The American Renaissance sculptor Daniel Chester French settled on neighboring Stockbridge as the site for his summer home and studio, Chesterwood. Just down the road was lawyer and diplomat Joseph Choate’s family vacation home, Naumkeag. It was Choate’s daughter, Mabel, who moved an 18th-century building called Mission House into the center of Stockbridge and commissioned a Colonial Revival garden around it. Stockbridge also benefited from the generosity of Irene and Bernhard Hoffman, who donated 15 acres to the Lenox Garden Club in the 1930s. The parcel, artfully planted and groomed over time, became the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
Today these patrician properties are open to the public, and their legacy of high design extends to the landscape. This sultry summer has pushed New England’s short-lived flower gardens to bloom weeks ahead of schedule, and the heat has not been kind to anything now flowering. Fortunately, these gardens were conceived by extraordinary designers who did not rely on flowers alone. With their woodland trails, intimate gardens, fountains, shady nooks, and daydream views, these landscapes have the power to delight the eye and lift the spirit. Events and exhibits at each of the gardens continue throughout the season.
The Mount “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist,’’ Wharton (1862-1937) wrote in a letter describing the Italianate garden rooms below the palatial house, both of which she designed herself. Although her niece, the accomplished landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, consulted on the gardens, the well-traveled Wharton, who wrote about Italian gardens, was an expert in her own right.
