Greenwich -- Jefferson-Ebert House and Garden

The original six-acre farm had a small 1843 or earlier house done in the Greek Revival style that was expanded and altered in 1905 in the Colonial Revival style by architect Theodore E. Blake, for artists Charles and Mary Roberts Ebert. The current owners acquired the house with 1.61 acres in 1993, then renovated the house and landscape from 2008 until 2010. Projects for the gardens, formal and secluded, included defining sight lines, renovating old stone walls and building new ones, creating paths, and mass plantings of deer resistant materials. They attached a greenhouse with radiant floor heating to the house for houseplants, tropicals and seedlings. When the greenhouse floor is dampened the humidity spreads into the house. Custom built, the greenhouse has details that repeat white-shingled Colonial Revival style. Some mature trees and shrubs dot the property, including kousa dogwood near the front wall and gate, sugar maple, shagbark hickory, red oak and cryptomeria, stewartia, holly and viburnum. There was one remaining rose from the garden of former owner Jane Righter, honored posthumously with a medal by the Garden Club of America. A variety of hardy ferns were planted around the foundation of the house. The small fieldstone patio to one side is shaded by a beech with underplanting of ginger, trillium and hellebore. There is a small fountain on the patio and an herb garden nearby. In view are woodlands and a brook with a spillway that once fed a sawmill. A bluestone walkway in front of the house is bordered by boxwood and a spring display of bulbs including allium. Pea gravel paths lead to outbuildings, including an old stone spring house and a bright red barn/potting shed. A fenced potager produces seasonal vegetables, roses, bulbs and annual flowers. On a small slope there is a spring display of daffodils and hyacinths backed by forsythia. An old maple with a circular bench looks onto a shady garden of fern, hellebore, tiarella, ornamental grass, trillium, and Japanese woodland peonies A circle within a square sundial garden behind the house has dwarf black mundo grass in the corners of the cobblestone and pea stone paving, with an old English sundial in the center. Another circular feature is the old fieldstone-lined well with a wrought iron wellhead. An allée of English oak has a lower layer of boxwood and ground level layer planted with epimedium, geranium and amsonia. At the end there is a semi-circular ring of trees overlooking a pergola draped in native trumpet vine. Containers on stone walls, steps and driveway pillars have seasonal plants for year-round appeal. Persons associated with the garden's design: Gordon Hayward (garden designer, circa 2010); Kendra Masicioli (sundial garden, 2013); Mary Hope Lewis Ford (horticulturist/conservationist, 1956-1965); Jane Righter (rosarian, 1925-1941).