An Everchanging Garden

Greenwood is a living story of transformation, a place where nature, history, and the arts intertwine in the quiet rhythms of the seasons. From May through November, as the months turn and the air shifts, the gardens offer those who visit a new experience with each passing week. From the soft awakening of spring, through the summer’s blaze of brilliance, to the golden hush of autumn, each season reveals a different chapter in the tale of this enchanted hideaway.

In spring, the garden stirs with gentle insistence. The air is fragrant with paperbush, and daffodils and hellebores emerge with unyielding resolve. Tulips dance in beds along the Main Lawn and Garden of the Gods, while songbirds fill the woodlands, landing in trees that are just beginning to don their leafy attire. Later in the spring, peonies unfurl beside the Teahouse, roses clamber over pergolas, and the magnolia ‘DD Blanchard’ drapes its waxy white blooms over deep green foliage at the Croquet Lawn. This exuberant and energetic display is just the beginning of the season at Greenwood.

Spring in full bloom by the West Pergola on the Main Lawn

Roses bloom on the West Pergola by the Main Lawn

As summer unfolds, Greenwood’s terraced gardens transform into a celebration of abundance with an array of colorful annual flowers, including heliotrope, white lace flower, snapdragons, viper’s bugloss and floss flower. Sunlight is at its peak, and blooms of perennial flowers such as sea lavender, butterfly weed, catmint, speedwell, red hot poker, and ornamental onions — carefully curated to match their specific environments — blend seamlessly with the Rookwood tiles set into the D-Shaped Pool Grottos. And still, there is more to come in this enchanted oasis.

The Grotto on the west side of the Upper Terrace’s retaining wall

The Grotto Fountain on the east side of the Upper Terrace’s retaining wall

Autumn arrives in a contemplative finale. The air becomes crisp and the landscape changes once more as maples, hickories, black tupelo, Japanese stewartia, and bald cypress blaze in brilliant reds, oranges, and golds. The light of shortening days filters through branches, casting soft shadows on mossy stones and timeworn follies. Colorful, late blooms such as the closed gentian, asters, Japanese anemones, and annual salvias still thrive in the garden borders, while whimsical limestone statues keep solemn watch over a garden slowly exhaling. There is an understated beauty to this season, and a reminder that the passage of time in the garden inevitably leads to rebirth.

A whimsical statue overlooks the Teahouse walk leading to the Summerhouse

The D-Shaped Pool on the Main Axis in October

Throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, this garden remains a sanctuary of peace and splendor. Once a private estate owned by the Day and Blanchard families, and now a public oasis, Greenwood invites you to linger and reflect upon the turning of each season, as horticulture, history, and art meet in unison.