A writer's other great passion, restored

LENOX -- The mistress had a corner bedroom so she could look down on her flower garden while writing longhand in bed. This she did each day from about 6 a.m. to noon, often with a dog propped under one arm as she dropped each completed page on the floor to be collected by her maid and typed by her secretary.

This was how Edith Wharton wrote ''The House of Mirth" at The Mount, her vacation home in the Berkshires, 100 summers ago. Her novel about Lily Bart, a sincere and vulnerable young woman destroyed by the hypocrisy of high society, became a record-breaking bestseller and gave Wharton the confidence to pursue a career as a writer.

To celebrate the centennial of Wharton's first literary masterpiece, her beloved flower garden was replanted at The Mount this June through a $500,000 grant from an anonymous Boston foundation.

''You don't often get a chance to plant a 3,000-perennial garden in this day and age. It's very exciting," said Susan Child of Boston, who designed the garden with former associate M. Christopher Alonso.

The magnificent garden looks like it was planted years ago. Hundreds of fragrant lilies, old-fashioned mignonettes, and stately delphiniums recreate the luxurious abundance that hallmarked the Gilded Age. The color scheme is sparkling white, vivid blue, and deep purple with bright splashes of pink from the garden phlox that Wharton especially loved.

Tall filigree thalictrum and filipendula contribute the airy effect that Wharton sought in defiance of her era's convention of compact and regimented plants. Asters and fall-blooming anemones are among the many flowers designed to carry the garden through October, when The Mount closes for the season. The four large rectangular borders enclose a rebuilt fountain. Child describes the scene as ''exuberance within the confines of rigor."

The flower garden is the climax of a $35 million restoration project that has brought The Mount back from the brink of collapse. ''This garden is the crown jewel of the entire restoration project," said project manager David Andersen. ''The flowers cost $150,000. But it cost four times that for the layers upon layers of work in this garden that people never see, such as the archeology, the engineering, and the irrigation."

Wharton often spent her afternoons gardening. Despite 10 live-in gardeners and groundskeepers, she liked to get her hands dirty, said Child, ''something women of her class never did." Though her childless marriage proved unfortunate, Wharton lived a very full life here, entertaining her friends and managing an elegant ''great house" with 35 rooms and a staff of 20.

Before she became known as a novelist, Wharton had another career as an early arbiter of interior and landscape design. This is not as odd as it sounds, as she was born into the upper level of New York society when women's creativity was confined to matters of the home. But Wharton brought her discerning eye to every endeavor open to her. Her first book, ''The Decoration of Houses," written with Ogden Codman Jr. in 1897 as a corrective to Victorian clutter, was a surprise success.

It promoted European ideas of proportion and symmetry, practicality, and classical restraint, which, not coincidentally, were also characteristics of the writing style Wharton was honing.

Wharton believed that the house and garden should be fully integrated with each other and with the landscape. At the Lenox site she selected for her summer home, this landscape includes views of Laurel Lake and the Berkshire Hills that reminded her of Tuscany. The bone-white Georgian-style house she built in 1902 and the 3 acres of formal gardens she completed in 1907 comprised a laboratory for the ideas in her design books, as well as a working retreat from her residence in Manhattan.

Wharton was an early practitioner of fusion in design, enhancing a distant New England view with an Italianate foreground of formal hedges and terraces, anchored at one end by this French-style fountain garden planted with billowing perennials in the British style pioneered by contemporary garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, and at the other by a walled Italian garden -- a ''giardino segreto."

Wharton produced six novels and numerous other writings during the decade she summered at The Mount with her mentally unstable husband, Teddy. When they separated in 1911, he sold The Mount without her permission and many of its carefully chosen furnishings were auctioned. Wharton moved permanently to France. In 1921 she became the first woman awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for ''The Age of Innocence."

Three years before her death in 1937, Wharton wrote wistfully, ''The Mount was my first real home, and though it is nearly twenty years since I last saw it (for I was too happy there ever to want to revisit it as a stranger) its blessed influence still lives in me."

During the subsequent years, Wharton's reputation went into mid-20th-century eclipse and The Mount's fortunes reflected this. It passed through several hands, including the Foxhollow School for Girls and Shakespeare & Company. The buildings gradually deteriorated and the gardens were lost to neglect.

But the potential for restoration endured and was galvanized by landscape architect David Bennett. In 1980 it was bought by the nonprofit Edith Wharton Restoration. After long negotiations with the resident theatrical troupe, which needed another home, EWR stabilized and restored the sagging summer mansion, its shattered greenhouse, the decaying carriage house, and the remaining overgrown 49-acre landscape. The estate, located at 2 Plunkett St., has attracted nearly 90,000 visitors since re-opening in 2002.

One section of the gardens that had survived in good shape was a winding woodland driveway lined with sugar maples designed by Wharton's niece, Beatrix Jones (later Farrand), who went on to a stellar landscape-design career culminating in Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

The heart of the landscape is the huge brick terrace where the Whartons entertained. All the major rooms of the house open onto this and the gardens spread out below it. These include a large, steep rock garden with grass stairs now planted with dozens of hydrangeas. There are also witch hazels like the ones reportedly presented to Wharton by a lover. (Because they bloom late in the fall, they were said to signify that Wharton, who wrote ''The House of Mirth" in her 40s, was a late bloomer.)

Many low hedges of dwarf globe arborvitae and cold-hardy Green Mountain boxwood, evergreens not available in Wharton's era, parallel the immense brick terrace, replacing original hedges of hemlock and full-size arborvitae that required much pruning to contain. Two rows of formally planted linden trees will be pruned into a continuous aerial hedge lining a bright white path of crushed limestone running below the terrace.

Garden designers studied old photographs assembled by historian Scott Marshall and writings uncovered by landscape historian Cynthia Zaitzevsky to try to identify and copy the original plantings as much as possible. Even the height of the water spraying from the recreated dolphin fountain is based on photographs.

One of the antique varieties Wharton planted, which horticulturist Gordon Clark is still trying to acquire, is called Old Cellar Hole. But old labor-intensive plants have been superseded by newer varieties in some cases. For instance, the Arnold Arboretum's Peter del Tredici identified the original white petunias that surrounded the fountain in old photographs as a wild Mexican species, which was then obtained and grown from seed. But soon people were complaining about the work entailed in deadheading this annual -- just as one of Wharton's literary houseguests had in a letter after he unwisely had volunteered to help out in the garden. This year, the fountain is planted with modern petunias.

It is more unusual and difficult to restore a garden than a building because gardens are so much more ephemeral. This project could probably not have happened if Wharton had not become recognized as a great American author, if her gardens had not been such a key element in her creative vision, or if the footprints of the garden had not remained intact without new buildings or subdivisions rising on top of them in the intervening century. All these components have enabled a near miracle to occur: the recreation of one of the great Berkshire summer house gardens of the Gilded Age a century after it first bloomed.

Most of the grand contemporary gardens are long gone. But you can visit two notable survivors while you are in the area: Naumkeag, 9 Prospect Hill, Stockbridge (413-298-3239), the former home of Joseph Choate, US ambassador to England in Wharton's day, and Chesterwood, 4 Lanesville Road, Stockbridge (413-298-3579, ext. 211), home of Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French.

Special exhibits and lectures this summer are observing ''The House of Mirth" centennial at The Mount. For more information on hours, tours, exhibitions, and lecture programs, visit edithwharton.org or call 413-637-1899.