Women Who Shaped Garden History
Best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton was also a passionate and knowledgeable garden designer. Her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) helped revive interest in the principles of Renaissance garden design, and she put those principles into practice at her estate, The Mount.
Wharton's interest in gardens was inseparable from her interest in architecture and interior design. Her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-written with architect Ogden Codman, argued for simplicity, proportion, and the integration of interior and exterior spaces. She applied the same principles to gardens.
Published in 1904 with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, Italian Villas and Their Gardens argued that the greatness of Italian garden design lay not in plants but in structure: the relationship between house and garden, the use of terraces, staircases, water features, and enclosures, and the way a garden framed views of the surrounding landscape. This was a provocative argument at a time when English garden taste favored lush, flower-filled borders.
Wharton designed the gardens at The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, as a practical demonstration of her ideas. The gardens include a formal flower garden, a sunken Italian garden, a rock garden, and a kitchen garden, all organized along clear axes and enclosed by walls, hedges, and trellises. The Mount has been restored and is open to the public.