LATE AFTERNOON, ASHINTULLY, OCTOBER 2009

I intended to visit Ashintully again this fall, but schedule, weather, and a bad cold all played against me.  Well, procrastination was  involved also, but the point is, I didn't get there.

I'm a road trip kinda guy---I've never met a road I didn't like. A car, a road, I'm there. Some are better than others, but all offer something to think about.  I remember watching the landscape of urban industrial New Jersey flash by from the back of a town car on the way to the Newark Airport from Manhattan one day years ago.  It was a grey day, the driver was listening to a classical station.  The bleak industrial landscape reminded of Charles Sheeler paintings, and of F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of a similar landscape on Gatsby and Daisy's fateful drive.  Suddenly, in that unlikeliest of surroundings, I saw a palace fit for a czar rising on a hill to the left.  At second glance, it proved to be a just a high school, but its proportions, classical details, and pastel painted stucco surface would have been at home on the banks of the Neva.  In the time it took to travel a thousand feet, Daisy Buchanan had been replaced by Natasha Rostova.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Main Road in Tyringham, Massachusetts, one of those beautiful winding lanes that the Berkshires do so well,  taking one through hill and dale, past farms and little hamlets of toy buildings.  Ethan From is long forgotten in this 21st century version, hardscrabble farms replaced with weekend houses.  I'm sorry that I was rushing to my destination.  It was the last hour of the last visiting day of the season, and I didn't dare take time to stop, not even to photograph perfect Federal farmhouses, not even to photograph the surprising cottage at Santarella (speaking of Hansel & Gretel), the former studio of Henry Hudson Kitson, sculptor of the Lexington Minute Man statue.  Fortunately, one can remedy this with the aid of Wikipedia Commons:

According to the Santarella website, the 'thatched' roof is actually composed of 80 tons of asphalt shingles.  But, I digress---This post is really about Ashintully, which I first read about decades, centuries, ago in an article in Horticulture.  I'd ever since wanted to see it, and finally I managed to be in the Berkshires on a visiting day, and racing from the other garden wonder of the region, Naumkeag, I arrived 45 minutes before closing.

The Ashintully estate was created by Egyptologist and politician Robb de Peyster Tytus (An Egyptologist! Hard to believe that nowadays one need only to own a pizza chain to become a politician), who combined three farms in the Tyringham valley to create a 1,000 acre estate.  Titus had Hoppin & Koen design a large classical house (with more than a whiff of that high school in New Jersey in its aspect) sited halfway up a mountainside, with spectacular views across the Tyringham Valley and Bartholomew's Cobble.

Titus died young, of tuberculosis, and in due order, his widow married Canadian publisher John Stewart McLennan.   Their son John McLennan, the noted modern classical composer, inherited Ashintully, and took up residence in a farmhouse at the foot of the hill, on the corner of Sodom Road.  Here he created a garden, both modern and classical, full of surprises and mystery.  I've visited many beautiful gardens, but never one more affecting.

These pictures cannot convey the full experience---the gray fall afternoon, the sensation of ever-chaging vistas---one moment formal, the next wild and asymmetrical, the allusions to other times and places, and the sound of the jet of water in the central pool mingled with rustling leaves, and the sesation of fine mist blown  in the air from the fountain as one approached.  It is a complex garden of simple elements.

The stairs to a little mount topped by a finial are mysterious and dramatic, and the effect breathtaking.

The Regency Bridge

 

The Ram's Head Terrace

A minimalist vista, created with little more than a pair of finials and judicious pruning

The big house, known locally as 'The Marble Palace', burned in 1952.   This gate at the end of McLennan's garden leads to a trail up to the house site.

The dramatic ruins of the gardens of the old house are slowly being reclaimed by nature, but at the end of the trail one is rewarded by the breathtaking sight of the columns of the house breaking the sky, with the valley spread out below---Greek ruins, New England style (and yes, I do realize the columns are a Roman order). 

For a more comprehensive history and description of this amazing garden, with pictures taken in high summer, please click HERE for a link to 'Great Gardens of the Berkshires' at Google Books.

And courtesy of the superior search skills of a favored commenter, is a lovely video about the history and making of the garden at Ashintully.   Click HERE. 

DREAMING OF SUMMER GARDENS

Yesterday, Maine was treated to the cruelest April Fool's joke imaginable. Winter weary already, we were treated to a Nor'easter dumping almost another foot of wet, heavy snow up on us.  A large cedar beside the house fell, taking down the phone and electrical lines.  I won't whine---much, but staring out at the dirty melting white stuff, I've made a decision.  Nothing but gardens in the blog for the next few days.

