History of the
Vanderbilt Estate
The Vanderbilt Gardens Formal Italian Style |
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The next level contains beds of "perennials", plants that can survive the winter and come back next year. While "annuals" bloom all summer, "perennials" tend to bloom for a few weeks and then are just foliage the rest of the summer. However, since different perennials flower at different times, there is always some color in this garden. As the weeks of the summer change, so do the colors in the perennial level.
The lower levels contain roses, lots of roses. The rose garden was added by Frederick Vanderbilt, himself. It regularly contains over 1800 rose bushes. Many of them are considered "vintage" roses, which are old varieties which might have appeared in the original garden at the turn of the 20th century. There is a combination of tea roses, climbers and bush variety roses. Their best flowering is normally between mid-June and mid-July depending on the weather.
The beds are laid out
in a formal,
"Italian" style. This refers to the way the beds are laid out, not
the types of plants. (No, there are
no tomatos in an Italian style garden.) In an Italian style garden,
if you draw a line down the middle (horizontally or vertically), one
side of the line will mirror the other side.
