above: Mark Hicks of Elise Design Group installed a slate-roof, mahogany-and-granite gateway leading to a retreat on the grounds of a 15,400-square-foot manor house in New Canaan. – Photograph: Elise Design
Following what, for some, has been a winter of our discontent, now is the spring of our contentment.
And perhaps more than ever, we are turning inward to our own backyards for solitude and solace. The natural pleasures of private spaces are healing and restorative.
“There’s always been a demand for privacy in Fairfield County—homeowners wanting to shut the outside world out when it comes to their property,” observes one Fairfield County landscaper. “But after this fall and winter, I think more people are viewing their yards as a sanctuary, with a definite increased sense of health and wellness.”
Residential yards possess the potential to be perfect places for recovering from the stresses of life in turbulent times. Simply stepping out the back screen door—the only screen permissible when solace is at stake—can itself be therapeutic: Birds and bees are the soundtrack, blossoming flowers the essential aromatherapy, fireflies and stars the lightshow.
There’s also a sense of safety in a yard with vertical green walls of evergreen hedges, fenced flower and vegetable gardens with seating for morning coffee or an evening glass of wine, and small, gated outdoor rooms for yoga, meditation or quiet conversation.
Numerous studies reveal that spending even brief amounts of time in nature can lower anxiety and stress, improve mood and cognition, and help with depression, post-traumatic stress and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders. Recent research has found that children who live near green spaces experience less depression and exhibit better emotional behavior.
Yet, this is Fairfield County, where elements of classic design and custom comforts count. Accordingly, this spring, local landscape designers are showing us how to carve out islands of serenity and sanity from the chaos outside the garden walls—and they’re doing it with grace and in great style.
THE RECOVERY ROOM
In the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield, and working with Sandy Hook landscape designer Brook Clark, James Philbin of JP Philbin Landscapes & Nursery is creating what the homeowners are calling their “Recovery Room,” a wide, open area behind a magnificent party barn for family members and friends.
Whether the homeowners are seeking to recover from partying in the barn or from the tumultuous previous year in politics and public life isn’t known, but either way, health and welfare appear to be the objective.
“It could be the result of a post-pandemic mindset,” Philbin says. “But there also seems to be this uptick in demand for outdoor saunas and spas.”
When completed sometime this summer, the Recovery Room is to feature a pool and separate, spacious patio, possibly under a pergola, with adjacent cold plunge pool and hot tub—a trend in requests for dual, polar-opposite pools that’s being reported by other landscapers.
SECRET GARDENS
In Westport’s Compo Beach area meanwhile, Philbin and Clark teamed up to create a kind of oasis of privacy and serenity in the lower corner of a large property that itself is hidden from public view behind walls of tall arborvitae hedge. Even in the yard, one might not know the 20-foot-by-40-foot secret space is even there. That’s because of the “blind entry”—a narrow gap in one section of the surrounding five-foot-high hedge wall that’s hidden from view by an outer, overlapping hedge wall.
“What we’re trying to do is to create the illusion of seeing the end of the property,” says Clark. “Guests can see hedge, but only the family knows there’s a secret garden inside!”
The hedge is Schwoebel upright holly, which has small, glossy, dark green leaves, is compact, deer-resistant and easy to maintain. The interior of the 20-foot-by-40-foot space is covered in no-mow grass or eco-lawn—a drought-tolerant, low-maintenance fine fescue that can, but doesn’t have to be, mowed.
Still in progress with a projected finish date of sometime this summer, plans include the creation of a 10-foot-by-10-foot patio with bistro table and lights—small lights hanging from stainless steel wire strung across metal poles—of the kind found in open-air festivals in Italy.
Even mansions need small, private, outdoor retreats—and maybe more so than more intimate homes. For a former Wall Street investment banker in a 15,400-square-foot English manor in north New Canaan, Mark Hicks of Elise Design Group offset the formality of the granite-paved entrance courtyard and imposing brick and stone façade with a handsome path around the right side of the house that meanders like a slow-moving stream to an unknown destination.
Past an airy woodland garden where Laurel and rose dance around lichen-covered rocks, Hicks constructed a high, slate-roof, mahogany and granite gateway that suggests an Easter rite of passage.
“To be interesting,” Hicks says, “there has to be a sense of separation—a threshold you have to cross over and a portal you have to pass through to get to the other side.”
What lies there is a small retreat in the form of a semicircular patio with a table and chairs hidden from neighbors’ views behind an ivy-clinging stone wall. It’s the perfect place for the owner—who now divides his time between teaching and writing—to think and read, and hold quiet conversations.
THE BACKYARD SALAD BAR
Being able to step out the back door and pick enough greens and legumes for a fresh salad every night—from early spring well into the middle of autumn—is not only physically healthy but emotionally and psychologically rejuvenating.
