Dear Mr Stillman...

The finest example of a classically inspired 20th-century American garden, at Wethersfield in the Hudson Valley, is at last being given the attention it deserves. Jane Garmey recounts its extraordinary story

- Jane Garmey

CREATING a classically inspired garden with belvedere, clipped hedge allées, elliptical pool, urns, and statuary in the aftermath of the Second World War might seem an unlikely endeavor. But it was not one to daunt Chauncey Devereux Stillman, the grandson of one of America’s richest bankers.

A keen equestrian who rode with the Millbrook Hunt, Stillman was familiar with Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City. In 1937, aged 32, he bought what he described as a ‘run-down farm’ on 400 acres of open farmland in nearby Amenia, later adding another 700 acres. He picked a magnificent site with spectacular views of the Taconic Range, the Berkshires, and the Catskills and named it Wethersfield after the Connecticut village where his ancestors had first settled on arriving in America.

Two years later, the newly married Stillman commissioned Bancel LaFarge, an established New York architect, to design a brick and brownstone Georgian Revival house and Bryan J. Lynch, a well-connected landscape architect, to create an enclosed garden at the back of the house. Lynch’s design was clearly influenced by the Arts-and-Crafts garden-style pioneered in England by Lutyens and Jekyll, which was enthusiastically adopted by American garden designers. Large beds were filled with perennials and annuals, framing a circular lawn that was bordered by a long flagstone terrace shaded by a dense arbour of grapes and trumpet vine and intersected by a rill. A pleached tunnel of amur maples, later replaced by beech, enclosed the other side of the lawn and three radial stone steps at the far end of the garden led to a raised secluded parterre.