Garden Dialogues 2019: Greenwich, CT

Garden Dialogues, a program established by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), offers intimate tours of some of the country’s most beautiful and exclusive residential gardens and provides insight into the creative process of their design.

OvS Principal Eric Groft will lead tours of two of OvS’ long-standing, residential commissions in Greenwich. Both The William Tubby House and the Everett N. Blanke House bear the hallmarks of OvS’ design approach, which balances horticultural complexity and architectural craftsmanship.

Each of the property owners, TCLF President and CEO Charles A. Birnbaum, and Jeff Jones, owner of Gardens by Jeffrey Jones, a longtime landscape contractor and firm-friend, will participate in this unique forum. This is an in-depth opportunity to experience how OvS designs, crafts, transforms, and perpetuates gardens that blend art and science in landscape architecture.

The Everett N. Blanke House

The historic Everett N. Blanke House, a 110-year-old Tudor-style building, is home to a large, active family. The driveway meets stone entry steps which lead to a garden terrace, where the focus is a large lily pool which seemingly emerges from the bedrock. A formal walled terrace garden and water feature is placed on the axis of the front door and library, and includes a dining terrace and outdoor kitchen. Off the expansive porch, a bowling lawn, surrounded by roses and boxwood, provides a transition to the raised swimming terrace. A large 60 x 20’ pool with built-in annual planters, an in-ground trampoline, and formal lawn terrace surround this garden space. A great lawn sweeps up from lawn steps for formal tent parties and a place for the children to play lacrosse. The hidden fern garden, featuring a bench by Ben Forgey Jr., displays an array of ferns, mountain mint and spring favorites such as white bleeding heart and Rhodotypos.

The William Tubby House

At just under three-acres, the Tubby House residence, with a home designed and owned by architect William Tubby, boasts a landscape that alludes to untamed beauty of the owner’s native Australia, but is decidedly American in palette and structure. American trees, shrubs, grasses, and forbs grow in abundance throughout the property. It features an entry garden with an intricate paving pattern of cut bluestone squares with elegant, red-brick borders, and a fountain. A lily pool serves as a home for aquatic flora and fauna and a stream surrounding the property is filled with native wetland plantings suited to the ecologically sensitive area.

Garden Dialogues occur nationwide through autumn. The Greenwich Garden Dialogues will take place on Saturday, May 18th from 3:00 -6:00 PM. Tickets are available here.