2023 Garden Tour
Gardens by the Sea
Featured Gardens
Devilstone
Why the name Devilstone? Throughout history all over the world, people have often called a huge, immovable boulder in the middle of a field or alone in a forest a “devil’s stone.”
Mount Desert Island is sprinkled with such giant boulders made of non-native rock. Geologists call them “glacial erratics,” a name derived from the Latin errare meaning to wander. Thousands of years ago these huge stones were swept hundreds of miles by glaciers and deposited in unlikely locations all over MDI.
Built in 1885, Devilstone was one of the first homes built along the Shore Path. It was named for just such a large glacial erratic that sat in the middle of the surrounding grassy field. Sadly, that estate residence was long ago demolished.
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Today the two-acre property includes a Shingle Style Main House built in 1926 with 100 feet of oceanfront and a more modern Guesthouse. In 1980, John Nelson, an artist and long-time seasonal resident of Bar Harbor, bought Devilstone. For 40 years, he shaped gardens from the giant lawn that swept down to Frenchman Bay, the grassy field (where sat the glacial erratic), and a forest bordering Hancock Street.
Having earned a degree in landscape architecture in California, Mr. Nelson had a lot to learn about New England flora and sought the help of expert local nurseries to create an old-fashioned English cottage garden with strong Asian influences.
Purchased in 2021 by new owners, the garden offers many places to linger – a firepit
overlooking Frenchman Bay, a bench surrounded by hydrangea and pines, and a horseshoe pit in the front garden. Among the outstanding trees and shrubs on the estate are varied species of American and Asian hydrangea, an expansive collection of rhododendrons, and elegant Japanese maples with delicate, weeping forms.
Paths covered in soft, fragrant pine needles are an unusual structural feature of the garden. The property’s pine tree needles are used on the paths to reduce yard waste.
(Look for the glacial erratic to the left of the driveway near the Main House.)
Breakwater
Designed by Fred Savage for John Jacob Astor’s grandson, Breakwater was built in 1904. A gate house stood at the entrance and the driveway wound through deep woods past a horse barn and a carriage house before arriving at the elaborate Tudor-style residence. The only plantings were adjacent to the home and the only flowers bloomed in window boxes.
In 2000 when new owners purchased the property, their landscape architect bulldozed everything except the buildings to the ground, including most of the surrounding forest. On this blank canvas, a series of outdoor “rooms” were created: a croquet court, a putting green with sand traps, and an oceanside flower garden with a yew hedge for privacy along the Shore Path.
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The genius behind this design? The artful placement of each structure among trees and hedges, providing the house optimal privacy. Surrounded by flowers, shrubs, and trees, the home was screened from the carriage house and barn and the many passersby on the Shore Path.
This garden structure still exists today. The only change to Breakwater’s buildings: A modern garage replaced the barn which burned down years ago.
In 2020, the current owners, Jefferson Harkins and Joe Shepard, purchased Breakwater, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. They are refining its landscape with Whitney Williams Granholme of Sea Glass Gardens.
Where the putting green once was, an herbaceous border of annual and perennials thrives, producing cut flowers for indoor arrangements. The landscaping around the croquet court has been refreshed to add beauty and interest. Near the main house, a newly added rose garden is divided into four parterres with roses arranged by color.
Oceanside, the flower borders have added variety of form, foliage, texture, and fragrance. Two specimen trees put on a colorful display in autumn – a Katsura and a Japanese maple. While the yew hedge remains critical to providing privacy from the Shore Path, its height is being lowered to keep it healthy and strong.
It is a marvel that Breakwater’s four acres sit in the middle of bustling Bar Harbor yet offer a serene sanctuary with the peace of endless ocean views.
The Breezes
In 1866 the marriage of Anna Pingree to Joseph Peabody merged two of the most influential and wealthy families of Massachusetts. Although the couple separated after a decade, Anna forged ahead, becoming a renowned collector of American impressionist artists’ work. Perhaps to gain the wall space needed to showcase her favorite artists’ work, in 1896, she had this Colonial Revival cottage built on West Street overlooking Frenchman Bay and in 1906 she had a second summer home built in Ipswich, MA.
In 2014, the current owners bought the home. A tribute to the elegance of a bygone era, The Breezes is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After a year of renovation, the family moved in. For the first two summers, neglected shrubs, trees, and flower gardens were painstakingly removed. Only saved were several old specimen peonies.
