Rumson Gardens
Garden of Green: A quiet formality pervades this Rumson garden surrounding the recently-constructed New England shingle style home. This is a garden of green, of ornamental grasses and specimen trees, of a woman who enjoys the personalities of plants, such as Osmanthus, her deer-proof favorite. Once a nursery, this organically-grown landscape has Norway spruces all in a row. Several 20-foot enkianthus, camellia, stewartia, solid beds of cherry laurel, and patches of fern and holly show the way to “the wild way back.” A litany of natives and veggies fill large blocks of nursery and trial gardens where shoulder high sea oats grow.

Rumson First Presbyterian Church The church has a formal memorial garden with stone wall and stone path, bordered by rhododendron, Hinoki and Leland cypress and other conifers, American holly maple, and an oak grove. This freeform garden, a sanctuary for the congregations’ remains, brims with colorful trees and shrubs including roses, prostrate Colorado blue spruce, Japanese maple, and soft Deodor cedar, draped with Siberian cypress. The 125 year old church with Tiffany windows, designed by Thomas Hastings, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Guided tours of the church’s interior will be graciously given throughout the day by volunteer church members. The church and garden are open from Noon to 4.

Nearby Little Silver Gardens
Swallowfield: A 1920s house and garden are the setting for this 2.5-acre landscape. A rose arbor leads to terraced, sunny, perennial gardens that give an immediate sense of a nature preserve within structure and formality. There, native plants mingle with the ornamental. A long view across various garden areas, some secluded, includes a tiled patio dining area with hydrangeas. A picket fence encloses a wildflower meadow that abuts a stone path axis through a series of symmetrical gardens: milkweed/rose gardens, a circle garden around a sundial, then through an arbor to a pond of water lilies, roses, native wetland plants, crepe myrtle and a bamboo backdrop. The property is a designated Backyard Wildlife Habitat and Monarch Waystation.

Brewer Garden: The entire front yard of this cedar shake Jersey shore home on two acres is a mosaic of shrub roses galore, flowering shrubs, perennials, ferns, trees, and ground cover. Prostrate holly, leucothoe and ice plant cascade down its banks. An iron gate leads through green gardens where everything grows huge including mounds of hellebore, giant yews, giant gumdrop beech tree and tall sensitive fern, a cherry laurel hedge and pond with a woodland garden on its shore. Holly, inkberry and hydrangea flank a freeform pool, cabana, and private boardwalk surrounded by a mosaic of gardens and paths on Little Silver Creek.

Stuhmeier Garden: A quarter-acre lot on a suburban street densly covered with well-tended plants in a flowering oasis: perfect specimens of blooming shrubs and vines, standard roses amid summer’s last perennials, giant heads of PeeGee hydrangea, an herb garden, container flower gardens, sculpture, flowering vines and quiet nooks. All grown by a man with a passion for gardens.