Newport's Blue Garden

The most coveted invitation of the 1913 Newport summer season was for the Masque of the Blue Garden, an inaugural soiree for the magnificent garden created for Arthur Curtiss James and his wife, Harriet Parsons James.

Three hundred guests were greeted by Harriet James, who was clad in a blue 16th-century Italian gown embroidered with sapphires and amethysts and crowned with an ornate diamond-studded headdress. After an Italianate pageant staged by professional entertainers, a trumpeter led guests into the James mansion for dinner and dancing.

Arthur Curtiss James made his fortune in copper and the railroads. A private man and one of America’s least-known millionaires, he was happiest sailing his yacht on the sea. Harriet was a vivacious socialite who enjoyed entertaining, fine homes, and beautiful gardens.

When the Jameses built their Newport mansion, Harriet hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a secret garden in a monochromatic color palette of blue. Flowers in ethereal shades of sapphire, azure, periwinkle, purple, violet, lavender, gray, and white reflected the sky and surrounding ocean. To keep the garden looking fresh from spring through fall, the beds were replanted several times each year by a staff of 40 gardeners. With its graceful design and signature color scheme, the Blue Garden became a Newport showplace and the site of lavish parties and garden tours. 

After both Jameses died in 1941, maintenance of the Blue Garden suffered. In 1967, the mansion was devastated by fire and demolished, and the property was subdivided into house lots and sold. The once-glorious Blue Garden disappeared under a thick covering of invasive trees and vines.

In 2012 philanthropist, preservationist, and horticulturist Dorrance Hamilton funded the restoration of the garden. Hamilton was an important member of Newport society, a benefactor of Blithewold and the Philadelphia and Newport Flower Shows, and a neighbor of the Blue Garden.

Completed in 2015, the renovation of the Blue Garden reflects Olmsted’s design intent but utilizes a 21st-century plant palette that allows for simplified maintenance.

Enclosed by low walls, trellises, and a columned pergola, the Blue Garden is classical in layout with a cruciform shape. A long reflecting pool, lined with Persian-inspired blue tiles and fine spray jets, is connected with a runnel to a square lily pond.

Boxwood, Caryopteris, and ‘Twist-n-Shout’ lacecap hydrangeas provide structure, while beds of mixed perennials, annuals, and bulbs create a long season of bloom. You will find perennial salvias, balloon flowers, phlox, monkshood, asters, false indigo, and delphiniums augmented with annual bachelor buttons, lantanas, morning glories, plumbago, lobelias, and agapanthus. Cobalt blue ceramic pots accent the plantings. The Blue Garden is once again a showplace in Newport thanks to the creativity and dedication of two amazing women.

Excerpted from The Garden Tourist’s New England by Jana Milbocker.

The Blue Garden, Newport, RI 02919, thebluegarden.org

Hours: June 13–Oct.10: 11 am & 2 pm, by appointment only. Admission: $15, online tickets required

The Magical Garden of Green Animals

Green Animals is the oldest and most northern topiary garden in the United States. The 7-acre estate overlooks the Narragansett Bay, and contains a whimsical garden with more than 80 topiaries sculpted from California privet, yew, and English boxwood.

This small country estate in Portsmouth was purchased in 1872 by Thomas E. Brayton, Treasurer of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Company in Fall River, Massachusetts. It included a white clapboard summer residence, farm outbuildings, a pasture and a vegetable garden. Brayton's daughter Alice gave the estate its name because of the profusion of "green animals" created by property superintendent Joseph Carreiro.

Carreiro was hired to design and maintain the ornamental and edible gardens from 1905 to 1945. He experimented with California privet propagated in the estate greenhouse, and developed a system for training these, without the support of frames, into over-sized animal shapes. Many of the animals took almost 20 years to grow into their final size. Since the Brayton home was a summer residence, it was not a concern that privet was deciduous and sheds its leaves in the fall. His son-in-law, George Mendonca, superintendent until 1985, expanded the gardens to include more than 80 topiaries, and sculpted some from yew and boxwood.

Alice Brayton inherited the estate and made it her permanent residence. She became an avid historian and gardener herself, and bequeathed Green Animals to The Preservation Society of Newport County upon her death. Today, Green Animals remains as a rare example of an estate with formal topiaries, beautiful flower, vegetable and herb gardens, orchards and a Victorian house.

The landscape is a series of garden rooms bordered by mature conifers and magnolias. The fanciful topiaries are the stars of the garden. Favorites include teddy bears, a camel, a giraffe, an ostrich, an elephant, a unicorn, a reindeer, a dog, and a horse with his rider. They are set within lovely flower beds planted with colorful perennials and annuals. Near the house and main entrance, the topiary retains a more formal style of figurative and geometric shapes. A walkway of arched topiary leads around the house to the front porch, where you can relax on a rocking chair and enjoy a view of the bay. The topiaries are all trimmed by hand using garden shears and require weekly hand trimming. Some conservation metal supports have been discreetly positioned inside the forms to provide stability in wind and snow.

The rest of the garden is equally magical. Grape arbors, fruit beds, orchards, cutting gardens and an extensive vegetable gardens sport decorations and whimsical scarecrows that delight children.

The Brayton house museum contains a display of vintage toys including a large collection of toy soldiers and vintage dollhouses. Adults will appreciate the original Victorian family furnishings and decoration.

Ribbons for prize-winning dahlias and vegetables, dating from about 1915, line the walls of the well-curated gift shop. Green Animals Topiary Garden is a delight for gardeners of all ages!

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