Located in northwest Washington, bordering Rock Creek Park, Hillwood embodies the life and aesthetic interests of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. The twenty-five-acre property, however, predates Post’s 1955 purchase by three decades, the main house being built in the 1920s for Helen Blodgett Erwin and husband Col. Henry Erwin. Of special interest to garden historians is the early work by Washington-based landscape architect Willard Gebhart, the property then being called Arbremount. To quote from the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s website, his efforts typically resulted in a “strong, central axis, formality in a casual garden setting, broad view terraces, and easy access between the house and garden.” These are “hallmarks of his style” still seen at Hillwood today.* (The property mixes approximately one-half designed space with another half being forested.)
As noted in a paper by Gwen Stauffer, former deputy director of gardens, Jazz Age Hillwood typified Country Place Era design, such as “Gardens” page readers see at Bayou Bend. Like Ima Hogg’s garden, therefore, Gebhart transformed the site into a series of individually configured rooms set apart by tall shrubs and/or walls. When Post bought Arbremount, renaming it Hillwood, she already knew such garden design well, having worked with landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin at her earlier Long Island home, also called Hillwood. (Between Post’s first and second estate named Hillwood, she lived at Tregaron, a notable Country Place Era Washington site and a topic for a future Gardens page post.)
Post apparently liked much about Arbremount in 1955, as there was no unbridled modification to Gebhart’s overall scheme. For professional help where change was wanted, she turned initially to landscape architects Umberto Innocenti and Richard Webel. (Their work is known to this author from their WW2-era design of Stratford Hall’s West Garden.) The Hillwood visited by Society members attending the Mount Vernon 2000 meeting was thus both revealing of Gebhart’s underling design, mid-to-late 50s changes by Innocenti & Webel, plus subsequent modifications under Post’s guidance. Now, an Innocenti & Webel winding, shrub-embellished, drive leads to the house, while the former nearly straight road offers access chiefly to the greenhouses plus other service buildings and work spaces.
Another significant alteration entailed replacing a reflecting pool designed for the Erwins by landscape architect Rose Greely with an Innocenti & Webel French parterre garden. Accessed directly from Post’s French Drawing Room with its bedazzling array of tapestries and other fine collectibles à la mode française, it features a small pool and multiple fountains, while a terracotta statue of Diana who, along with a faithful hound, reigns over the space from a tall plinth.
Additional Hillwood garden rooms owe their present appearance to Georgia native and landscape architect Perry Wheeler, designer of the White House rose garden. In her paper referenced above, Gwen Stauffer notes Wheeler’s touch at the Hillwood’s rose garden (with Marjorie Post’s grave at its center), the lunar lawn, a beloved-by-all dog cemetery, the putting green, and more.
Because of its capture-all-the senses character, Hillwood’s Japanese-style Garden may linger longest among many visitors’ recollections. To upgrade what had been an “oriental” garden, Post looked to Shogo Myaida, a broadly educated native of Japan who sought to join design and plant elements from his homeland with European garden themes. His three-tiered “miniature mountain” blends such statuary as guardian lions (aka foo dogs), bridges, and other hardscape elements with plants native to Japan as well as North America. Waterfalls, fountains, and pools offer the aquatic element so crucial to such spaces, bringing tranquility and vibrancy to a perfect balance.
Not surprisingly Hillwood’s various gardens are populated with an extensive plant array to include flowering shrubs and trees, the previously mentioned roses, summer annuals, etc.…all to be discovered via a visit in person or the online sources provided below. Those sources also stress the importance of orchids to Marjorie Post, so guests with a penchant for their enthralling beauty may find the greenhouse experience of the Hillwood’s orchid collection to be worth the price of admission alone.
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*https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/willard-gebhart
For more on Hillwood, see: https://hillwoodmuseum.org/gardens
See also: https://hillwoodmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/Digital%20Visitor%20Guide.pdf
For the Gwen Stauffer paper and more on the landscape architects and designers who worked at Arbremount and Hillwood, see:
http://volunteer.hillwoodmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/THEHIS1.pdf
For more on those who shaped Arbremount-Hillwood’s grounds, see:
https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/rose-ishbel-greely
https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/innocenti-webel
https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/perry-wheeler
For Shogo Myaida, see:
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