������������

“[T]he island is exceedingly pleasant and healthful, and the women beautiful…Travelers, with propriety, call it the Eden of America.”    
-Jedidiah Morse, American Geography; or A View of the Present Situation of the United States of America, 1789.

The landscape of Newport is dramatic and seductive. Rugged cliffs and windswept meadows mingle with French parterres, Italian fountains, and parks punctuated by rare trees. The combination of these disparate elements of untamed nature and highly cultivated gardens gives the city its unique and distinctive character. Perched at the picturesque tip of Aquidneck Island, scenery and social life have shaped the cultural landscape of Newport for the past three centuries. The colonial quarter hugs the west facing harbor, while the summer colony of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought out ocean views from the fields, cliffs, and rocky coastline to the east and south. As the acknowledged “Queen of Resorts,” nineteenth century Newport attracted the nation’s leading architects, landscape architects, and decorators, who made the town a veritable laboratory of design. Bellevue Avenue, established in the early 1850s, became the site of a construction boom of Gothic and Italianate villas, which were featured in Newport and Its Cottages (1875), the first of many publications promoting the city as a place for architectural and horticultural fashion. In the 1860s, Ocean Drive opened the rocky coves and rolling hills of the southern part of Newport to development, providing a popular scenic destination.

Image

During the 1880s, specimen trees, especially beech, arrived in Newport in full force. European, Copper, and Fernleaf beeches flourished in the coastal climate, dominating the Picturesque schemes of prominent designers such as Ernest Bowditch and Olmsted Brothers, who worked on over 30 Newport commissions. Among the notable landscapes are Chateau-sur-Mer, with its superb collectio