Ashintully Gardens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ashintully Gardens is the name given to a 120-acre estate in Tyringham, Massachusetts that is maintained by The Trustees of Reservations. The name Ashintully comes from Gaelic and means "on the brow of the hill".
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[edit] Description
The gardens blend several natural features into an ordered arrangement with both formal and informal beauty. These include a rushing stream, native deciduous trees, a rounded knoll, and flanking meadows.
Garden features include the Fountain Pond, Pine Park, Rams Head Terrace, Bowling Green, Regency Bridge, and Trellis Triptych. Urns, columns, and statuary provide ornamentation. Foot paths, bridges, stone stairs, and grassy terraces connect various parts of the garden.
In 1997, Ashintully Gardens received the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's H. Hollis Hunnewell Medal, a prize established to recognize gardens embellished with rare and desirable ornamental trees and shrubs.
[edit] History
Ashintully Gardens was created under the guidance of two men: Robb de Peyster Tytus and John McLennan Jr.
[edit] Robb de Peyster Tytus
In the early 20th century, Egyptologist and politician Robb de Peyster Tytus assembled in this estate from the merger of three farms in Tyringham and additional land in Otis.
On a hill overlooking the southern end of Tyringham Valley, Tytus built a white, Georgian-style mansion which came to be known as the Marble Palace. The mansion's main façade featured four Doric columns and was spanned by thirteen bay windows. Its interior contained thirty-five rooms, ten baths, and fifteen fireplaces. Though the Marble Palace was destroyed by fire in 1952, the front terrace, foundation, and four Doric columns remain today.
In 1913, Tytus died at Saranac Lake, New York, leaving his wife, Grace, and two daughters, Mildred and Victoria.
[edit] John McLennan Jr.
A year later Tytus' death, his widow married John S. McLennan, a Canadian senator, newspaper owner, and historian. She gave birth in 1915 to one child before subsequently being divorced.
That child, John McLennan Jr., acquired this estate where he had spent all his childhood summers in 1937. He later moved into the farmhouse at the bottom of the hill. McLennan lived the rest of his life there and renovating the nearby barn into a music studio.
McLennan became an accomplished composer of contemporary music, including chamber and orchestral music and pieces for piano and organ. In 1985 he won an American Academy of Arts and Letters music award.
Over the course of thirty years, McLennan created Ashintully Gardens on the land that Robb de Peyster Tytus had acquired and subsequently it was bequeathed to the public. Of the over 1,000 acres that Tytus acquired, 120 acres now comprise Ashintully Gardens .
