With an almost imperceptible hand, designer Dan Pearson has conjured a dramatic landscape garden from 20 acres of Connecticut wilderness
WORDS KENDRA WILSON PHOTOGRAPHS NGOC MINH NGO
I’d hesitate to call it a garden,” Dan Pearson says regarding Robin Hill, a 20-acre property in Connecticut that his studio has been steering for the past decade. Although there are set pieces (a herb garden to one side of the house, an enclosure with a circular pond by the entry court), even the cutting garden is so removed from the idea of ‘a garden’ that it is hidden in summer behind a wavy edge of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, its boundaries dictated by a pre-existing stone wall. To the occasional visitor, Robin Hill betrays none of the breathless industry of some conventional gardens; instead, all is serene. This is remarkable, given that it could have gone so wrong.
In the winter that Susan Sheehan, a New York art dealer, fell for the neglected but pretty 1929 house, she and partner John O’Callaghan were beguiled by the snowy scene. Dan takes up the story: “When the landscape awakened in spring, Susan was confronted by this enormous amount of growth coming from everywhere, and became fearful, in terms of her responsibility.” The property backs on to 6,000 acres of restored forest, and the fact of a very real and encroaching wilderness was a shock. “One night we saw a mountain lion attacking a deer on the back field,” says Susan.
Dan’s 2009 book Spirit: Garden Inspiration was what inspired his prospective client to hire him; she knew nothing of his design work. When Dan in turn asked Susan to gather some pictures that inspired her, she sent him a 250-page document, which he compares to the art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. At the end of this visual journey, she had written: ‘And I don’t think I want a garden.’
Dan saw that she wanted an environment rather than something that would look highly tended. “The work we do is always about sense of place but it’s just as much about the people who occupy it, and how you can make it resonate for them,” he says. “Our role as designers here was to ease her into this place and make her feel less fearful.”
The New England landscape is alive with ghosts, some of which are evoked in low farmers’ walls running through reclaimed woodland. At Robin Hill, older remnants are muddled with the marks of more recent owners, including an interior designer in the 1980s, whose green and white garden was “famously tasteful”. Someone down the line must have shared Susan’s fear of wilderness, building high walls in the entry court and securing
