I will arise and go now,
and go to Innisfree.
W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1888)

Recognized as one of the “world’s ten best gardens,” Innisfree is a powerful icon of 20th century landscape design. Over 50 years in the making, it is largely the work of landscape architect Lester Collins, FASLA (1914–1993), with important contributions by his client, the artist and teacher Walter Beck. Innisfree merges the essence of Modernist ideas and traditional Chinese and Japanese garden design principles with a nuanced reading of its glacial landscape. The result is a distinctly American stroll garden on 185 acres surrounding a large, shimmering lake — a sublime composition of rock, water, wood and sky.

At Innisfree the visitor strolls from one three-dimensional picture to another. Streams, waterfalls, terraces, retaining walls, rocks, and plants are used not only to define areas but also to establish tension or motion. The 40-acre lake is glacial, most of the plant material is native, and the rocks have come from the immediate forest.

"In the late 1920s, Walter Beck and his wife, avid gardener and heiress Marion Burt Beck, began work on Innisfree, their country residence in Millbrook, New York. Walter Beck’s fascination with Asian art influenced his painting, the collecting he and his wife pursued, and their ideas on garden design. In the 1930s, Beck discovered the work of 8th-century Chinese poet, painter and garden maker Wang Wei. Studying scroll paintings of his famed garden, the Wangchuan Villa, Beck observed that Wang created carefully defined, inwardly focused gardens and garden vignettes within a larger, naturalistic landscape. Wang’s place-making technique — christened “cup gardens,” by Beck — influenced centuries of Chinese and Japanese garden design. It is also the principal design motif in the Innisfree landscape. Like his Chinese predecessor, Beck created three-dimensional pictures in the garden, incorporating both rocks from the site and horticultural advice from his wife. Unlike Wang Wei, or perhaps more familiar figures like Lawrence Johnston, who used his cup-like rooms at Hidcote in England to draw one through a sequence of events and create an overall sense of place, Beck focused more on individual compositions. Relating these to each other and to the landscape as a whole was the genius of Lester Collins."

"Western gardens are usually designed to embrace a view of the whole. Little is hidden. The garden, like a stage set, is there in its entirety, its overall design revealed in a glance. The traditional Chinese garden is usually designed so that a view of the whole is impossible. [It] requires a stroll over serpentine, seemingly aimless arteries. The observer walks into a series of episodes, like Alice through the looking glass."
Lester Collins, Innisfree: An American Garden (1994)

Location: Millbrook Village

Categories
Gardens, Nature Centers & Nature Trails
Hudson Valley Gardens
Photo Locations Hudson Valley
Scenic Hudson Valley
Waterfalls