The Moorings' Gardens

This is a piece I wrote about The Moorings' gardens for the Garden Conservancy tour in 2008

The Moorings’ Gardens

The Moorings, surrounded on three sides by Buzzards Bay, is the main house of Converse family’s summer estate in Marion, Massachusetts.  Built in 1903 by Harry E. Converse, the original estate encompassed approximately 60 acres.   Passing through the stone and iron gates which mark the original entrance, one can look ahead down the main drive lined with ancient giant rhododendrons to the bay, nearly a quarter of a mile away.  

The final drive to the house, sweeping along the shore of Sippican Harbor, is lined with salt-hardy rosa rugosa on the left and on the right the remnants of what was once a beautiful Japanese-style lily pond .  

The Japanese Lily Pond from an old postcard :

In addition to the 45-room main house, torn down in 1922 and replaced with the more practical home you see today, the property included a gate house, caretaker’s home, carriage house, ice house, and fire tower – all still standing but now adapted for 21^st century use as private homes.  

The present gardens around the main house are laid out on the footprint of the original gardens, and remain very much as they were over 100 years ago: front gardens enclosed by high boxwood hedges, a cutting garden for house flowers and a vegetable garden to the west side of the home, a sea-swept sunken garden on the bay side lined with fieldstone wall, and a glass-enclosed camellia garden off the dining room.  The Converse family has attempted to maintain a relaxed natural atmosphere with a distinctly English country garden look and feel within the formal framework of the original gardens. The surrounding salt bay with its strong breezes has much to say about the choice of flowers you see in the gardens.  

                                      Cutting garden with high hedges for protection against strong SW winds from the bay

Both the front garden and cutting garden today consist mainly of perennials, with blooms beginning with early crocuses and other Spring flowers and continuing throughout the Summer and well into the Autumn.   

                                                     Sunken garden on the bay side of the house

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And this is an excerpt from personal memoirs I'm in the midst of writing about my childhood on Converse Point and elsewhere:

The Gardens

Outside the house, the gardens in summer were magical places, filled with color and aroma.  In the spring, tall purple iris.  Then later, snapdragons, asters, peonies, hollyhocks, fierce tiger lilies, calla lilies, delicate white babies breath, purple ageratum, white alyssum, bright yellow and orange marigolds, mounds of white daisies.  It was a riot of color and smell. Rich, warm, fecund. I loved those gardens.  I’d help Nan or her caretaker, Domingo Nunes, cut flowers in the back cutting garden and bring them into the greenhouse for trimming.  Then they’d go into the house to Nan’s sun room where they’d be arranged in vases for various rooms in the house.    

                                      Perennials in the Cutting Garden

The front garden is an English country garden, and was Nan’s: Domingo wasn’t allowed in there except to cut the lawn and do weeding.  She designed it herself, chose all the flowers, and planted them herself.  I have a wonderful memory of kneeling in the grass beside her while she dug.  She had rubber pads that she strapped to her knees.  The back garden, used for cutting flowers for the house, was Domingo’s domain, and my grandmother wasn’t allowed in there except to cut flowers. He designed it and chose all the flowers for it.  So there was a truce of sorts:  the back garden for Domingo, the front garden for Nan.  

                                           My Apple Tree Hiding Place in Winter

Up next to the front door is an apple tree, with the most amazing branches that went every which way.  At ages 3-6, I was small enough to climb up into it, and there was one, perfectly level branch just my size. I’d sit on that for hours watching…boats out on the harbor, people walking beneath me, my grandmother cutting flowers, my grandfather sitting at his desk in the rumpus room.  It was a great hiding place to watch the world from. I can also remember as a child rolling around on the lawn, the damp warm grass on my face, even watching ants way down at the bottom of the grass.  

                                       Front Garden perennials…

I remember summer cocktail parties on the lawn in the front garden, with blue wicker chairs brought out and wicker tables as well.  

My grandfather would set up a bar over in the corner between the rumpus room door and the front vestibule – right behind his chair inside in the library.  Eleanor would serve hors d’oeuvres, wandering around the garden, probably very glad to be out from under her white half-ironed sheets.  We kids, mostly cousins, but also other kids who lived on the Point, would play on the beach outside the hedge, usually with somebody’s baby sitter riding herd on all of us and making sure we didn’t drown each other.  Our parents could forget we were there for a while. 

The Moorings had two vegetable gardens – one right next to the cutting garden, and also surrounded by 6-foot hedges, and another larger garden down the road between  Gosh Hollow (the Ingersoll/Olsen house) and the Francis’s in the Gatehouse.  This was mostly corn, squash, and pumpkins.  (My mother later built a house on that five-acre  lot, in 1977.) The house vegetable garden had all the rest – carrots, beets, onions, peas, beans, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, some squash, and about eight rows of corns across the back.  We’d pick vegetables on Sunday mornings after church for summer Sunday dinners, and then help shell peas and beans, and take the husks off the corn, for Hannah. Also, I remember shelling peas at home on the steps of Mum’s bedroom garden, and we must have picked the peas in the Moorings garden because we didn’t have one at home.    

And then there were the greenhouses, one especially built for camellia trees Nan had brought back from China on her honeymoon.  Beautiful red, pink, white, and peppermint flowers that bloomed through the winter.  I remember going in that greenhouse during a raging blizzard and standing in awe in the humid, warm air with those beautiful deep green leaves and flowers bursting all around me -- and only an eighth of an inch of glass separating the flowers and me from icy winter blasts of snow.  Pure magic… Later as we grew older, those camellias made wonderful, and very impressive I thought, gifts for the various girls we dated and loved.   

A second greenhouse, attached the the camellias’ home, was more of a working greenhouse, with potted flowers of all kinds -- I remember lots of red and white geraniums, huge jade trees,  and droopy bell-like purple and pink flowers, wonderful aromas, mosses on the ground, and a work room with barrels full of different potting soils and organic fertilizers (no chemicals in that greenhouse!)    

-- More to Come --