Blithewood Garden

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Gardening is essentially an effort to stall natural succession. Without constant human intervention, the process of change in species composition of a community continues unabated. Without you, your “garden” exists in name only—nature does not wait to reclaim what is hers.

Although this is so with the living elements, manmade objects do not escape the processes of aging and decay. Time and the elements wear down structures as well. Blithewood Garden at Bard College in Annandaleon-Hudson, NY, is a jewel of a garden that has been slowly crumbling away. A small garden with outsized significance, it has been aptly described as, “a garden on an intimate scale within a grand setting.” It is easy to overlook the decay and admire instead the idyllic view of the walled garden, or the borrowed one of the Catskill Mountains across the river, but age and the elements have been taking a toll: the garden was sending up an SOS. Blithewood Garden is an early and significant example of the design of a house and garden together as one thought process. The formal garden is sited within a picturesque landscape that has significant connections to Hudson Valley and American landscape history of the nineteenth century, when pioneering figures like Andrew Jackson Downing emphasized the importance of integrating house and landscape.

As tastes changed at the turn of the century, Blithewood’s new owners, Captain Andrew and Mrs. Frances Zabriskie, hired Francis L.V. Hoppin to replace the existing “villa” with a Georgian manor house and to add a neoclassical walled garden. Hoppin was a former apprentice of the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, and along with Beatrix Farrand, designed The Mount for Edith Wharton.

Designed nearly 120 years ago, the garden is Italianate in style, with Beaux Arts influences. This generally means order, symmetry, geometry, and formality. Hardscape and structure are more important in these gardens than in many other styles. Walls, terraces, pathways, statuary, water features, and hedges create outside rooms to extend the footprint of the interior living space.

The garden, as much as the house, is architectural. As a result, the hardscape is critically important for structure. Gardens that emphasize structure and hardscape elements face special challenges as they age. While some remnants of the estate’s original vegetation remain, Blithewood Garden’s plantings have evolved, making it a rehabilitation rather than a restoration. It was essential, however, that its historic structure be restored and preserved.

In 2015, Bard’s director of grounds and horticulture approached the Garden Conservancy for its assistance. The following year, a memorandum of understanding was put in place to guide joint efforts and the Friends of Blithewood Garden was created, drawing upon the community at Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, and the broader Red Hook/Tivoli area, for whom the garden is a cherished place.

Bard and the Garden Conservancy are planning a comprehensive rehabilitation project. With the Garden Conservancy’s project management support, research has been conducted to complete necessary studies and materials analyses. Raising broader awareness of the garden’s significance is essential, as Bard and the Garden Conservancy gear up for securing the needed funds for the project.

Blithewood is a superlative manifestation of the role that gardens played in early twentieth-century American culture. Yet it remains totally relevant today, providing the sense of comfort and peace that people feel when experiencing a garden, as well as a heightened awareness to the beauty and history around them. There could be no better argument for why we preserve gardens.