Beatrix Farrand laid out the gardens at this 4.2-acre farmhouse estate on Highbrook Road, and you can still trace her design. This 4.2‑acre property began as a 19th‑century farmhouse and was carefully reshaped in the 1920s into a Colonial Revival design by Arthur McFarland, who also designed the little caretaker’s cottage that sits nearby. The gardens you see were laid out by Beatrix Farrand for Mildred McCormick, an heir to the fortune of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, and the whole estate was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
The grounds are arranged as a series of garden “rooms,” laid out roughly from northeast to southwest. To the north is the Eden Street room, bordered at the roads by a log rail fence and set off from the front yard by a stone wall; it’s a roughly square grassy space with old apple and maple trees among pines and locusts. The front yard itself is dominated by a circular gravel drive punctuated by flowering shrubs and specimen trees.
A circular gravel drive edged with flowering shrubs leads you past the log-fenced Eden Street room, where old apple and maple trees still stand among the pines.