Now in its 20th year, Homestead Farmers custom-builds handsome fenced edible plots so that homeowners can do just that, and more.
The company constructs bespoke herb and vegetable gardens in raised beds fully enclosed in frames and posts of aromatic, rot-resistant cedar, with fine wire netting to keep hungry critters out. Graveled paths thread the beds for easy weeding and harvesting, often with space in the center for seating.
Every season, some weekend gardeners ask for trendy produce like blue potatoes or purple carrots. But the majority of customers look to Homefront Farmers for mainstay salad ingredients.
“Most people want their garden to be like a salad,” says Miranda Gould, Client Operations Manager for the Redding-based company. “You know, they want lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers. Week after week after week, we are growing lettuces all summer long.”
While vegetables constitute the main course, so to speak, for most clients, Homestead Farmers mixes in other flora for practicality as well as aesthetics.
“Generally speaking, we try to integrate a lot of flowers in with the veggies because they bring in a whole bunch of wildlife like hummingbirds and bees,” says Gould. “You’ll get more vegetables when you have more pollinators in the garden, but I also think that when you walk into or sit in a garden, it can be a meditative experience, bordering on the spiritual!”
THE SHAPE OF PRIVACY AND TASTE
Evergreen hedges for privacy screens as well as courtyard and garden enclosures come in a variety of species—boxwood, holly, arborvitae, yew—each with its attributes. Many county residents delight in keeping them a cut above.
Sharpened pruning shears in the hands of experienced craftsmen and craftswomen can turn the geometry of ordinary shrubbery into the alchemy of topiary, the art of trimming and sculpting evergreens into classical forms and fantastical shapes. The practice dates to the Middle Ages; Levens Hall Topiary Garden in northwest England, where some examples are more than 300 years old, was installed by King James II’s gardener in 1695.
A beautifully shaped boxwood or yew can also serve as a focal point in a yard or the centerpiece of an outdoor “room.” Whatever its purpose, though, the sight of topiary on a residential property immediately suggests luxury, sophistication, taste and style.
Some of the finest examples of topiary can be found in Greenwich, where stately, formal homes are perhaps the most fitting canvases for classical topiary forms.
Sandy Lindh, founder of English Gardens and Design in Riverside, leads tours to famous and unique gardens in the British and French countrysides. But back home in Riverside, her team designs, installs and maintains elegant English-style gardens throughout Fairfield County that frequently include topiary.
One client of Lindh’s with a large house and separate guest cottage in backcountry Greenwich asked her to give the outbuilding the look of an English cottage with small boxwood knot gardens on either side of a graveled path to the door. Popular in the British Isles in the 1600s, knot gardens are low boxwood arranged in intertwining geometric patterns with herbs or flowers planted in the spaces between the hedges. Here, when tulips run their course in the early spring, annuals are planted for the summer.
On a 30-plus-acre estate in New Canaan, Lindh’s team spends a week each season pruning, reshaping and maintaining a topiary garden that’s been in place for many years. They use several types of pruning shears, including long-handled shears she brings back from England that allow her and team members to lean over plantings and shape them into diamonds, orbs, peacocks, doves, lollipops and pom-poms among other traditional forms dating back centuries.
“We do all our topiary by hand,” she says, “because if you do it with a hedge trimmer it’ll shred the leaves and they’ll turn brown.” The tools are sharpened and sterilized (to avoid cross-contamination of blight) for a clean, hard look. “It just takes time,” she adds, “and that’s fine.”
Elsewhere, more playful topiary can lighten even dreary days. Back on Greenfield Hill, the late Candy Raveis took the five-plus-acre hilltop property on which she grew up and, with husband Bill Raveis, transformed it into a showcase of border gardens, courtyards, orchards and topiary tableaux.
In one section, high boxwood hedges were sculpted into oversized armchairs—King and Queen chairs for the couple—that look comfortable enough to sit on. Beside them is a soft-looking boxwood in the shape of an oversized bunny, one of Candy’s favorite animals, and for centuries a European favorite. On warm evenings after work, the two would take glasses of champagne out to the setting and, seated on less-amusing but more practical chairs, talk about their respective days.
Outside the home’s conservatory, with views of the shimmering waters of Long Island Sound in the distance, lower boxwood was crafted into a sailboat with a bear at the helm. And why not? Beyond delighting the Raveis grandchildren, bears setting out to sea might be the perfect antidote to times that try men’s—and women’s—souls.
“If you have a garden and a library,” Cicero wrote, “you have everything you need.”
So, let’s take a favorite book out into the Secret Garden, or into the outdoor Recovery Room, or into the middle of the Living Salad Garden, and leave the lawn and disorder of the outside world outside.