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Passionate about flowers and color, but adamant that they’re not gardeners, the new owners partnered with Jodi Sargent of Eden Street Flowers in Hulls Cove to revive The Breezes’ gardens.
Today the front gardens on West Street offer seasonal interest with window boxes adding pops of color. From the driveway, visitors walk to the right of the home on a bluestone path flanked with magenta New Guinea Impatiens and Salvia ‘Mystic Spires.’ The walkway leads through a shade garden with a tiny fountain to the back lawn and garden.
There, with the backdrop of Frenchman Bay, are the oceanside gardens. Cross the lawn to a center path flanked by hydrangea macrophylia, lavender, and annual petunia integrifolia.
The flower borders provide a tricky challenge: The right side enjoys ample sun while the left side is often shaded. And although the view of the sea and Porcupine Islands is magnificent, the garden is steadily buffeted by wind.
Brilliant color abounds. Key is the mix of annuals (snapdragons, zinnias, and salvia) and perennials (dahlias, hydrangea, and peonies). While the color palette is always changing, there is always lots of blue, provided by Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’ and mostly the harder to find Pacific Giant Delphinium and the New Millennium Delphinium series, both ‘Cobalt Dreams.’
La Rochelle, Tour Headquarters
La Rochelle is the home of the Bar Harbor Historical Society which is lovingly caring for the mansion’s gardens. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, La Rochelle has been home to only three families during its 120-year history.
In 1903, this lavish chateau was built for George Bowdoin, a partner at JP Morgan. In 1794, his great-grandfather helped establish Bowdoin College which was named in his honor. The largest home on West Street, the 41-room La Rochelle is named for La Rochelle, France, the family’s ancestral hometown from which they fled in the 1600s to escape religious persecution.
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After only a few years of ownership, the Cough family sold the mansion after the Fire of 1947 to Philadelphia entrepreneur Tristram Colket and his wife Ethel Dorrance, daughter of the founder of the Campbell Soup Company. In 1972, the Colkets donated the home to The Maine Seacoast Mission which in 2019 sold it to the Bar Harbor Historical Society.
Tended by devoted volunteers, La Rochelle’s two historic gardens in front of the house are:
The Woodland Garden: Balancing texture and tone, this small, shaded garden is a haven for birds that feed on its variety of berries and drink from its bird bath. A crushed pink granite path bordered by large boulders welcomes the visitor to rest on a stone bench and walk among the trees whose blossoms and foliage form a colorful canopy. The varying height of the shrubs, evergreens, and groundcover offer visual interest and a sense of movement.
The Sunken Garden: This rectangular garden is enclosed by an ivy-covered red brick wall and features a path of stone dust. In 2021, the garden was transformed, with a deep bow to the world-renowned landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, who summered in Bar Harbor. Today the garden illustrates Farrand’s balance of symmetry and color in its plants and shrubs and follows her interpretation of a garden as a place of respite, with its stone bench offering peaceful rest. Farrand often used sundials as focal points; here an armillary sundial graces one side of the garden.
On the waterfront, the Butterfly and Pollination Garden was created and is maintained by the Bar Harbor Garden Club.
The Farm House
If gardening reflects a way of thinking, then the garden at The Farm House is a journal written in plantings and pathways. This four-acre horticultural essay in form, color, and texture was inspired by passion and still thrives after 100 years because of one gardener’s extraordinary act of courage.
In the 1820s The Farm House was built by early settlers on MDI. In 1911 Robert Hall McCormick and his wife Sarah of Chicago purchased the property to add to their neighboring farm and stable. McCormick was a descendant of the inventor of the McCormick Reaper, which revolutionized agriculture. In the 1920s the McCormicks’ youngest daughter Mildred inherited The Farm House.
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Mildred commissioned renowned landscape architect Beatrix Farrand to develop the garden and prominent local architect Arthur McFarland to expand the white-clapboard house.
In 1923, Farrand created a series of magical environments enclosed by a stately arborvitae hedge – from a 100-foot expanse of perennial/annual borders to a serene English park and a hushed woodland walk.
Miraculously, the property escaped the Fire of 1947. Mildred’s devoted gardener Jock Riddell stood on the roof and hosed down the property, saving the house and its magnificent garden. The fire decimated all the neighborhood’s other properties.
