A stroll through the Thuya Gardens, Maine

Another slide show for you today - this one from the Thuya Gardens in Northeast Harbor, Maine. When I’m heavy on the photographs, it’s much easier incorporating them into a slide show for you. While in Maine a couple of weeks ago, my blogging friend, Lili, and her husband, Henri, picked me up one morning to do a little sightseeing. I had told them that I’d never been to the Thuya Gardens and had asked if they would mind taking me there.

So off we went, planning on having lunch at Jordan Pond House afterward. I found out a lot about the gardens, and the house (Thuya Lodge) that sits on the property. What I hadn’t known was that the gardens were actually started with plantings from the 1956 dismantling of Beatrix Jones Ferrand’s family home, Reef Point Estate, in Bar Harbor. Mrs. Ferrand was a landscape gardener and landscape architect whose designs graced estates, college campuses, public parks, and even the White House.

Charles Savage, a landscape designer, and trustee of Joseph H. Curtis’ Thuya Lodge, designed the Thuya Gardens at the site of an old orchard. Mr. Curtis passed away in 1928 and his 140-acre property was gifted to the citizens of Mt. Desert through a trust he established. The storybook-English style Thuya Gardens is part of the Mount Desert Land & Garden Preserve.






If you’re really interested, the link below leads to a wonderful article from the Down East Dilettante and includes lots of historic significance.

Saving Mrs. Ferrand’s Plants


Hope you enjoyed the photos. It was a perfect day for shooting flowers: overcast, with a hint of rain in the air. I loved it!

Beatrix Farrand was one of the founding eleven members, and the only woman, of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Farrand is one of the most accomplished persons, and women, recognized in both the first decades of the landscape architecture profession and the centuries of landscape garden design arts and accomplishments.  ~Wikipedia