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!

It’s weird that I’m compelled to write about a lawn when the pink styrax is in bloom and the roses look so pretty but the other day a visitor asked me what turned out to be a provocative question. As we looked out across the expanse of the Great Lawn she asked, “Now, what was that used for?” and I have to admit I was a little thrown by the question. Lawns have become so controversial lately – the Obamas are eating their view and I know I’m not the only gardener systematically replacing the lawn at home with other kinds of plants. I think I sputtered that the Great Lawn was used for the view but the more I think about her question, the more I find to say.

In the gilded day and age when summer “cottages” (read “palatial estates”) were seldom lived in showcases of their owners’ wealth and importance in society, Blithewold was instead, a home – grand and luxurious to be sure – but lived in throughout the summer and other holidays and thoroughly enjoyed. Blithewold’s grounds were designed by John DeWolf, a landscape architect who worked closely with the family to create a varied landscape that was very useful in terms of their leisure activities and pleasure. Because of their interest in horticulture, an arboretum and gardens were cultivated and because of their love of the site, the views were preserved and enhanced. Doesn’t that sound like your garden too? The lawns were part of the package and served to knit the different landscape elements together.

The lawn is much larger than in looks in pictures – actually it’s larger than it looks in reality. Roughly ten acres is difficult to put in perspective without something measurable in the distance. The distance is so great that most of the children in the family used to ride their bikes all-the-way down the lawn to the beach. DeWolf designed the Great Lawn to undulate gently to the bay although, interestingly, one of the original plans includes a “haha” or hidden wall to separate and conceal a proposed cow pasture. (The Van Wickles kept cows – I didn’t know that before today – and with their large vegetable plot in the lawn below where the Display Garden is now, they also ate the view.)

The family obviously enjoyed their view since nearly every room in the mansion looks west toward the water and we know from records in the archives that they used the Great Lawn for all sorts of fun stuff. Fireworks were set off on the lawn every 4th of July to the delight of all of Bristol; tables were set up on the lawn for Marjorie and George Lyons wedding celebration; the enormous sails of the Herreshoff’s capsized America’s Cup contender Columbia were dried on the lawn; and in 1926 a biplane piloted by Julian Dexter, a family friend, landed there and took off again piloted by Marjorie Lyons herself (in the photo ready to fly, wearing a headscarf).

Nowadays the Great Lawn is still enjoyed primarily for the frame it puts around the view and as a gathering place for parties. But there’s nothing like an expanse of lawn to bring out an opinion or two on the subject of its worth, purpose and sustainability. I will say that the lawn this wet June is being mowed once a week – other lawns, twice obviously using a not insignificant amount of gas. Are you finding it difficult to keep up with (and justify) the mowing right now too?

There’s nothing that brings out the inner kid like grass under the toes and no better groundcover for lying back and studying the clouds. If and when you replace your lawn you’ll have to find those pleasures elsewhere. Take a run and tumble on Blithewold’s lawn instead and for those of you who find the ground too distant for a stretch, Fred and Dan’s sod bench in the Display Garden (“what is that thing?”) will be sittable any day now.

What do you use your lawn for?

-By Gertrude Keller (daughter of Bessie Van Wickle McKee’s sister) from the Blithewold guest book, July 1953

Happy Halloween!

I’m off to tie the knot and have a voyage de noces (that’s French for honeymoon/wedding trip I’m pretty sure if the online translation site can be trusted) in Paris. I’m armed with a bookcase’s worth of slick guidebooks that we’ll probably ignore in favor of just having a look at what’s around the next corner and through the park gate. And I’ll also be packing copies of letters – more like a carnet de voyage from a 20 year old Margorie Van Wickle in Paris to her mother, Bessie in 1903. When Margorie visited Paris she found it to be quite affordable – “…we went shopping in the ‘Bon Marche’ – a most facinating store where nothing costs anything“. Alas, we might not find that to be the case now… About the dangers of walking in Paris she says, “You get out into the middle of a Rue or Boulevarde and every carriage within hailing distance makes a rush for you…” And by her recommendation we can skip the Pantheon but must see “the Church of St. Etienne du Mont – the most charming one in Paris – I think. It is very old – but Oh so graceful and artistic. It made up for any amount of stupid Pantheons.” Have I mentioned how much I love the archives? I didn’t find any pictures of Margorie in Paris (no doubt there are some – just not scanned in yet) but here she is with her new husband George Lyon in 1914.

I’m hoping it’s spring in Paris already and I’m leaving just as it is starting to emerge here. In two weeks time, who knows how far along she’ll be. I’ll make sure to come back and I hope you do too! Stay tuned…

I could use some help. Every year about this time I start thinking about getting new roses for the Rose Garden and every year about this time I go certifiably nutty trying to read between the lines of rose catalog descriptions. My kingdom for a disease resistant rose! Some of you already know that we don’t spray the Rose Garden with any kind of fungicide or pesticide – we clean up dead and disease-y leaves and we handpick beetles (though fingers crossed that the milky spore disease that Dan applied a year and a half ago makes a noticeable difference this year). And we’ve begun to interplant the garden with a mixed up mix of shrubs, perennials and annuals so that there’s other stuff going on midsummer besides black spot and beetles.

