SECRET GARDEN

LUSHLY PLANTED WITH ROSES, A WALLED SPACE OFFERS REPOSE AMID A SPRAWLING HISTORIC LANDSCAPE ON THE HUDSON RIVER

- NGOC MINH NGO

In the 19th century, the rugged beauty of the Hudson Highlands inspired the first artistic movement in the United States, the Hudson River School. While painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church sought the heroic in this wilderness, well-heeled New Yorkers found the landscape the perfect escape from the burgeoning city.

For five generations, this 120-acre piece of land was a retreat for the family of a wealthy railroad mogul. It was acquired by its current owners 10 years ago. While the forested land here is now under conservation, the property’s gardens were once designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of America’s first woman landscape architects. Her work here had mostly vanished by the time the property passed on to the current owners, who imagined a new overall scheme that pays tribute to Shipman with a formal lawn and garden area at the back of the house. From there, a series of wild and more formal landscapes leads down to the new walled garden, featured on these pages.

“The idea of a walled space was, from the start, both practical and aesthetic,” explain the owners. “On a practical level, we wanted to create pockets within the larger landscape, where the hum from distant traffic would be reduced. On an aesthetic level, we were inspired by many sites we had visited touring gardens of Europe, particularly the walled garden at Rousham and the Lutyens-Jekyll collaboration at Le Bois des Moutiers in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy.”