This Garden Gets a Poetic Revival with Sprawling Meadows and Pollinator Gardens
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“All that has been is visible and clear,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, beloved bard of early America. This classic Georgian Revival along Concord, Massachusetts’s Authors Ridge is patterned after Longfellow’s house in nearby Cambridge, and when a young family bought the circa 1900 manse, its timeless beauty was indeed visible and clear.
Yet the former glory of its nearly six acres was decidedly less so. “It was overgrown, with no real sense of order or plan,” says Dan Gordon of Dan Gordon Landscape Architects. Plus a 2016 microburst had decimated many of the existing trees.
Tasked with reenvisioning a landscape that both complemented and enhanced the stately architecture, Gordon and project manager Patrick Taylor created definition by regrading the front elevation and introducing a stone retaining wall and a parade of bluestone pavers. An allée of London plane trees and groupings of mounded boxwood frame the entrance, creating quiet contrasts of height and form, order and elegance.
From there, a sweeping lawn gives way to a grassy meadow with the woodland beyond, “in keeping with the rural nature of the surrounding landscape,” says Gordon.
Closer to the house, a terrace garden brims with white hydrangea and perennials surrounding a fountain. “This more intimate garden contrasts with expanses of lawn. And it’s always lovely to hear a water feature from a porch,” Gordon notes. With the scent of catmint and salvia coming from the rear garden, these sensory elements become part of the poetry of the home, and the New England landscape its ardent muse.
2023 World's Most Beautiful Gardens winner for Most Poetic Revival; Design by Dan Gordon Landscape Architects.
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