For more on Naumkeag, see the first post in this series. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/npmDQpdImZY.
This week: more of Naumkeag’s spectacular gardens.
Naumkeag’s gardens, continued
Gardeners and landscape architects always impress me because they can think in the fourth dimension: not just how certain plants look now, but how they’ll look months or years from now. A linden allée like this one suggests the designer was thinking far into the future. (Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina has two spectacular allées: one of live oaks, one of magnolias.)
A sculpture of Diana is the focal point at the end of the linden allée.
A walk through the woods … the well-controled, precisely maintained woods.
A cast-iron “pagoda” shades a large Chinese scholar’s stone (gongshi).
This is the approach to the “Afternoon Garden”, which has brightly painted Venetian gondola poles around its perimeter. It was the first of Fletcher Steele’s projects at Naumkeag, designed in 1928.
We are sneaking up (the long way around) on that large sculpture near the left.
At left: an original MacMonnies!! Young Faun with Heron was created in 1887, and has been at the Choates’ home ever since.
Next week: some views of the interior of Naumkeag.
More
- Back in the summer of 2020, when most museums were still in lockdown or requiring masks, my husband and I discovered the pleasures of spending time in elaborate, exquisitely planned gardens. Our first excursion was to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where we visited the Gilded Age mansions of Naumkeag, Ventfort, and The Mount. I shared photos of these on Facebook, but I prefer to have my photos on my own website. I’ve already shifted Ventfort (here and here). The Mount will follow eventually.
- For more Gilded Mansions and their gardens on this site, click here.
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