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Old Westbury Gardens: A Legacy of Home
by Mary Jasch
From the time when John and Margarita Grace Phipps built Old Westbury mansion on Long Island and raised their four children there, countless families have enjoyed its rolling landscape. Its sense of place is pleasure. From gardens and golf to polo and hunts, the Phipps family used it well, inspiring a legacy for visitors who come for a few hours' stroll or an evening of romance.
Today at Old Westbury Gardens guests enjoy the house, the sculpted grounds, and the unusual events. From Scottish games and antique cars to dog days and year-round concerts, the theme is always pleasure on these 160 acres.
It began in the early 1900s when Margarita oversaw the construction of the Rose and Walled Gardens with English architect George Crowley. They were fashioned after the gardens she loved as a young lady in England. Her husband Jay (John), a financier like his father, delighted in the planning of the house and design of its furnishings with English antiques and art.
When the mansion was completed in 1906, so were Margarita's two gardens. Several architects designed other gardens to be seen from the house. Boxwood shrubs, Buxus sempervirens, were already 100 years old when brought up from Virginia in 1931.
After passing through the iron gates forged in the 1700s, a front lawn leads the way to the hilltop mansion and its surrounding gardens. A tour inside the mansion reveals bedrooms, writing rooms, studies, and startling real portraits of the family that used them.
Outside again, walk past West Porch, a garden room with glass walls that recess into the ground. A grand American Beech, Fagus grandifolia, sprawls its unmarked limbs since the 1920s when West Porch terrace was built.
Stone stairs head down through masses of ironclad rhododendron, hybrids of Rhododendron catawbiense, to West Pond where a replicate of the Phipps kids' Swan Ferry floats. Is this where Wynken, Blynken and Nod once sailed past the moon? A walk around the pond leads to a colonnade at the recently restored Boxwood Garden.
Bear left, then straight toward the Rose Garden where all the beds are edged in boxwood. Stop to see a special English cottage garden where the young Phipps children played with their cousins who lived nearby, including C.Z. Guest, gardener/author of First Garden. Their kids' playhouses reflect an elegant lifestyle - three tiny log cabins for the boys and a thatched-roof tea house, a gift for daughter Peggie on her tenth birthday. It still stands just as she left when she last played there, set for tea. Last year, the cottage got a new thatch roof. (Read the story)
Enter the Rose Garden through a tunnel of roses. Then take Primrose Path, dazzling in spring, toward Lilac Walk. But just before the lilac garden, and to the left, gravestones among the Geranium macrorrhizum 'Ingwersen' mark a hidden cemetery devoted to the dogs who played a large part in the lives of the family.
“John S. Phipps was a sportsman. His family rode and owned horses, hunted and also owned dogs. The family pets were numerous and enjoyed places of special affection. The collection of tombstones east of the gravel path designates the final resting place of the generations of small friends who had provided service in exchange for affection," Richard Gachot writes in Halcyon Days with coauthor Peggie Phipps Boegner.
Straight ahead two junipers greet visitors just before the dramatic Walled Garden, designed primarily to showcase its structural elements. Twenty-six formal flower beds on 2.5 acres hold perennials, shrubs, roses, vines and herbs. Espaliered magnolia and Kousa dogwood flank the walls. During the time the Phipps lived at Westbury House, flowering was scheduled for spring and fall (they traveled elsewhere in winter), but since opening to the public in 1959, the garden has evolved for continuous bloom.
A jewel awaits at the far end of the Walled Garden - a tranquil lily and lotus pond caressed by a curving pergola. Here, a visitor can recharge and take in the soothing scent and sounds of water. There are many other special garden nooks to investigate at Old Westbury.
Make your way through nearby greenhouses and cutting garden, which supplies flowers for the house, to the South Allee of European Linden. Turn left and head toward the house.
The Phipps family reveled in equine sports. Jay loved polo and racing. His horsemanship apparently developed from his courting days when he and a brother chased girls on ponies across the English moors.
"The house was usually full with the family and visiting cousins and friends. Each of us owned a dog, and Garndpoods had a gray parrot and a macaw that perched in the dining room. Everything that one could possibly want was found on the place. There was a large stable for ponies, hunters, polo ponies, and, later, racehorses. Adjoining the stables was a kennel for father's beagles. Our neighbors, the Thomas Hitchcocks, also had a pack of beagles, and we would join forces on a hunt," writes Peggie in Halcyon Days.
Somewhere on Old Westbury grounds, whose margins ebbed and flowed over time, Jay's stable and kennels existed among the fields and hedgerows, probably to your right. The Phipps love for their homeland went beyond the cultivation and display of it. They used it well - all its undulations and curves.
Through the iron gate, a half-mile walk through a Canadian hemlock border takes you to the house. It takes two people two weeks to trim and shape the border annually.
Recognize the view? You might if you've seen Love Story, for Hollywood loves Old Westbury, too. Scenes from 17 movies have been shot here so far, including Scorsese's Age of Innocence in 1993 and now Bernard and Doris, a film about Doris Duke starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes due out this fall. The Gardens are listed in the New York Production Guide as a film location.
Meet the South Terrace of this amazing Charles II style home. Two lead 18th century sphinxes dominate the terrace. Between them, a tiny grass plot amid brick is a concert stage. Across the terrace way, descend through rhododendron to the pool house to see three mosaics of sea shells.
Old Westbury Gardens is a gift from a family, who loved their home and its pleasures, to the thousands of visitors who now enjoy its quiet beauty by day and fun, energetic concerts by evening.
Peggie Phipps Boegner and her family have done well - and they want to share it with you. Wear your walking shoes to Old Westbury (but pack your dancing shoes)and plan to spend the day. Pack a picnic or enjoy lunch at Cafe in the Woods. Then, please, stay for an evening concert that will without any doubt rev up your second burst of energy.
Old Westbury Gardens is open daily through October, Sundays in November, and December 2 through 17.
Visit them online: www.oldwestburygardens.org
Please Note: Early on the morning of Sept 16, Margaret Phipps Boegner died, peacefully, just two months short of her 100th birthday, at her home in Old Westbury, located just a few hundred yards from Westbury House, her Thatched Cottage, and the rest of Old Westbury Gardens.
As founder and leading benefactor, chairman, and more recently, emeritus trustee and a daily visitor, no single individual is more closely associated with these beautiful grounds. Strolling the winding paths, or seated in her golf cart with her faithful companion Herma and her beloved Yorkie, Tilly, Peggie, as she was known by virtually everyone, was a familiar and welcome sight at dinners, fundraising events, and concerts, right up to the moment of the stroke that would claim her.
Peggie passed peacefully, knowing that her legacy will live on for future generations to enjoy, even though she has passed, even at 99 years old, much too soon.
Vincent Kish
Manager of Communications
Old Westbury Gardens
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published August 29, 2006
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