Old Westbury Gardens: A Legacy of Home

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.