It isn’t easy to let go of an amazing season in the gardens but at some point in the fall we will have to. Just not quite yet! There’s more activity and color in the gardens than ever – I don’t think I’ve ever seen more monarch butterflies than I have this week and even the hummingbirds are sticking around (or stopping here for meals before continuing south.)

We have been soaking up the last of the season and taking it all in. Literally and figuratively. This week’s harvest for the East Bay Food Pantry may have been our next-to-last but we managed to tip the scales at a whopping 148 lbs (of cabbage mostly) bringing us so close to our 1000 pound goal for the season we can practically taste it. Yesterday we also picked our next-to-last buckets of flowers for arrangements and even as I write, Crystal Brinson, flower and garden designer extraordinaire, is entertaining and inspiring a full-house with a floral design demonstration in the dining room.

We will begin taking out the cutting bed in a couple of weeks – but only after picking from it one last time to honor our curator Margaret Whitehead, who is celebrating the release of her book Blithewold: Legacy of an American Family. Margaret and a team of volunteers (she herself began as a volunteer) spent years – decades – sifting through the entire collection of letters, bills, journals, etc and transcribed everything. Margaret then spent the past three years putting it all together in a way that offers us all a glimpse into the lives of the people that created this place. It’s been a labor of true love for Margaret and is a fascinating read for the rest of us. Proceeds from the sale of the book go into the Mary Philbrick Conservation Fund to support preservation projects in the mansion. (In addition to storing Blithewold’s archives in her head, Mary Philbrick was also a much beloved garden volunteer, and Dick’s wife.) Buy the book!

The forecast for the weekend is sunny and in the 70′s so there’s no reason not to get out here and take it all in one last time too. That said, this bountiful fall could go on for a while yet and it’s only the mansion that will be closed after this weekend (to be readied already for Christmas!) The gardens remain open year-round and visits beginning next week will offer a behind-the-scenes look at projects and how we prepare the gardens for winter.

Is your fall bountiful? Are you still busy taking it all in?

One of the things that sets Blithewold apart from other summer cottages in Rhode Island (aside from the grounds of course) are our extensive archives. The family left a priceless treasure of decades worth of photographs, letters, playbills, menus, journals, home movies and clippings in the attic – everything was saved. Generous family members have also passed relevant information and pieces from their own archives back into Blithewold’s keeping.

For years and years a devoted corps of volunteers, under the direction of our curator, Margaret Whitehead -who herself, started as a tireless volunteer, have been cataloging, transcribing, and scanning everything – and finding new information every day. So far the rest of us have only been given glimpses into Blithewold’s past by reading Margaret’s newsletter articles and the interpretation in the house, and by begging for stories but now … drum roll please … I’m really pleased to announce that the archives will be blogged!

Andrew Brennan, an intern going for a Masters in History from Providence College, has embarked on an epic endeavor to publish (portions of) Blithewold’s archives, along with his interpretation of them, to the interwebs. All of us who are interested in the family can look forward to getting to know Marjorie Van Wickle Lyon, the letter writer, and Estelle Clements, a habitual journaler, so much better.

He is beginning his journey with a particularly timely parallel – Marjorie’s trip to Egypt in 1904 – and judging by his introduction, I can also look forward to learning much more than I ever knew about a different era… A time not-so-very-long-ago when letters were handwritten and journals were private…

The blog is still in beta form and it may move to a different address soon but for now you may read it – subscribe to it! - here.

Did anyone in your family write letters or keep journals? Were they saved and have you read them?

I think it’s because I work here year-round that I tend to forget that Blithewold was built as a summer retreat. The Van Wickle/McKee family came up from Pennsylvania and later down from Boston and spent the entire summer here, from late May to October. Unlike most of the grandiose Newport mansions which were occupied for shockingly short periods of high society socializing, Blithewold was lived in: It was their home – and probably all the more precious and beloved for being their summer home.

I don’t know if it’s a universal tradition but around here – up and down the Eastern Seaboard at least – it seems like nearly everyone has a summer home-away-from-home, whether it’s borrowed or bought, really rustic or extra schmancy. These houses (or mansions or villas or camps or cabins) are often shared with extended family and passed down through the generations and the more we move around in our lives, the more these places become the constant. And the summer place (the shore, the lake, the island, the mountains) has all the blissful associations of endless summer days with absolutely nothing to do (besides swimming, reading, sailing, drawing, napping, eating, playing cribbage or cutthroat Trivial Pursuit, and laughing with family – to name just a few nothings) to give it even more significance and giant chunks of our hearts.  When I think about how attached I am to the place my family rented for a couple of weeks every summer for 70 or so years, I can only begin to imagine how much the Van Wickle/McKees must have loved Blithewold.

I’m way off the garden topic today because I’m about to go off on my own summer vacation and I can think of nothing else! I wonder, do you get away with your family to the same place every year? Where does your heart live?

I’ll be away for 2 weeks and I hope you’ll return when I do to see how dramatically the gardens have changed in the meantime. Happy summer – wish you were here!