Rocky Hills – An Avante-garde Woodland Garden

There is a woodland garden in Chappaqua, New York, like no other planted with collections of Dawn Redwood and Japanese maple, collections of magnolia, conifers, rhododendron, azalea, and Spanish bluebells and forget-me-nots everywhere. The owner, Henriette Suhr, loves the color blue.

Suhr and her husband William first came to the property 55 years ago to find a weekend respite from the city. The house had a cow field then, just after World War II.

“We started gardening, cleaning up. The biggest things happened after my husband was here. (He died 30 years ago and from then to the present, Henriette, now 98, takes care of the gardens.) We were going to leave it as open space, but then the County Parks Department came along and said it was very different and they’d like to have it. The Garden Conservancy has an advisory committee. We hope they’ll be involved in the future.” Suhr gave her home and13 acres of gardens to Westchester County ten years ago to become a public garden and parkland forever.

As an interior designer, she looks at her new garden a certain way – as space. “I approach this in the way I approach my work. I put things together as to how they look good. Here they have learned to live together.” Indeed they have and Mrs. Suhr and her gardens have won many awards.

An autumn walk through Rocky Hills reveals a love for trees and evergreens – their shape, style, texture, color and structure. Hemlock towers next to Magnolia stellata , pink Saucer Magnolia and a giant tent-like Japanese maple that takes ten days to prune and turns brilliant red in fall. Rhododendrons and azaleas grow at their feet. “The hemlock – how these things survive like that…These things are miracles.”

A glamorous blue Atlas cedar glides across the view over ground-hugging juniper toward an imposing willow. Across the grass, terraces, rocky hills and islands of evergreens – beds of solid blue spruce in all forms heighten the colors of fall. “I have a preference when it comes to evergreens. When it’s not green-green, I use the blue.”

A phalanx of evergreens, now 50 feet tall, was once a planting of very gnarled saplings chosen by the Suhrs. “And now they’ve all straightened themselves out,” says Suhr with the tone and look of an Earth mother.

Up into native hickory, oak and ash, a black garden with black sambucus and a row of lilacs line the path next to the slope’s edge. The understory is holly and azaleas. Heading downslope toward a meadow, the trees become redbud, Japanese maple, magnolia.

Magnolia ‘Elizabeth’ and other cultivars stand at the edge of the meadow developed 20 years ago. Brooklyn Botanic Garden Research Center developed and donated the trees when Mrs. Suhr offered the use of her meadow. “I said, ‘I’ll give you the meadow. Bring them over here.’ I consider myself the keeper of these trees.”

In the meadow in springtime, German iris, foxglove and bluebells accompany the magnolias and maples – as do the forget-me-nots that cover the woodland floor of Rocky Hills – plus gardens, meadows, lawns, shrub gardens, water gardens, conifer gardens, everywhere in spring. What could be more beautiful?

“Out of the meadows came the forget-me-nots. I’m very fond of bulbs. We have the very old bulbs. I’m practically covered with the Spanish bluebells.” In back of the meadow, a grove of Dawn Redwood invites.