Virtual Garden Field Trip: High Elms

Blithewold Presents:
Virtual Garden Field Trip:
High Elms
Little Compton, RI
Thursday, June 4
4 PM
45 minutes

Blithewold and High Elms were featured as part of The Garden Conservancy’s June 2020 Open Days, which has been postponed to June 2021 Stone walls frame this seventeenth-century farm house set amid six acres of organically-managed gardens and meadows. The owners, Gioia Browne and Jim Marsh, have enhanced this mature landscape by adding nine gardens and planting more than 300 trees and shrubs. Their collection is documented in a database that contains more than 2,000 species and cultivars from nearly 500 genera. The woodland garden flanking the nineteenth-century barn is planted with ferns, Jack-in-the-pulpits, a Dirca decipiens (leatherwood), and manywoodland beauties under decades-old rhododendrons. Shaded by a white wisteria, the enchanting summer house terrace overlooks the rock garden with its bulbs, ferns, primroses, dwarf conifers, and ground covers. In 2019, the rock garden was expanded and a circle garden was created. From April to November, the border blooms with tulips, allium, peonies, roses, clematis, annuals, dahlias, asters and shrubs. Spring shades of orange, yellow, and red give way to a palette of blue, purple, yellow, and orange. Nearby are the shrub walk, overlook, cutting garden, and hydrangea bed. The bog garden features flood-tolerant natives including magnolia, carex, clethra, azaleas, and gentian. Every spring the resident frogs wake after a long winter to spend the summer in the lotus pool. The spring garden is planted with snowdrops, pink daffodils, scilla, and other ephemerals. The treasured Edgeworthia chrysantha and Corylopsis pauciflora are sited to be seen from the house as they unfurl in early spring. Garden seating throughout enhances the appreciation of individual plants, insects, birds and garden views.

Admission to this garden field trip: $10 per person donation suggested

A link will be sent after registration.