The restoration work continues with plans for restoration of the pergola and upper garden walls, and friends and garden lovers are stepping up to help.
years—as a volunteer. Her interest began in 1984 when a student at UVM named Susan Hayward wrote a thesis on a plan for restoring the gardens. A member of the Shelburne Farms board at the time, Birgit picked up where Susan Hayward left off. When she discovered Lila’s driving influence was British designer Gertrude Jekyll, she enrolled in the landscape design program at Harvard-Radcliffe College to learn more about Jekyll. Her studies gave her a window into Lila’s design rationale, and her goal became to maintain the Jekyll color scheme in Lila’s gardens: blues and pinks at the south end, transitioning to yellows, oranges, and reds, with blues and whites at the north end. Some of the plants Lila planted still thrive in the gardens: long runs of pale pink Queen Victoria peonies, white Immortality iris, which bloom again in the fall, and the purple baptisia, with its vibrant foliage all summer. “What really inspired me was that Lila didn’t have Jekyll design this,” Birgit says. “She did not have a plan drawn up by a landscape architect. Her maintenance guy, Gebhardt, helped her, but it was her vision of what she wanted. To me, this embodies what Shelburne Farms is.” Asked if she feels close to Lila when working in these gardens, Birgit suddenly chokes up. “Birgit would understand Lila’s love of this landscape and her experience here more than 40
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