A walk through the formal gardens at Wethersfield Estate & Garden, in Amenia, N.Y., offers a dreamy escape back in time. The landscape, some 80 years in the making, conjures the Italian Renaissance and hints of ancient Greece.
But there is more than a grand history lesson embodied in its specimen trees, expanses of formal hedging and topiary, exquisitely sited terraces and cast of classical-style statuary.
While it may not occur to most visitors, the present moment of this remarkable scene raises some of horticulture’s most pressing questions about the future — issues that are not unique to Wethersfield, but shared by many historic landscapes and botanic gardens, as past and future tug at each other.
There is nothing new about the inherent tension in navigating the line between historic preservation and the urge to present visitors with fresh visual excitement. Today, though, there is added complexity.
How do you do all of this in the face of mounting pressure from pests and pathogens emboldened by a changing climate — particularly when some of them threaten the star players in gardens of other eras, like Wethersfield, with its majestic specimen European beech trees (Fagus sylvatica)?
Somehow Jeff Lynch, who joined as head gardener in March after nearly 10 years as grounds manager at the celebrated Chanticleer Garden, in Wayne, Pa., and his small but energetic creative team appear undaunted.
Mr. Lynch is buoyed by the enthusiasm of a supportive board of directors, he said, and grateful also to be moving forward armed with a 2023 cultural landscape report prepared by Heritage Landscapes and underwritten by the Garden Conservancy.
“It’s a document that will guide us in the restoration of the garden,” Mr. Lynch said, “and taking it back to the significant period, in the 1970s, to get it back to the original.”
Taking steps to give the vulnerable beeches their best shot at survival was just one element the report called out as part of the process of moving forward. Bringing vast stretches of the garden-defining yew hedges (Taxus x media) back into scale was another.
Some of the outsize hedging conceals important architectural features, including a circular set of steps in the style of the British architect Edwin Lutyens, and a pair of sculptural urns alongside them. Other hedges are no longer flat-topped but somewhat mounded, and much wider than intended, encroaching on pathways and softening once-sharp axes.
Two stone lions carefully positioned decades ago to stand guard beside a pair of conical yews that announce the garden entryway are now tucked inside the shrubs, with big pockets pruned out to accommodate them.
“People love it,” Mr. Lynch said. “It’s whimsical.”
But these excesses, he stressed, were not part of the original intention. He and the team are focused on getting back to an earlier heyday, and will begin a multiyear effort this winter on the yew hedges and topiary — one that involves rejuvenation and, in certain cases, shrub replacements.
First, though, he is pondering a precise strategy for when to do what.
“It’s really figuring out how to do that, so visitors don’t see all that newness at once,” he said. “We don’t want people to see that the garden’s being renovated.”
A Conservation Ethic From the Start
Wethersfield was born out of the banking heir Chauncey Stillman’s passion for the history of art and architecture, and his capacity for ahead-of-the-times thinking. Starting in 1937, he bought two adjacent pieces of land in northeastern Dutchess County: an abandoned orchard and an abandoned dairy farm.
Mr. Stillman had a strong interest in conservation, and at various times served as a director for the Audubon Society, the New York Botanical Garden and the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society). Coaxing the land back to vibrancy, he eschewed the use of chemicals, practiced crop rotation and contour plowing of the hillsides to reduce erosion and runoff, and further conserved water in a series of man-made ponds used for irrigation. He engaged in tree farming, and also reforested large areas of the property.
On the highest point of what is today 1,000 acres, he built a Georgian Revival house and commissioned the first of three acres of formal gardens: a small, enclosed British-style Arts and Crafts design close to the house. It connects to a larger, Italian Renaissance-style garden, designed in a transformational, decades-long collaboration with the landscape architect Evelyn N. Poehler. (An exhibit about their work together is on display at the Sharon Historical Society & Museum, in Sharon, Conn., through Oct. 13; the garden itself is open Friday through Sunday, from June to mid-October.)
