Our Gardens

This on-going award-winning project contains about forty varieties of annual and perennial herbs known to have been planted for culinary and medicinal purposes from 1779 to 1850.  Among the plantings are basil, bee balm, calendula, catnip, chamomile, chives, costmary, dianthus, geranium, lady’s mantle, and lamb’s ear.

Created to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Simsbury Garden Club, this shade garden is planted with several unusual fern, hosta, and astilbe varieties, and is shaded by a clump of Shadbush trees.

Created to honor the memory of Betty Fisher, long-time Simsbury Historical Society member and the wife of the late local author Clavin Fisher, this garden features a naturalized planting of myrtle groundcover with daffodils, trillium, spring and fall crocus, and daylilies.  With historic lilacs at each corner, Russian sage softens the edge of the stone porch.

This award-winning perennial garden, anchored by a mature Weeping Higan Cherry tree, was in the process of a redesign when the gardeners found a previously unknown well shaft as they were preparing the new beds. The raised beds feature plants popular in the 18th and 19th centuries such as bachelor’s buttons, phlox and dianthus.

Nearly twenty different varieties of roses bloom here beginning in June and continuing throughout the summer.  In 2002, the original bed was expanded to the current rose walk with the addition of New Dawn climbing roses and the latticework trellis in honor of Lina Wagner and her horticultural service to the Historical Society.  As a result, the Town of Simsbury was recognized with a Rose City designation.

Joan Phelps Messenger, the last of the Phelps family to live in the Phelps house on the site, donated this bed in honor of her mother Martiemae Tuller Phelps and in remembrance of the massive iris beds that graced the site during her residence. With technical assistance from the Historic Iris Preservation Society and the acquisition of heritage planting stock, this bed now contains iris varieties that were popular from the 1500s through the 1930s.