The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program Features Dutchess County Private Garden Visits, a Pop-Up Sale, Book Signing, and Digging Deeper Lecture on September 24th
COLD SPRING, NY: On Saturday, September 24th, visit seven private and public gardens in Clinton Corners, Millbrook, and Stanfordville, open to the public through the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program, beginning at 9:30 a.m. (hours vary). Admission to each private garden is $7; children 12 and under are free. Open Days are rain or shine, and no reservations are required. The Open Days program also presents a Digging Deeper event at 4:30 p.m., “A House in the Country – The Garden of Katie Ridder & Peter Pennoyer,” at their private garden in Millbrook. Registration for the Digging Deeper event is required and space is limited. Admission is $60 for Garden Conservancy members, $65 for nonmembers. Call 1-888-842-2442, or visit www.opendaysprogram.org for more information.
Visitors may begin the September 24th Open Day at any of the following locations:
- Innisfree Garden, 362 Tyrell Road, Millbrook (9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) – Innisfree merges the essence of Modernist ideas and traditional Chinese and Japanese garden design principles with a nuanced reading of its glacial landscape. The result is a distinctly American stroll garden on 185 acres surrounding a large, shimmering lake. Admission to this public garden is $8 per person. A pop-up sale on site will include vendors Broken Arrow Nursery, Atlock Farm, Ellen Hoverkamp photography, Merritt Bookstore, and Orchard Jewelry.
- Junto Farm, 99-100 Dr. Harrington Road, Clinton Corners (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) – a marriage of lush modernism with a stunning sculpture collection in a large-scale, family-friendly, and often edible, landscape. Plantings reflect the owner’s travels and memories, such as lilacs, azaleas, tulip poplars, magnolias, elms, ivy, bamboo, Japanese maples, and London plane trees.
- Clove Brook Farm – Christopher Spitzmiller, 857 North Clove Road, Millbrook (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) –potter Christopher Spitzmiller designed the garden in collaboration with gardener and television personality P. Allen Smith, featuring a horseshoe-shaped layout with two long, mixed perennial beds towards the front, filled with vibrant blooms, and additional rectangular beds include a mix of mostly flowers and some vegetables planted to bloom seasonally. A large collection of Heritage breed chickens, doves, and honey bees also reside on the property. The garden was recently featured in the July 2015 Country House issue of Architectural Digest.
- Garden of Katie Ridder & Peter Pennoyer, 366 Ludlow Woods Road, Millbrook (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) – interior designer Katie Ridder brings her storied sense of color and pattern to life around the fanciful Greek Revival-inspired house designed by her husband, architect Peter Pennoyer. Landscape architect Edmund Hollander, designed the property with simple hedgerows and trees, while Ridder plays with a looser style within the flower gardens.
- Bear Creek Farm, 6187 Route 82, Stanfordville (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) – acres of dahlias and peonies, part of an ever-evolving flower-growing operation, as well as impressive trees, including a 350-year old sycamore, one of the largest in Dutchess County. The natural pond, filled with bass and koi and bordered by Little Wappingers Creek, is surrounded by willow bushes, grape vines and Scotch pines as well as welcoming Adirondack chairs.
- Garden of Ellen & Eric Petersen, 378 Conklin Hill Road, Stanfordville (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) – a connoisseur’s collection of plants in a series of welcoming and vibrant living spaces. September brings both annual and perennial sunflowers into bloom, along with many other tall daisy-type plants, pokeweeds trained into standards, heptacodium showing its decorative red sepals, Franklinia, and a meadow of Sporobolus heterolepsis (prairie drop seed), which frames a sculpture by Vivian Beer. The garden was included in Jane Garmey’s book, Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley.
- Garden of Zibby Tozer, 840 Hunns Lake Road, Stanfordville (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) – formal elements in a stunning farmscape. The main garden is a seventy-foot-long herbaceous border filled with flowering perennials, grasses, Alberta spruce, topiaries, and other shrubs. Other gardens dot the larger property of rolling hills, grand old trees, a lush meadow of rye, and paddocks with miniature horses, Babydoll miniature sheep, miniature donkeys, and Belted Galloway cows.
Also on September 24th, at 4:30 p.m., the Open Days program presents “Digging Deeper: A House in the Country,” at the garden of Katie Ridder & Peter Pennoyer, 366 Ludlow Woods Road, Millbrook. Join renowned architect Peter Pennoyer and sought-after interior designer Katie Ridder for a talk about the conception, design, decoration, and landscaping of their new country house in Millbrook, New York. The couple bought the property in 2009 as a family getaway and have spent the last seven years transforming the land and building an exuberant, one-of-a-kind Greek Revival-inspired house with lush woodland, flower and cutting gardens. Katie and Peter chronicle their entire process in the new book, A House in the Country (Vendome Press, 2016). They will be signing advance copies of their book and giving an informal garden tour. Refreshments will be served. Registration for the Digging Deeper event is required and space is limited. Admission is $60 for Garden Conservancy members, $65 for nonmembers (Open Days admission is included; a $7 value). Call 1-888-842-2442, or visit www.opendaysprogram.org for more information.
All Open Days gardens are featured in the 2016 Open Days Directory; a soft-cover book that includes detailed driving directions and vivid garden descriptions written by their owners. The directory includes garden listings in eighteen states and costs $25.95 including shipping. Visit www.opendaysprogram.org or call the Garden Conservancy toll-free at 1-888-842-2442 to order with a Visa, MasterCard or American Express, or send a check or money order to: the Garden Conservancy, P.O. Box 219, Cold Spring, NY 10516. Discount admission tickets are available as well through advanced mail order.
The Garden Conservancy created the Open Days program in 1995 as a means of introducing the public to gardening, providing easy access to outstanding examples of design and horticultural practice, and proving that exceptional American gardens are still being created. Its mission to share American gardens with the public is achieved each season, through the work of hundreds of private garden hosts and volunteers nationwide. Digging Deeper, a new series of Open Days programming, is designed to offer a deeper look into the gardening world through immersive experiences with artists, designers, gardeners, authors and other creative professionals. The Open Days program is America’s only national private garden-visiting program. For information and a complete schedule of Open Days visit the Garden Conservancy online at www.opendaysprogram.org.