Tag Archives: Conservation

Sedgwick Sanctuary

Yesterday I learned a new word, drumlina long, flat-topped hill formed by glaciers, during my visit to the appropriately-named Long Hill in Beverly, one of the properties of the Trustees of Reservations. At the top of this drumlin, away from the “gold coast” where many of their Boston friends summered, Ellery and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick built a Federal Revival House with bricks harvested from an Ipswich mill and detailed woodwork crafted by enslaved workers from a Charleston mansion. They planted a copper beech tree to mark the spot of their new summer home, and after it was built, kept on clearing and planting, crafting a series of inter-connected gardens around it, designed to frame the home and also blend in with the 100+ acres of woodland and meadows beyond. It’s a spectacular site in so many ways: I’ve visited it many times and posted it about here too, but the Trustees have been engaged in a garden revitalization initiative for their properties, and so I wanted to give Long Hill another look. I took a proper tour rather than just wandering around (highly recommended: it was particularly important for me as I know quite a bit about plants but nothing about trees, and Long Hill has some very unsusual specimens) and now I have a whole new appreciation for this amazing space, and the amazing women who created it.

When Ellery and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick purchased the Long Hill property in 1916, he was in the first phase of his long and successful run as owner and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which extended to 1938. But she was pretty famous too, having published a popular (and still very useful) gardening guide entitle The Garden MonthByMonth in 1907. The pull-out color chart from The Garden graces Long Hill’s library, framed by silhouettes of Mabel and the second Mrs. Sedgwick, the former Marjorie Russell, who was also an accomplished plantswoman. Together, in succession, they built the spectacular Long Hill gardens, Mabel establishing the integrated “garden rooms” format and Marjorie adding more exotic varieties of plant material—and also focusing on plant propagation and experimentation, often in collaboration with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The property served as the summer retreat for the the entire Sedgwick family, including the four children of Mabel and Ellery and their children, until the death of Marjorie Sedgwick in 1978, after which Theodore Sedwick Bond, Henrietta Sedgwick Lockwood, S. Cabot Sedgwick, and Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. donated Long Hill to the Trustees. It still feels a bit like a family house, even with an event tent on site: accessible rather than stately.

 

One way the Trustees has enhanced the accessibility of the property is to emphasize the fact that it is a place of activity, still a work in progress as it was under the administration of the two Mrs. Sedgwicks. There’s a cutting garden, a greenhouse and horticultural center, cold frames, ongoing plant propagation, workshops, and for those that don’t want to get their hands dirty, the horticultural library in the house. There are also trails for those who want to explore the rest of the 114-acre property, the “world” beyond cultivation. The overall message is appreciate and act.

plant propagation in action for those who don’t recognize it—like me!

I’m going to conclude with some of the spectacular trees on the property, just a sampling for sure. I’m just starting to look at trees after a lifetime of being unblissfully unaware, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to revisit Long Hill and will continue to do so. There’s a lot to learn, but yesterday I was just kind of awestruck by some of the textures and colors of the bark, let along the flowers and leaves. It got increasingly humid as we made our way through the garden(s), and so a weeping hemlock was a welcome rest stop, as it was 10 degrees cooling under its dense branches.

These last two amber trees are a Tall Stewartia and a Paperbark Maple.

A few last photos: the house is beautiful, but it’s really just an orientation center for the garden now—-BUT I want you to see this beautiful wallpaper in the center hall, purchased by the Sedgwicks in London during their house furnishing tours in the 1920s, as well an example of “enslaved craftsmanship,” a mantle from the Isaac Ball House in Charleston.


My Dear Girl

I am absolutely charmed by the physical appearance of a recently-preserved “lost” letter from Paul Revere to his wife Rachel dated a few weeks after his famous April 1775 ride. Its existence has been known for some time, and it was published as a transcription in Elbridge Henry Goss’s Life of Colonial Paul Revere (1891), but the actual document had been presumed lost until very recently, when a box was donated to the Paul Revere House in Boston which included the letter, in a long-folded condition that showed its age. Now digitized and preserved by the Northeast Document Conservation Center and returned to the house to which it was first delivered, the letter is a visible symbol of the power of primary sources: it is one thing to know what a document says, it’s quite another to see the author’s handwriting. It’s much more intimate (and powerful), especially if the expression includes an endearment like “My Dear Girl” and proceeds to details like a request for linens and stockings. At the end of the letter Revere includes a note to his son, informing him that “It is now in your power to be serviceable to me, your Mother, and your self” and signing off  “Your loving Father, PR.”

Revere Letter

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Revere House 1930s

The Letter at the Northeast Document Conservation Center website, where you can see a sequence of images illustrating the preservation process; Paul and Rachel Revere and two 1930s images of their house: an etching by W. Harry Smith, Smithsonian Institution, and a linoleum engraving by Stanley Scott for the Federal Art Project, Boston Public Library.


Views, but no Rooms

Yesterday, a perfectly sparkling September Sunday, we hiked around the Coolidge Reservation in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, encompassing 66 acres on the Atlantic on a point that looks back (south, west) on both Salem and Boston, and Cape Cod beyond. Owned, operated, and opened to the public by the venerable Trustees of Reservations, the reservation encompasses two parcels of land:  Bungalow Hill, offering woodland and vista, and the expanse of “Ocean Lawn” on Coolidge Point, where the Coolidge family’s grand mansion once stood, facing the sea. In between there is Clarke Pond, once stagnant but now re-opened to the sea (and stocked with mosquito-eating fish called mummichog–why don’t we have them in every body of water?) by the Trustees.

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From the pond it is an easy walk to the point, which was acquired by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, in 1871 for the site of a summer residence. His son replaced the first Coolidge summer house, apparently a simple clapboard structure, with a “Marble Palace”, designed by Charles McKim and completed in 1904. Not to be confused with the Vanderbilt’s Marble House in Newport (much less the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg), Marble Palace was a brick Georgian structure embellished with marble foundation and columns–it was visited by such luminaries as Presidents Taft, Roosevelt (Teddy), and Wilson and Prince Olav of Norway, but replaced (again) by a smaller building after World War II. This house was torn down in the late 1980s, leaving Ocean Lawn free of human constructions (except for an old fire hydrant): the Coolidge Family donated the property to the Trustees in the early 1990s, though at least one member lives nearby and the family’s presence is also maintained by the adjacent Thomas Jefferson Memorial Center.

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Marble Palace entrance

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Ocean Lawn, Coolidge Point, with only the surviving fire hydrant and an outline of the Marble Palace foundation. The front (seaside) and back entrance of Marble Palace, remains on the rocks, the view of Kettle Island, the modern house next door, looking north (east), the view to the south (west).


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