Ashdale Farm, the Stevens-Coolidge estate in North Andover Massachusetts, is one of the loveliest, and most perfectly maintained public estate gardens in New England---everything about it looks as it should, the highest praise the Dilettante can give---and too seldom do I get to these days. 

The property had been in the Stevens family since 1729.  After Helen Stevens' marriage to Joseph Coolidge, a great-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and nephew of Isabella Stewart Gardner,  the farm became their country estate, from 1914 to 1962.  They had architect Joseph Everett Chandler remodel the house, which comprised two Federal era structures, simultaneously making it more comfortable for modern life---combining smaller rooms into larger, adding a bow front bay to the rear of the drawing room on axis with the gardens, also designed by Chandler---yet making the house even more 'Colonial' in spirit than it had been before.

Plan of grounds (Trustees of Public Reservations)

Porches and French doors added by Chandler help open the house to the gardens.

An old fashioned mixed perennial garden is on axis with the drawing room bow

A walled garden adjoining the perennial the old fashioned garden is cleverly designed to appear sunken, the gentle splashing of fountains enhances the sense of seclusion

Across the back drive from the gardens, huge fields flank an orchard leading to a potager added in the 1920s.

At the rear of the potager, serpentine brick walls echo those designed at the University of Virginia by Mr. Coolidge's great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson

The level and quality of  maintenance at Ashdale Farm are superb.  Eye and technique are both at play here.

 

 Mrs. Coolidge willed the estate to the Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations at her death in 1962.  Additional land was donated by her daughter, Mrs. Walter Muir Whitehill, whose husband was director of the Boston Athenaeum, and author of the fascinating Boston, a Topographical History.   The gardens are open daily 8 AM to sunset, and the house may be visited on Wednesdays in season.

AND THE WINNER IS:

It was all rather fun, and thanks to all of you for your great and witty answers to yesterday's quiz---we'll have to play again sometime.  Congratulations, commenter ChipSF, for perseverance and stellar detective work in tracking down the correct answers.  A special nod to Anonymous, who said the connecting thread was 'isms'---narcissism, imperialism, and socialism.  

But indeed, Mogens Tvede was the thread that tied the three pictures together.  Here's as much of the story I could piece together without a visit to the library:

 The gardens of the Chateau de Brantes in Avignon, a late design by Mogens Tvede, for his cousin.

Long before Lee Radziwill, there was another famous Princess Radziwill, Dolly )1886-1966).  She was a patron and friend of artists, writers, and designers from Cocteau to Berard to Dior, and a major figure in International Society in the first half of the 20th century.  The portrait below, by Alex-Ceslas Rzewuski gives a hint of her stylish charms.

Prince Radziwill died in 1920, and the Princess soon remarried, to the Danish architect and painter, Mogens Tvede (1897-1977).  They lived, by all accounts, in splendor in a large town house near Les Invalides in Paris, where their circle of friends included Nancy Mitford, whose portrait was painted by Tvede. 

Although I am unable to find a great deal of information, it appears that the Tvedes were friends of the Standard Oil magnate Walter Brewster Jennings.  1927 found them as the house guests of the Jennings's at their Villa Ospo on once fashionable Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast.  As a result of that visit, Tvede was commissioned the next year to design a house there for Frank Gould, the Villa Marianna (below).

By 1930, Tvede was associated with society architect Mott Schmidt, a designer of cool, restrained and very traditional Georgian houses.  Although Schmidt loyalists protest loudly at the idea, one presumes this was a marriage of convenience, it being unlikely that Tvede had a license to practice in New York.  That year they designed a house at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island for Oliver Jennings, son of Walter Jennings.  It is likely, given Tvede's friendship with the Jennings family, that Tvede was the lead designer on the project.  It is certainly unlike anything else Schmidt designed, a house in the modern Scandinavian neo-classical style, bold and radical, the very antithesis of Schmidt's usual work.

After traveling down a nearly mile long drive, one drove through a central arch in the garage building facing the main house across the gravel court

The entrance front of the house reminds one of the work of Emilio Terry

A two story entrance rotunda led to the drawing room

The double height drawing room was a masterpiece of modern neo-classicism.

The water front of Dark Hollow

A holy grail for this post was to find a picture of the elegant octagonal pavilion at water's edge on this estate, but it eluded me---I thought I had saved one from a real estate ad last year, but no can find.

And, just for discussion's sake, here is a photo of Dunwalke Farm, the Douglas Dillon house in New Jersey, designed by Mott Schmidt in 1936, and extremely typical of his work.  I rest my case.

Photographs of Dark Hollow, photographer uncredited, from a 1933 issue of House & Garden.  Photograph of Dunwalke Farm from Mott B. Schmidt, Architect.