Treetop was built in 1928 by my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr, and designed by Ruth Adams. It was originally a summer house, but in 2008, my husband Tony and I made it year-round, and started a garden.

The house stands on fifteen acres of deciduous forest, sloping first up, then down, to a lake. It’s surrounded by towering trees, wide stone ledges and glacial outcroppings: the steep, broken terrain and dense forest make symmetry and formality impossible. So the garden is made up of two asymmetrical parts: one flat and demure, the other steep and wild.

Sissinghurst, beside the house, is on level ground, and flanked by buxus. It contains well-behaved plants in cool colors – pink, rose, blues and purples – white bleeding heart, columbine, physostegia, a rugosa rose or two. A stone path leads to the quiet Woodland Garden, with ferns, aruncus, asarum, hepatica, Bowman’s root, Jack-in-the-Pulpit and May apples. Along the way is the tiny home-made pond, sheltering a colony of “If-you-build-it- they-will-come” local frogs.

Margaritaville, across the lawn, is wild and unruly, consisting of a steep ravine, a rocky creek-bed, and a meadow-edge. It’s full of riot and sedition, orange and scarlets: tithonia, cardinal flower, crimson salvia, spigelia, oenethera. At the far end, the garden bleeds into meadow and woods, through tall, messy monarda, asclepias, veronicastrum, comptonia and a big shrubby potentilla.

We lean toward native plants, and we don’t use chemicals, so there are always butterflies and bees and birds humming about, as well as frogs, garter snakes, salamanders, chipmunks and weasels. Turkeys stalk through the woods, as do foxes, bears and bobcats. The whole place is more or less a wildlife preserve, or at least that’s how the creatures treat it.

–Roxana Robinson

View the Williams garden.

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