Garden Conservancy preserves heritage

Like many groups before them, they turned to The Garden Conservancy.

The not-for-profit, based in Cold Spring, N.Y., is like a landmark preservation society, except it saves gardens instead of buildings. It has had a hand in preserving and rehabilitating more than 90 exceptional gardens around the country since it was founded in 1989, and is now working on 16 preservation projects.

Some of the conservancy’s projects have a link to history, like Millay’s home near the Berkshires or the Gardens of Alcatraz on the famous island prison in San Francisco Bay. Others stand out for their design or horticultural qualities, such as the dreamily abstract Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden in Bishopville, S.C., or the drought-resistant plants gathered in the Peckerwood Garden of Hempstead, Texas.

Gardens can pose unique preservation challenges. They often are acts of improvisation, and all gardens are dynamic — changing year by year and day by day. Figuring out what bloomed where 80 years ago can be part detective work and part art.

Bill Noble, director of preservation for the conservancy, said the idea isn’t to bring back Millay’s gardens down to every trillium petal but to give the visitor a sense of connection.

"It will never be exactly the same to what Millay had there,” Noble said, "but it should be close enough in spirit that one could on a hot summer day imagine the smell of the flowers, and why you’d want to take your clothes off and plunge into the pool.”

Each preservation project is different, and each gets a different mix of the conservancy’s "legal, horticultural and financial resources.” The conservancy has a small staff and a $3 million annual budget, which also funds things like the "Open Days” private garden tours and educational programs. Just more than half of the budget goes to preservation projects and programs, so the conservancy picks its spots.

Steepletop is getting expert advice. On the other end of the spectrum, the conservancy this year took ownership of Chase Garden, a sprawling spread in Washington with views of Mt. Rainier. Noble said the group eventually will transfer the garden to a separate not-for-profit.

In New Orleans, the conservancy has been helping to restore the splendor of Longue Vue House & Gardens, which were heavily damaged during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Plans are to bring those gardens, started in 1934, more in line with the original intent of landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman.

"The depth and breadth of knowledge that they can bring together is something that as a local nonprofit, we just don’t have that kind of pull,” said Longue Vue’s Flora Williams.

For Millay’s Steepletop, Noble offers advice on how to bring it back to what it was like in the period roughly between 1925 and 1935, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s influence over the garden was at its height. (Millay died in 1950 at age 57).

Millay Society executive director Peter Bergman recently gave a tour of Steepletop showing how Millay designed a series of linking gardens, each with a purpose: a tiered rose garden for strolling, a shade garden by the outdoor bar, sweet peas and pretty blooms in the kitchen garden.

Even with the rehabilitation under way for several years, it takes imagination to muster up the bucolic grandeur of Millay’s day.

The kitchen garden is now filled with the vegetables and the bluish blooms like lupin and borage that Millay loved so much. But other areas, like around the brackish pool, have a long way to go. Invasives have crept in over the decades, and little saplings from Millay’s day are now towering pines throwing too much shade. But there’s hope. Once invasives were cleared, roses bloomed for the first time in six decades.

"A lot of plants here are champing at the bit to come up,” Bergman said.

To figure out how the garden looked, preservationists studied old black and white photos from Millay’s estate, as well as diary entries and other writings. Bergman said Millay wrote of bergamot and borage, and she even wrote a poem titled "The Strawberry Shrub,” likely inspired by the specimen outside her window.

It’s not always so difficult to dig into a garden’s past. For the Chase Garden, the elderly couple who created the 4 1/2-acre site were still alive and sat down for interviews. Preservationists would project images of the plantings on the wall and they would talk about the garden.

Millay has been dead for six decades, but Bergman believes her gardens can be brought back to the state they were in at the twilight of the Jazz Age.

Still, there are stone walls to fix, trees to cut, flowers to plant and a pool to repair. The society has one gardener aided by volunteers. As Bergman walked past the blooms and overgrown areas, he conceded it could take a while.

"It will probably never end,” he said.