A Garden on Bellevue Avenue with a Story to Tell

NEWPORT, RI—It was a garden that had a story to tell. According to the late Newport socialite Eileen Slocum, who inherited the property from her aunt, the story was about a young woman, Georgette Brown, who found herself a widow when she was just 28.

Eight years after they married, while traveling in Europe, he would receive a telegram. His brother lay dying in Providence. Brown took the first packet home from London but left without his wife, who followed separately. It was a situation, as American author Henry James might have considered it. A lovely and very good young woman, in her niece's account, follows her husband home from London on a family emergency. When she arrives at the pier, a coachman meets her and gives her a black veil.

That's how she was told in 1898 her own husband was dead from pneumonia. He died two weeks after he'd stood in the rain at his brother's funeral. Her private tragedy captured the nation's attention in 1898. Although it happened years ago, it has remained part of the culture in the circuitous way time sends the seeds of many stories in different directions. And it still percolates in Newport in a private garden on Bellevue Avenue.

The young woman in the story was Mrs. Slocum's Aunt Georgette.

It's the garden, Mrs. Slocum remembered in 2004, where two little girls -- she and her sister, Phyllis -- would open the wooden door in the garden wall. The door was built especially so they could come inside and play under the weeping beech. On other days, they spent time inside the house's north porch, where Aunt Georgette tried to prepare them for Confirmation.

"She was very religious and used to teach us Bible lessons," Mrs. Slocum said. "We were very resistant. We felt school was enough."

She gave the interview in 2004 to InsideNewport.net because she wanted to open the garden to the public on Sunday afternoons, as it had been open when her aunt was living. She made the gesture in her aunt's honor "and because she was such a good person," she said then.

"She would have wanted it to be shared," she said. In fact, it was a "common tradition in 1890 until 1910," she said, that almost all gardens along Bellevue Avenue were open Sundays, so their owners could "display their beautiful special flowers and patterns on the walkway."

Mrs. Brown was the first president of the Garden Club of Newport, she said. She was famous for her azaleas and rhododendron. Her ideas about horticulture, as well as her own situation as a widow, are reflected in the original Olmsted Brothers' garden design.

The original plan called for a tea house and a reflecting pool. Neither was ever constructed. But much of the original 'bones' still exist, including the gate with original stonework, the greenhouse next to Mrs. Brown's private garden, the bowling green, the miles of paths a drainage system under them, and the bosquet (wooded area). Although Frederick Law Olmsted, best known for his design of Central Park in Manhattan, also designed more than 40 private gardens and parks in Newport, he collaborated with the estate owners. Mrs. Brown was an active collaborator.

According to Newport landscape architect Tim Brown, who helped Mrs. Slocum restore the garden, there were about 140 letters between Olmsted and Mrs. Brown about the garden. His influence shows in the use of the garden as outdoor space with lawns, paths and trees. But the flowers were her special domain. She had roses, lilies, aster, phlox and violas. Olmsted merely tolerated flowers, Brown said.

"Aunt Georgette knew every flower," Mrs. Slocum said.

She also walked miles in the garden every day, and that was perhaps the only way she could respectably leave her house.

"This is the reason the garden path is exactly one mile from the door of the house's north porch," Mrs. Slocum said. In 1900, a young widow could not be seen out and about. Aunt Georgette was a widow for 60 years. After she told the story a few times to visitors from the Preservation Society or the Victorian Society, she realized everyone thought she was saying 16 years, not 60.

"That boggles their minds," she said. But Aunt Georgette devoted herself to two pursuits, a school she and her sister-in-law started for local children and the garden. The school is long gone, closed after the public schools took hold in Newport. But the garden is still growing.

The garden is on private property, and it is closed now since Mrs. Slocum died in 2008. But for those years, it was open for all to admire.