Nature's way

With an almost imperceptible hand, designer Dan Pearson has conjured a dramatic landscape garden from 20 acres of Connecticut wilderness

- KENDRA WILSON

I’d hesitate to call it a garden,” Dan Pearson says regarding Robin Hill, a 20-acre property in Connecticut that his studio has been steering for the past decade. Although there are set pieces (a herb garden to one side of the house, an enclosure with a circular pond by the entry court), even the cutting garden is so removed from the idea of ‘a garden’ that it is hidden in summer behind a wavy edge of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, its boundaries dictated by a pre-existing stone wall. To the occasional visitor, Robin Hill betrays none of the breathless industry of some conventional gardens; instead, all is serene. This is remarkable, given that it could have gone so wrong.

In the winter that Susan Sheehan, a New York art dealer, fell for the neglected but pretty 1929 house, she and partner John O’Callaghan were beguiled by the snowy scene. Dan takes up the story: “When the landscape awakened in spring, Susan was confronted by this enormous amount of growth coming from everywhere, and became fearful, in terms of her responsibility.” The property backs on to 6,000 acres of restored forest, and the fact of a very real and encroaching wilderness was a shock. “One night we saw a mountain lion attacking a deer on the back field,” says Susan.

Dan’s 2009 book Spirit: Garden Inspiration was what inspired his prospective client to hire him; she knew nothing of his design work. When Dan in turn asked Susan to gather some pictures that inspired her, she sent him a 250-page document, which he compares to the art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. At the end of this visual journey, she had written: ‘And I don’t think I want a garden.’