New Canaan -- Kathie Moore Gardens

The brick Georgian colonial style house built in the 1940's with 8.3 acres was inherited but other than trees everything has been changed. One of the first projects was installing a brick wall and gazebo near the tennis court, followed by stone walls, steps, paths, picket fences, terraces, trellises, a passageway connecting the house to another building, a swimming pool, sculptures, garden statuary, garden lighting, hedges, trees, shrubs and perennials, with annuals added each year to containers and borders. The owner designed gardens that encircle the house, a gazebo garden, front entrance garden, a 160-foot wall garden, swimming pool garden and open terrace garden. Island beds and borders have been added, eliminated or replanted as the owner "paints pictures using living plants". The property is entered on a gravel drive between stone pillars that are connected to stone walls and across a stone bridge over a stream that has fields on each side. On one side the field is filled with native plants including Joe Pye weed, butterfly weed, swamp weed, asters, ferns and sedge. The other field has grasses, irises, filipendula and a large diabolo ninebark shrub. Further along the drive there is a circle bed with a mature linden tree, shrubs, a rabbit statue, a large rock, and a Mexican baptismal font used as a planted container. The perimeter of the house is planted with boxwood hedges and ball shaped bushes, crabapple and pachysandra. Sheared boxwood hedges zigzag to the front door and cast stone containers in the formal entrance garden are planted with white flowering annuals and companion foliage. Underfoot there are granite squares edged with brick. Near a venerable sugar maple at one corner of the house the 160-foot stone retaining wall garden room built in the 1990's is planted with shrubs, perennial flowers and boxwood with planted stone baskets perched on either side of stone steps that are planted with campanula and thyme. There are many whimsical features in the gardens or on exterior surfaces of the buildings such as statues of rabbits and dogs, giant ceramic frogs, birdcages, birdhouses, reflecting mirrors and on the retaining wall "The Old Man of Mikeno", a 1923 bronze bust of the Gorilla sculpted by Carl Akeley in 1864 for the Museum of Natural History in New York. The swimming pool is surrounded by a white picket fence planted with New Dawn roses, tansy, spirea and hydrangea; large containers in each corner of the pool hold agapanthus, sage and rosemary. A pear allée leads to the barn that is embellished with a cupola and large window sourced from antiques dealers. The brick gazebo along the drive hosts climbing hydrangea, with the garden planted with smoke bushes, variegated dogwood, hosta, white astilbe, iris, sedum, white rhododendron, white birches, lilies and dwarf spruce. Persons associated with the garden include: George Stevens and Beatriz B. Moore (former owners, 1940-1973); George Bermejillo Moore (former owner, 1973-2015); Katharine L. Moore (owner, 1973- ); Enrique Monjo (1895-1976) (sculptor); Carl Akeley (1864-1926) (sculptor).