Garden Party

Garden Party

Have a green thumb -- or wish you did? You're in luck. Nine extraordinary Connecticut gardens have banded together to form Connecticut's Historic Gardens, a statewide "trail" of natural beauties.

The re-created Colonial-revival garden at the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum (211 Main St., Wethersfield. 860/529-0612. www.webb-deane-stevens.org) is a nostalgic presentation of old-fashioned flowers such as peonies, pinks, phlox, hollyhocks, larkspur, and antique roses.

A high-Victorian texture garden, a wildflower meadow, an antique rose garden, and a blue cottage garden are highlights of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (77 Forest St., Hartford. 860/522-9258. www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org). The gardens also include Connecticut's largest magnolia tree and a 100-year-old pink dogwood. At the Butler-McCook Homestead (396 Main St., Hartford. 860/247-8996 or 860/522-1806. www.hartnet.org/als), landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann created a Victorian garden oasis smack in the center of downtown city life.

The centerpiece of the Hill-Stead Museum (35 Mountain Rd., Farmington. 860/677-4787. www.hillstead.org) is a circa-1920 sunken garden by Beatrix Farrand. The garden is enclosed in a yew hedge and surrounded by a wall of rough stone; at the center of the octagonal design is a summerhouse with 36 flowerbeds and brick walkways radiating outward. Farrand also designed the garden at Promisek/Three Rivers Farm (694 Skyline Ridge Rd., Bridgewater. 860/354-1788), which overflows with beds of annuals and perennials such as hollyhocks, peonies, and always-dashing delphiniums.

Legendary British garden writer and designer Gertrude Jekyll designed only three gardens in the United States, and the one at the Glebe House Museum (Hollow Rd., Woodbury. 203/263-2855. www.theglebehouse.org) is the only one still in existence. The garden is a classic example of Jekyll's ideas of color harmonies and plant combinations and is primarily composed of mixed perennials enclosed by an evergreen hedge of mixed shrubs.

A historic apple orchard and a spectacular circa-1915 formal parterre garden that blossoms with a collection of peonies, historic roses, and lilacs is the highlight of the Bellamy-Ferriday House & Garden (9 Main St. N., Bethlehem. 860/247-8996 or 203/266-7596. www.hartnet.org/als). The boxwood parterre garden at Roseland Cottage (556 Route 169, Woodstock. 860/928-4074) includes 21 flowerbeds surrounded by 600 yards of boxwood hedge; each blooming bed of annuals and perennials is planted according to an 1850s plant-inventory list.

The gardens at the Florence Griswold Museum (96 Lyme St., Old Lyme. 860/434-5542. www.flogris.org), once the home of a prominent Old Lyme family and then a boardinghouse their daughter ran to shelter artists of the Old Lyme Colony early in the 20th century, have recently been restored to their appearance of 1910.