Upon her death in the 1980s Mildred gave the house to her great nephew Sargent Collier and his wife Elizabeth. Today Elizabeth lovingly stewards the garden with her husband Quinn Mills, led by the principles and spirit of the garden’s original creators, Mildred McCormick and Farrand. In 2007 the estate was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Mills family found Farrand’s original design for the garden in the Farrand Collection at the University of California at Berkley. The plan names the original plantings, including now-restored varieties of peonies and phlox, like Miss Lingard. Guided by this plan, Elizabeth has preserved and renovated the garden.
The garden’s Old World colors are reflected in wide drifts of campanula, dahlia, nepeta, phlox, and snapdragons against a backdrop of artemisia lactiflora and eupatorium. Punches of hot color come from aconitum, delphiniums, heliotrope, and salvia. A terrace bed is laid out in four squares, each with a pink dogwood surrounded by native Sweet Fern. Farrand’s charming garden embellishments still grace the garden in their original positions, including the white wooden gate topped by the silhouette of a squirrel nibbling an acorn that welcomes visitors to this garden paradise.
College of the Atlantic Community Garden
In 1971 College of the Atlantic co-founder Mel Coté and then-Vice President Sam Eliot chose a sunny location on the northern side of campus near Route 3 and planted a garden to help feed their families. Hauling water in buckets from a nearby faucet, they planted chard, spinach, peas, lettuce, beans, tomatoes, cucumber, and corn. Some crops did better than others, Eliot remembers, and the “dandelions and slugs were doing best of all.”
By 1974, other faculty had started planting and the garden was opened to students. On a very hot day, gardening male and female students took off their shirts. Dozens of drivers on Route 3 stopped for a look, causing a major traffic jam. To break up the snarl, the police chief called the college and asked if the female students would please put their shirts on.
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Since then, COA’s Community Garden has flourished. A small orchard was created with peach, pear, and apple trees, many planted by Jackson Gillman (’78). A vineyard complete with trellis was planted by a displaced British farmer. A charming entry gate was built by students and art and design faculty member Dru Colbert. Last year the Community Garden celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Today the garden is a large expanse of beds and pathways where students, staff, faculty, and about 20 community members tend organic garden plots. Gardeners share responsibility for tools, a compost system, and common areas. For the last 25 years Suzanne Morse, the college’s Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, has managed the garden.
The COA Community Garden has become an outdoor lab. Gardening and agriculture classes practice techniques, conduct experiments, and develop garden designs. For example, Morse’s classes tested seeds and identified which varieties of sweet corn and carrots would thrive best here.
The Community Garden also supplies fresh flowers for campus events and organic produce to the Bar Harbor Food Pantry. Each year participants in the college’s Summer Field Studies for Children care for and harvest produce from a Community Garden plot.
Our Sponsors
Platinum/Lupine:
Bar Harbor Bank & Trust
Gold/Rosa Rugosa:
Arra Homescaping
Atlantic Landscape Construction
Bangor Savings Bank
Betsey Holtzmann
Coastal Irrigation and Lighting
Choco-Latte Café
Darling’s Auto Mall – Your Local Maine Buick GMC Dealer
Fiore Artisan Oils and Vinegars
Havana Restaurant
Nate Holyoke Builders
Williams Irrigation Systems
Witham Family Hotels Charitable Fund
Silver/Lady Slipper:
Frost Farms
Gordon Robb Landscaping
Machias Bank
Bronze/Violet:
Anonymous
First National Bank
G.F. Johnston & Associates
Salsbury’s Hardware and Organic Garden Center
Udder Heaven Ice Cream Retreat
Window Panes
Transportation:
Acadia Gem
Darling’s Auto Group
Stanley Subaru
THE PROCEEDS FROM THIS TOUR SUPPORT:
Addressing food insecurity
- Open Table MDI’s organic garden in Tremont
- Our garden at the Kelley Farm Preserve in Bernard
Promoting a love of horticulture among youth
- College scholarships for studying horticulture
- Greenhouses at elementary schools
- Kids Can Grow, children’s summer gardening program
- Reestablishing Maines’s native lupine through the Sundial Lupine Project
- Tending gardens/containers at:
- Bar Harbor Historical Society
- Jesup Memorial Library
- Mount Desert Island Historical Society
- Pemetic Elementary School
- Ridge Apartments, MDI Housing Authority
Supporting through donations and volunteers
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- Beatrix Farrand Society
- Charlotte Rhoades Park
- Friends of Acadia
- Kids’ Corner
- Land and Garden Preserve
- Maine Coast Heritage Trust
- Wild Gardens of Acadia