The hills are alive... in Innisfree

The hills are alive in Innisfree Garden

About 90 miles west of the thrumming heart of New York City is a landscape that stirs my soul. I rate it along with Villa Lante, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Liss Ard in Ireland, Little Sparta, Ninna-ji Temple in cherry blossom season and Cranborne Manor Garden in Molly Salisbury's time. Returning to Innisfree after 15 years, I wonder, will it have retained its magic?

This magnificent, hilly panorama curls around a lake, its 185 acres revealed in glimpses. The drive wriggles through woods, framing views down to the water at the centre of a glacial bowl, mossy uplands curving sharply up to rocky crags and outcrops.

Oliver Collins, son of one of Innisfree's designers, Lester Collins, and now president of the board which controls the landscape, is waiting beside the lake where the Air Spring bubble fountain creates a boiling appearance on this chilly day. Oliver is the creator of the pump creating the effect. On the far side of the lake, slim verticals of White Pines are echoed by a single 60ft water jet. Above, mist billows out from a cantilevered rock formation.

The sight and sound of water, the tumbling streams and hissing water jet, are as much part of Innisfree as Yeats' eponymous poem, another of the landscape's inspirations:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, . . .

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

"Sound is difficult to manage. Our machinery is silent. When the animals go away in winter the sound of water dominates," says Oliver, who runs the landscape with curator Kate Kerin.

He adds: "Mother died on April 10 three years ago, when she was 92. I am not planning any changes."

The landscape began in the late 1920s as a collaborative effort between artist Walter Beck and heiress Marion Burt Beck. Landscape architect Lester Collins joined the team in 1938. After the Becks' deaths in the 1950s, he doubled the area of the garden, refined the design and ran the non-profit Innisfree Foundation as a public garden until his death in 1993.

The original idea was to create an English landscape to complement the house the Becks built as a homage to the Royal Horticultural Society's house and garden at Wisley, Surrey, southern England. But herbaceous borders and terraces were inappropriate for the landscape. Instead they created a series of vignettes to highlight or accentuate the existing features. Walter Beck coined the term Chinese Cup Garden to describe the style, although the shapes are more saucer than cup-shaped. He was inspired, in part, by the 8th-century garden maker Wang Wei.

Instead of a well-ordered progression of garden views, as favoured by 18th-century British landscaper Humphry Repton, who was one of Lester's influences, the cup gardens appear in no particular order. On the other hand, the lake and its steep sides of maple, oak and pine seem neater to visitors viewing the unfolding scenes.

Below the footprint of the house, which is all that remains of the Becks' mansion since Marion's death, when it became too expensive to run, a stream has been diverted into an elegant oxbow - an eccentric, formal grass-edged rill - before joining the lake.

Last time I was here, in summer, swans drifted scenically between pink lotus flowers and water lilies; Pink Lady orchids formed a carpet of colour over the spongy-thick layer of sound-deadening needles. Today, acres of moss make a backdrop for trillium, hooded gentian, Primula japonica and ferns. Even in April the skunk cabbage is pushing its great green buds out of the water.

Plants are encouraged by tipping the balance in the favour of, say, mallow, by weeding out alder. There is a deftness of touch in every aspect of this landscape.

At second glance even the "natural" craggy outcrop 20m above us is a 10m by 30m rock garden, which will by summer have verbascum, stachys, penstemon, oxalis, iris . . .

The path opens out into a hilly lawn and the extraordinary sight of perfect, natural columns of Ginkgo biloba "Menhir".

Pergolas and terraces, which drip with trumpet vine in summer, look down on standing stones and a massive "stone henge" framing the lake.

A grass dome, "possibly a chunk of mountain top or some such cast down by the glacier that created the lake", says Oliver, is echoed by clipped domes of Pyrus calleryana, the pear native to China.

Beyond the white pine woods, the path becomes boggy and narrow, criss-crossed with tree roots, moss and fungi. A covered wooden bridge reminds visitors this is an all-American landscape.

But even the all-American, maple syrup-supplying sugar maples here come with a twist. They are Acer saccharum "Monumentale" and, like the ginkgos, are naturally column-shaped. Innisfree's American elms went years ago, victims of Dutch elm disease, but the Hemlocks are hanging on, with the help of insecticide to fight the woolly adelgid.

Larger garden pests include beavers, which have built a lodge 100m from the bubble fountain, and deer. At least the latter has a use, as part of a programme of hunters donating food for those in need. So the dispossessed eat venison, albeit the tough, end-of-season sort.

All is beautiful, but there's one fly in the ointment: this magnificent informality, this living work of art, needs support.

"When Marion died there were 25 full-time gardeners. Overnight that fell to five," says Kerin. "Today there are effectively three full-time people made up from various part-timers. There were debts of $25,000 but when those were paid off, Lester, who had grown up in the garden, opted to go for it and maintain the garden rather than hive it off to more lucrative projects."

Most important is Kate and Oliver's ambition to buy back some of the land Lester sold off on Marion's death to keep the garden running. Land prices in the area would make development tempting and some of the sold land directly overlooks the garden. So rattle your loose change. Innisfree needs $5m.

And, yes, it still retains its magic, 15 years on.

Innisfree will be open five days a week plus legal holidays from May 6 until October 18, innisfreegarden.org

Jane Owen is the editor of House & Home. Read her Diary from Yale in Life & Arts

Photographs: Oliver Collins

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