After a devastating fire to the Fishers Island home of Tom and Bunty Armstrong, only the garden survived. The new house, designed by architect Tom Phifer, was built to complement the existing garden.Though designed for the original commodious 1926 colonial, the rest of the garden adapted easily to the modernist style of the new house. He incorporated both styles of abstraction, trimming the linden allée and the boxwood and hornbeam hedges into straight lines that precisely paralleled the shore and horizon. On the inland side of the house, he instructed Wheelock to carve out lyrically curving paths and organically shaped “rooms,” leaving plenty of space for him to do his own planting, chiefly his beloved daffodils. They left untouched the boulders that erupted from the turf and reminded Armstrong of the smooth, rocklike forms that show up in artist Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings.
Plant hunter Daniel J. Hinkley may be best known as an author, lecturer, television guest — from Nova to The Martha Stewart Show — and founder of the cultishly adored Heronswood Nursery, where he helped advance American plantsmanship one plant and one anecdote at a time. Today, though, much of his energy is directed inward as he tends the six-and-a-half-acre garden he’s dubbed Windcliff.
The property turns its back on an evergreen forest and opens up to the dramatic expanse of Puget Sound below, with Mount Rainier far in the background. At one end, a handful of charismatic native madrona trees (Arbutus menziesii) keep watch over the vertiginous cliff that establishes Hinkley’s greatest design challenge. “I now have to do battle with a view,” he says. “How do I make a garden intimate and not all about the bewildering openness of the sky and water?”
The remote hills and valleys of the earth, Hinkley’s workplace, are fertile ground for chance encounters and colorful moments, from running into the queen mother of Bhutan (whose litter was being carried down a trail) to facing a band of angry Maoist insurgents in northeast Nepal. Baboons left him lunchless, and mudslides trapped him on precarious shards of cliff. “I marvel in witnessing all the snippets of culture that I’m unaware of,” Hinkley says of his forays.
The Saint-Gaudens Memorial is a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1919 by the State of New Hampshire to promote the legacy of the great American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) and to preserve his home, studios, gardens, and artworks in Cornish. The trustees operated the property as a museum from 1927 until 1964, when they donated it to the federal government. To this day, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial serves as an active partner of, and advocate for, the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, sponsoring public programs that promote awareness of Saint-Gaudens, the lasting legacy of his work, and the creative arts both past and present.
The Passion Flower with its various parts is seen as a symbols of Jesus' scourging, crowning with thorns and crucifixion.
This flower, a genus with numerous species, indigenous to the tropical Americas, is unique among the hundreds of old Christian flower symbols in that there is specific historical documentation of the time and place of its origin - the symbolism having been first perceived by the Mexican Augustinian friar, Emmanuel de Villegas, who reported it, with sketches, in Europe in 1610.
The endurance in religious oral tradition of the "galaxy" of flower symbols of Our Lady, and of her life and her mysteries from medieval times, as discovered and recorded for literate tradition by botanists and folklorists, bears testimony to their enriching prophetic unction, which we at Mary's Gardens propose for wider knowledge and appreciation.
