A Garden on Cape Ann Preserves the Legacy of America's Greatest Landscape Designer

© Clint Clemens 2021Nola Anderson fell in love with Chimneys, an historic North Shore estate and devoted decades to rebuilding an Olmsted garden, now the subject of a book.

"When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden," the poet Minnie Aumonier once observed. Though she offered this advice nearly a century ago, she might have been talking about our own fraught times-the ways we look to the earth for comfort and sustenance, the avenues we explore for solace and renewal.

Maybe this is why the new book Immersion: Living and Learning in an Olmsted Garden, is so timely. © Clint Clemens 2021One of Olmsted's enduring flourishes is a winding half-mile driveway that provides an unfolding sense of arrival. The garden

Featuring spectacular photography, previewed here exclusively, Immersion chronicles the birth and revival of a little-known garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. on a secluded 19th-century estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, known as the Chimneys.

An Italianate landscaped wonderland overlooking the Atlantic was conceived as a series of descending terraces for contemplation, but by the time former advertising executive Nola Anderson and her husband, the advertising mogul and sailing enthusiast Jim Mullen, came upon it three decades ago, the Chimneys had become the Miss Havisham of mansions.

"Fools rush in," Anderson confessed to T&C."It was a total wreck!" In the book Anderson describes a nearly impassable half-mile driveway overgrown with rhododendron and forsythia."Depending on your perspective, it was either Sleeping Beauty's castle or Grey Gardens. We loved it."

© Clint Clemens 2021The view of the ocean through Japanese irises on Overlook Terrace. Anderson kept the counsel of Olmsted historian Arleyn Levee as she embarked on her journey of replanting and restoring.

Love, as we know, can be strange, and notoriously blind, too. Perhaps the most poignant lesson gleaned from a project of this size and scope, and the one that resonates with us most forcefully today, is that a garden, no matter how carefully planned, how meticulously laid out, how doted on and cared for, is a living, breathing organism, ever shifting and changing.

A garden is not a painting, not a statue-it is an entirely different order of art. If you can't step in the same river twice, you likewise cannot count on a landscape to remain frozen in time. Colors bloom and fade, aromas blend and dissipate-day by day, hour by hour. Even the most assiduous gardener, and Anderson is one, discovers early that he or she is at the mercy of primordial forces."After love at first sight, I suppose it was inevitable that reality would set in," she writes."Mother Nature is always in charge and is not always benevolent." © Clint Clemens 2021The Water Terrace designed by Frederick Olmsted Jr. sits high on an oceanside bluff and features a five-pool water garden inspired by Italy's 16th-century Villa Lante.

Olmsted, the son of the famed landscape architect behind Central Park, understood he was just a collaborator with this fierce matriarch when he was commissioned, in 1902, by the Boston financier Gardiner Martin Lane and his wife Emma to site a seven-chimney Georgian Revival summer residence for their 28 acres on Dana Beach; he spent the next 12 years designing the gardens. (The property was a fraction of the original estate purchased in 1845 by the beach's namesake, Richard Henry Dana, a poet whose father was a delegate to the Continental Congress and whose son, the abolitionist Richard Henry Dana Jr., wrote the early American classic Two Years Before the Mast.)

© Clint Clemens 2021A small model of Orion Riding the Dolphin in the Tea Garden, a nod to Vita Sackville-West

A horticultural couturier, the younger Olmsted cultivated on this verdant slice of Cape Ann a landscape out of a painting by John Singer Sargent, who was a frequent guest, often alongside Isabella Stewart Gardner; Henry Frick and J.P. Morgan were also seen there. When Anderson and Mullen bought the property in 1991, Olmsted's water lily pools, the garden's central feature, had crumbled. Granite walls and steps that defined and linked the series of terraces had collapsed from age and erosion. But slowly and carefully, they nursed this New England Eden back to life over the course of 30 years. © Clint Clemens 2021A bench on Overlook Terrace. Landscape designer Patrick Chassé riffed on Olmsted

"It has to be touched!" Anderson exclaims. Americans can be intimidated by all the luscious greenery, but she says"British and European visitors immediately take off their shoes and pick the vegetables." She recalls sack races and birthday parties when her daughter was small, impromptu fashion shows at the Tea House, croquet games on the lawn.

Sometimes the pleasure is enjoyed in total solitude. Anderson says that her husband, who she says shared her passion for the landscape, even if he didn't share the work, referred to it as"his shrink.

When he got home from the office he would go into the garden and sit for hours on the bench in the Overlook House, or sometimes in the Tea House, by himself, and all his cares would just float away."

Two years ago, having retired, they decided to put their life's work up for sale, and they had photographer Clint Clemens move in for the summer to document the fruits of their labor. The book is a product of that collaboration, and last October, with a pandemic raging and the sales of sprawling estates like this one booming, the fates handed them another twist: Another couple who appreciated the history and pedigree of the property purchased it for $21 million.

It was a bittersweet parting ("We had 29 and a half years in paradise") but one that has been commemorated with an elegant coda.

Asked to reveal a favorite garden moment, Anderson prefers to demur. She allows that it might be early spring, when, under the fragrant white blossoms of the crab­apple allée, tiny violets begin to emerge.

"And then you watch for other flowers, the first little daffodils. Oh, and after the rain is really great too! The spiders come out and make their last webs," she says, warming to the subject."There is very much a spiritual connection. It's so quiet.

In the summertime you could hear happy kids splashing, dogs, the waves, but then in other areas of the garden it's very quiet, calming." Isn't that what we long for now, more than ever: the peace that comes from a silent stroll through the nearest patch of greenery-perhaps with a glass of wine in hand-feeling the grass beneath our feet, letting the cares that consume us melt into the soft spring air?

© Clint Clemens 2021Sunlight in the morning offers an invitation to wander in the discrete gardens, each with ever changing vignettes throughout the year.

This story appears in the May 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW