Existing comment:
Developing a Garden Plan:
Very little is known about the history of the Belair gardens. In the early 1750s Col. Benjamin Tasker Jr. (1720-1760) "inclosed a large garden at very large expense" probably in the formal French-style of planned beds. His nephew and heir Gov. Benjamin Ogle (1749-1809) made a drawing of a house sitting in a park-like setting that emphasized the more informal English garden fesign tastes of the later eighteenth-century.
The Ogle family left Belair in 1871, and a descendant reminisced that "at the rear was a long sweep of velvety green, terraced and broken here and there by lovely beds of roses and plants." That vague wording is not aided by the earliest known images from an 1886 illustration and an 1892 photograph, both of which show the house and property in great disrepair and neglect.
The Woodward family era began here after 1898, and by 1914 the house renovation and enlargement by the New York firm of Delano and Aldrich included the terraces and falls seen today. The garden to the east of the terraced lawns encompassed a maze of boxwood, rusticated ironstone walls and outbuildings such as a smoke house and greenhouse, and a tennis court.
The small garden here relies on historic types popular in the Georgia period when Belair was built, as well as the Georgian Revival popular at the time of the restoration in 1914. Whereas it does not specifically reproduce any known Belair garden, it serves to remind us of the formal beds now lost. |