The original design is like a master class on the importance of establishing strong axial views in a garden. Those at Wethersfield emanate from the lines of the house.
Although there is no longer a family in residence, the staff maintains an exuberant cutting garden, and peacocks strut about, adding color and recalling other eras.
The place capitalizes, too, on the astonishing borrowed scenery beyond the gardens. From the 1,200-foot-high perch, rolling farmland, the Taconic Hills, and the Berkshire and Catskill mountain ranges are all on display.
Mrs. Poehler also helped develop a seven-acre “little wilderness” near the formal area’s southwestern edge, where carriage trails and bridle paths take you past “bigger-than-life statuary” depicting figures from classical mythology, Mr. Lynch said. From her original native-heavy design, mature witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) and mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) remain, and the gardeners plan to begin clearing the weedy herbaceous layer beneath it all this fall, in anticipation of restoration and replanting.
What’s Next? Creative Replacements.
Unlike the nature imagery depicted in the frescoes inside the mansion, the scenes outside keep changing, often in a kind of call and response between natural forces and the gardeners’ hands.
An original hedge of dwarf European cranberry bush (Viburnum opulus Nanum), sited in front of a larger one of yew, became infested with viburnum leaf beetle, a nonnative invasive insect. It was replaced this spring with native dwarf sweet pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia Tom’s Compact), an inspiration of Alaina Mancini, Wethersfield’s head of horticulture, that is delightfully fragrant in bloom. When the Clethra finished flowering this month, it was pruned to try to maintain it as a dwarf hedge in keeping with Mrs. Poehler’s original plan, Mr. Lynch said.
Elsewhere, the connecting element between the two formal garden areas is in its third incarnation. The original tunnel of Amur maple (Acer ginnala) was replaced in the 1970s with European beech. That version was recently lost to ambrosia beetle damage, one of multiple issues facing beeches, and was replaced again last year, this time with native American hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana), whose young shoots will be pleached — or trained and interlaced — onto the supporting tunnellike metal frame.
But what do you substitute for a pair of 24-foot-tall weeping beeches trained into columnar form over many decades? The two, lost to the nonnative ambrosia beetle, were part of a grouping of four such foundational showpieces anchoring one formal area.
“I would suspect that they might be the only weeping beeches trained into columns anywhere in the world,” Mr. Lynch said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
There is no replacing them, exactly. Mr. Lynch’s solution: a pair of Persian ironwood trees (Parrotia persica), “a really, really tough plant that tolerates pruning very well.” He was able to find two good-sized ones of an upright cultivar, branched low to the ground so they can be trained as columns.
The hope is to keep the many other specimen beeches resilient enough to withstand what comes. Lately, that includes beech leaf disease, a problem first identified in Ohio in 2012, caused by a foliar nematode that is likely nonnative. The characteristic dark banding that shows in spring on newly opened leaves, which may be small and crinkled, has been found on native beeches (Fagus grandifolia) in Wethersfield’s surrounding woodlands. The staff is applying potassium polyphosphite fertilizer products to strengthen the trees, as recommended by the University of Connecticut guidelines, and providing other forms of support.
For Mr. Lynch, all horticultural successes start with such tactics, at ground zero: with how we care for the soil, which is the foundation of the landscape, and life.
The first initiative he undertook in his new position this spring was implementing what he calls a “soil health-care program,” like the one he introduced at Chanticleer. This regimen does not rely on conventional fertilizers, but rather “feeds the microbes that are existing in the soil,” he said. Kelp, fish hydrolysate and humates are among the components of the professional formulas he uses (in addition to the potassium polyphosphite).
One imagines that Wethersfield’s original owner, Mr. Stillman, would be pleased to hear this. He would surely agree that even in a place so vast as Wethersfield — defined by its heroic architectural elements, specimen plants and views that seem to go on forever — unseen little things like the soil life deserve our utmost care.
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
If you have a gardening question, email it to Margaret Roach at gardenqanda@nytimes.com, and she may address it in a future column.