

260 Northwest Hill Road is an harmonious landscape of interweaving meadow, lawn, stone terrace, gardens, pools, and house. Elegant, yet informal, the outdoor spaces vary in character from a dramatic woodland ravine, to an intimate bedroom shade garden, to an expansive lawn with views of Mount Greylock and Dome Mountain. Guests are immediately welcomed by an arrival garden with a terraced front entrance. They will visit a rhododendron and hosta shade garden, a rock garden with fishpond, and a lower grove with a sitting garden. Each is unique in character, yet intimately connected with the house and the surrounding multi-level terrain.

Finally, Brooks Garden, 36 Keep Hill Road, surrounds one of the first modern houses in Williamstown, which was built in 1948 overlooking the valley and Mount Prospect beyond. The pond and fountain in the entrance circle is one of four made by the owners. On the west side of the circle is a small katsura grove. Connecting the house and garage is a courtyard with a pergola and trellis that holds wisteria, kiwi, clematis, and roses. In the middle is a small pond with a quiet fountain surrounded by herbs, pastel spring flowers which give way to warmer colors that attract hummingbirds and butterflies later on in the summer. A larger pond and watercourse is found in the more extensive part of the garden where paths connect different rooms a shade garden and sedum garden and two new gardens in progress. On the east side of the house is a small vegetable garden, rhododendrons and lilacs, and the patio with a small fountain. All landscaping, garden design, stone walls, and care are provided by the owners.

This tour is rain or shine, and you may pay cash ($5) at each garden you visit, or purchase tickets on line in advance at www.gardenconservancy.org.