The Fells Newbury John Hay Estate
— — a garden the diplomat came home to.
Not only on a wall.
“The summer place of John Hay, Lincoln's young secretary and later Secretary of State. The house looks down through pine and hemlock toward Lake Sunapee. Alice Hay Wadsworth built the rock garden between the wars, stone by stone, into a slope the family had walked for two generations. The trails carry on past it to the water. Nobody hurries here. from the studio
The Fells Newbury John Hay Estate, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Fells sits on roughly 84 acres above the western shore of Lake Sunapee in Newbury, New Hampshire, the surviving core of a 1,000-acre summer estate begun in 1891 by John Milton Hay. Hay served as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later as Secretary of State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Three generations of Hays gardened the slope before the property passed into conservation. Most of the land is now the John Hay National Wildlife Refuge, with the historic gardens and main house operated by a nonprofit trust open to the public from spring through autumn.
The rock garden is the signature of the place. Alice Hay Wadsworth, John Hay's daughter, laid it out across a steep ledge above the main house beginning in the 1920s, working stone by stone with local granite and a planting palette of alpines, dwarf conifers, and heaths. Her brother Clarence later added the 100-foot perennial border and the old garden walls. The bones of both gardens survive, restored and tended by the trust, and read in early summer as a piece of Edwardian American horticulture rare in northern New England.
The grounds and trails are open year-round in daylight hours. The Main House and gardens run a posted season, typically mid-May through Columbus Day, with a small admission for non-members. From the visitor parking the path drops through hemlock to the perennial border, the rock garden, and the lake shore loop. Newbury Harbor on Lake Sunapee is two miles east; Mount Sunapee, the regional ski hill, rises across the water. Allow ninety minutes for a quiet walk; longer if the rock garden is in flower.