A Garden Across Centuries
The Jay Estate, the boyhood home of US Founding Father John Jay, is a 23-acre estate currently operated by the Jay Heritage Center (JHC). It is a National Historic Landmark owned by New York State Parks and Westchester County Parks.
NBW was tasked with restoring a 3-acre garden as part of the estate’s greater evolution from farmstead to country estate to public park. The design of the garden serves to activate new programs and experiences at the JHC, facilitating its growth as a vibrant educational campus and host to innovative programs in American history, social justice, architecture, environmental stewardship, and landscape conservation. The gardens have been restored to reveal the influence of a series of landscape ideas and uses from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
The separate garden rooms are a conduit for the many historical and cultural stories emerging from this important place. Each room is framed by dry-laid stone walls, the earliest of which was built in the late 18th century by the Jay Family. These walls were essentially intact in their original form and required rebuilding by stone artisans only in areas where natural forces — like trees — damaged them.
Room One is inspired by the agrarian and the Picturesque, represented by traditional parterre gardens featuring low evergreen hedges and vegetable rows within the parterre frames. The reflecting pool in Room Two marks the footprint of the swimming pool installed by Zilph Palmer Devereux in the last century. One of the only historic plantings that remains on-site is a large Japanese maple, which represents Van Norden’s (the early 20th-century owners of the property) interest in Japanese and Chinese culture. Room Three is defined by a 100-foot-long Rose Arbor, a reproduction of the historic arbor built in the late 19th century. Native meadow species are planted on either side of the arbor in rows, spatially reflective of the landscape’s extended agrarian use and serving the didactic purpose of revealing the synergy between pollinator species and companion plants to visitors. Management intensity decreases from Room One to Three, allowing for a gradual transition to the woodlands south of the gardens.