Traditionally the Rose Garden was a mixed garden heavy on roses. Word is that the family didn’t spend much time in this garden although they had a beautiful moongate built in 1913 and had tall fences erected (similiar to what surrounded their tennis courts) for the climbers to grow on. And Estelle Clements (Bessie’s live-in companion, friend and helper) mentioned in her journal when her favorite roses were in bloom.

June 10, 1922 Most of the standard roses are in bloom and the ramblers are beginning to come out. Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, Waltham Rambler, Goldfinch, Gardenia are flowering and Thousand Beauties is beginning to come out.

(I love the archives!) But the Rose Garden might have been enjoyed even more by the family’s staff. Situated next to the carriage house and barn (where the family wouldn’t have had much occasion to go), and surrounded in the summer by a thorny fence and stone walls, this private eden would have been the ideal place for a smoke break.

Now it’s our entrance garden – a visitor’s first peek at Blithewold’s 33 acres and we desperately want to make a good impression. –Very difficult to do that with unsprayed roses along midsummer! So we asked one of our favorite (retired) garden designers, Ginny P. to give us her thoughts and I’d like some of yours too. I really want to know if any of you have favorite roses that you don’t treat like roses – do you have any that look good even without weekly hosedown of chemistry? I know you do!… One of the Florabundas (our Thursday Rose Garden volunteers) gave us the most perfect rose last year – and just what I’m looking for more of. ‘Morning Has Broken’ is a beautiful butter yellow non-stopper with a sweet fragrance and best of all – not a spot of fungus amongus all summer! And we had it jammed in with annuals probably stifled and it just never stopped or dropped. We also have the ‘Knock Outs’. They don’t knock my socks off but they do seem to stay healthy. Can you recommend any others before I place my order for a boatload more of ‘Morning ..’?

I checked the All American Rose Selections website for recent winners. Winners are chosen based on a list of characteristics including disease resistance. On the page describing their test gardens I found this: “The rose varities in these trials receive only as much care as your average home gardener would be likely to give. In fact, AARS members recently voted to remove fungicidal spraying from the testing process, to ensure that our AARS Winners are natural top performers.” And I have to admit to being irked. Call me naive but I didn’t realize testers were allowed to spray the roses. Just how exactly can they tell if a rose is disease resistant if they’re spraying it? And when exactly did the fungicide ban go into effect? I couldn’t find that information anywhere on their website and so far no one has gotten back to me. I’ll happily try more AARS winners if I know they won the award fair-n-square. Anybody know the scoop?

Blithewold is R.I.ght here!

Like many other tycoons and coal barons in the late 19th century, the Van Wickles decided Rhode Island, a southern facing scoop of shore between Connecticut and Cape Cod, was where to “summer”. The insanely wealthy came en masse in high summer from the sweltering south to build outrageously palatial “cottages” in the cool sea breezes of the Ocean State. Newport was the famous choice of the rich and fabulous but Augustus Van Wickle chose little industrial Bristol because he was able to purchase 70 beautiful bayside acres with deep water moorage out front for his yachts. The quality and quantity of land was more important to him than the prestigious folderol of summering in Newport – the Van Wickles spent long summers and holidays at Blithewold actually enjoying their property rather than endlessly attending society parties.

Rhode Island is pretty special. It’s the smallest state in the union and has the longest name. Remember “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” the next time you play Trivial Pursuit. R.I. was founded on religious freedom, was the first state to declare independence, and the last (of the first 13) to ratify the constitution. The state motto is Hope, our bird is a chicken (Rhode Island Red), the state drink is coffee milk and our official shellfish is the quahog. (Does your state have a drink or a clam?) With a population of just over one million, we’re the size of a small city and everybody knows everybody or is somebody’s cousin. We have a skewed perception of distance and time – no place in the state is more than an hour and a half away from another but to go “off island” is an expedition (we pack a lunch). And we always give directions based on what used to be there (“turn right where the Almacs used to be…”) which tends to frustrate tourists and newcomers. Rhode Islanders garden in about 3 different zones – from 5 to 7a – in a state that could fit inside Yellowstone Park.

Bristol (zone 6) is a town of 22,500 in the East Bay. We are nearly surrounded by salt water – Narragansett Bay on the one hand and Mt. Hope Bay on the other. Bristol is the home of the oldest (longest, loudest, bestest) 4th of July parade in the country and I think Bristol gardens are also particularly outstanding. Bristol has a sizeable Portuguese community, many of whom emigrated from volcano infested Azores and brought a beautiful and utilitarian garden culture with them. A few years ago the Bristol Garden Club helped sponsor a Portuguese Garden tour and I’ve never seen such lovely city gardens – every inch under cultivation with grape arbors, orchards, vegetables and ornamentals in cheek-by-jowl neighborhood backyards.

