{"id":710,"date":"2012-12-10T12:11:40","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T20:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=710"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:29","slug":"ghosts-of-gardens-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/ghosts-of-gardens-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts of Gardens Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

GHOSTS OF GARDENS PAST<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Last week, in need of a minor adventure, I went to Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey.\u00a0 On the face of it, a thirty-eight minute drive to the northern part of the state might not seem like the stuff of which adventures are made.\u00a0 However, I was in search of history and the remnants of gardens.\u00a0 Those things are always exciting because they involve memory and imagination.<\/p>\n

Ramapo has a beautiful setting, on the edge of the mountains of the same name.\u00a0 It is easy to see why sugar baron Theodore Havemeyer chose the area as a country get-away back in the 1870\u2019s.\u00a0 He purchased a total of about 2,300 acres, dubbed the property \u201cMountainside Farm\u201d and renovated an existing house into an impressive Italianate dwelling for himself and his nine children.\u00a0 Later, Havemeyer built a second house, now referred to as the Birch Mansion, for his oldest daughter, Natalie, and her husband, John Mayer.\u00a0 In 1969 a portion of the Havemeyer property, which had been sold to Havemeyer family friend Stephen Birch, was purchased by the State of New Jersey and Ramapo College was built on the site.\u00a0 Both the houses are still standing.\u00a0 Theodore Havemeyer\u2019s mansion now serves as the home of the college president and a site for various official functions.\u00a0 The Birch Mansion contains the college\u2019s administrative offices.<\/p>\n

Unlike their contemporaries the du Ponts, the Havemeyers have not gone down in horticultural history as great garden builders.\u00a0 Theodore Havemeyer was more interested in the sport of golf, but did establish a model dairy farm on his property.\u00a0 His daughter-in-law, Katherine Aymar Sands Havemeyer (1871-1951), was noted for her horticultural interests, and her legacy, in the form of namesake peonies, lilacs and phlox lives on.\u00a0 Katherine\u2019s garden was on Long Island, at an estate called Cedar Hill.<\/p>\n

Little remains at Ramapo of gardens that may have surrounded the Birch and Havemeyer houses, but there are tantalizing traces.<\/p>\n

I was able to walk all the way around the Birch Mansion, which is in on top of a hill at the center of campus.\u00a0 The views from all sides are wonderful, especially in the winter when the trees are bare.\u00a0 You can see clearly where the various doors opened onto terraces or garden areas.\u00a0 On one side of the house a bench remains, along with a single concrete urn, which I thought might once have been one of a pair.<\/p>\n

I was most intrigued by the remains of a small sunken garden.\u00a0 This kind of formal or semi-formal layout was common in gardens designed at the end of the Victorian period.\u00a0 The layout of the Birch Mansion\u2019s sunken garden is rectilinear, though now the outlines are a little blurred by the presence of a large shrub in each of the little garden\u2019s four quadrants.\u00a0 Perhaps they are pruned during the growing season to keep things tidy.\u00a0 In the middle of the space, a round concrete basin tells the story of the pool that was once the focal point.<\/p>\n

Downhill from the sunken garden, you can still see portions of old retaining walls that terraced the rolling terrain.\u00a0 There are also some fine trees, most likely planted in the Havemeyer\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

These days, the most notable garden at Ramapo College is the six year old Havemeyer Edible Garden, a plot where students grow and learn about plants, sustainable eating and nutrition, using a curriculum devised by Dr. Jacqueline Ehlert-Mercer, registered dietician and wife of Ramapo\u2019s president, Dr. Peter Mercer.\u00a0 A variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs flourish in the Havemeyer garden during the growing season.\u00a0 It is both very fitting and somewhat ironic that a garden devoted to healthy eating should be installed on property that once belonged to a man whose fortune was based on sugar.<\/p>\n

As the Christmas holiday draws closer, it also seems fitting to experience a place where the \u201cghosts\u201d of gardens past, present and possibly even future live in close proximity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GHOSTS OF GARDENS PAST \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last week, in need of a minor adventure, I went to Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey.\u00a0 On the face of it, a thirty-eight minute drive to the northern part of the state might not seem like the stuff of which adventures are made.\u00a0 However, I was in search … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[483,482,234,485,484],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-edible-gardens","tag-havemeyer","tag-historic-gardens","tag-new-jersey-gardens","tag-ramapo-college"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions\/711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}