The climate in R.I. seems particularly conducive to gardening. The weather is constantly changable and we enjoy four lengthy seasons (though spring has a tendency to feel an awful lot like winter up until the moment it feels like summer) that aren’t any longer than they ought to be. Right when we’re truly ready for summer to end, fall falls. And though I was just talking to another professional gardener last night who said she didn’t want winter to be over quite yet (we’re still enjoying our rest), I’m sure in a few weeks it will seem like the most perfect thing to be back outside full-time cutting back and tidying up.

I really love Rhode Island. I moved away when I was 18 and for the next fourteen and a half years the biggest little called to me. “Come back!”, said little rhody. So I did. The Van Wickle McKees loved it too and eventually made Blithewold their year-round residence. Thank you to Jodi at Bloomingwriter for suggesting we all tell our garden’s geography story.

In 1926 Blithewold’s 50 year old Toon tree (Cedrela sinensis aka Toona sisensis) bloomed for the first time (and was thought to be the first one to bloom in this country). William McKee, Bessie Van Wickle McKee’s second husband, brought the flowers to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston for identification which incited plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson and botanist Alfred Rehder to travel to Bristol to see what other amazing things the McKee’s might have on their property. Wilson and Rehder discovered a plantman’s paradise. In a letter to her daughter, Bessie wrote, “They were frankly amazed to find so lovely and interesting a place here – and kept saying, ‘Why you have a second arboretum here, we never dreamed there was a place like this.’”

Blithewold was horticulturally rich even before the Van Wickle McKees bought the property. The Gardners who owned “Ferry Hill” in the 1800’s probably planted the original Toon and other exotic trees – many of which are still living today. We know Mr. Gardner designed a meticulously kept English style garden with award winning fruit trees and flower and vegetable beds (where the Enclosed Garden is now), and he grew this area’s first orchids in his greenhouses. Clearly he and the Van Wickle McKees were plant junkies just like you (if you’re a gardener) and me.

Plants have been traveling the world with people like us since the dawn of time and non-natives have been usurping space on the land and in our hearts for pretty much ever. How many of us would hurl whole paychecks at Dan Hinkley for just a few choice finds? For a long time though it was probably only naturalists who knew to be alarmed at how the landscape was changing. Now we’re all more aware. Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) imported for its festive decorative berries is smothering everything in its path (at least in our part of the world) and invisible hitchhikers like Japanese beetle and Hemlock woolly adelgid came in with nursery stock and have proceeded to decimate whole landscapes. (Did you know that Japanese beetles eat 400 plant species? – Look around an infested garden and you’d guess it was that many.) But we addicts still want-desire-need exotic plants in our gardens and we swear we’ll keep an eye on them and we’ll never ever never let another exotic invasive escape cultivation!

It’s not just the view that’s changed – exotics are taxing the whole system. I’ve been reading Bringing Nature Home – How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens by Douglas Tallamy and am feeling so conflicted now about what to plant in my own garden that I am certifiably toons. Just ask Gail. I knew there were arguments for using natives in the landscape – we all talk about using the right plant in the right location and what’s better (less maintenance and fuss) than the plant that would have grown there in the first place? But Tallamy makes a convincing argument for planting natives from a bug’s and bird’s and butterfly/moth’s eye view. Our native creepy crawlies have specifically adapted over the millenia to eat specific plants. Sometimes an exotic plant has an edible leaf chemistry but a lot of times, not. Some people might think “but I don’t want bugs eating my garden because then I’ll have to use pesticides for goodness sake!” and this is Tallamy’s retort: “Somehow along the way we have come to expect perfection in our gardens: the plastic quality of artificial flowers is now seen as normal and healthy. It is neither. Instead, it is a clear sign of a garden so contrived that it is no longer a living community, so unbalanced that any life form other than the desired plants is viewed as an enemy and quickly eliminated. … a sterile garden is one teetering on the brink of destruction.” Nature’s own checks and balances kick in when natives are planted – preditors follow the prey. (If you build it they will come.)

I think Tallamy is (and I am) preaching to the choir. We true gardeners know there’s a balance to life and we want our gardens to be with nature, not against it. My head spins because I still feel justified as a gardener/horticulturist working in one of this country’s only coastal arboreta to try new plants as they become available (plus I want them). But I think we’ve got a bounden duty to plant and teach with our natives as well. (And in my own garden I’ll be going toons but probably not growing them.)

A reader asked if the fountain in yesterday’s picture was a new feature and I thought it would be fun to show that it’s actually almost older than time (at least by the looks of this picture from our archives). The Bosquet looks a bit different these days! The fountain is not working … yet!…