Road Trip to Michigan and NY

I left on a road trip the other day leaving Miss Julia in charge of the studio and house.

I thought I would drive out of the heat but it was 100 in Richmond so didn't stop like I had planned. Instead drove to Winchester, where my great great great grandfather lived and is buried.

I visited the Museum of the Shenandoah to see their seven acre garden.

The pictures seem a little hazy, there had just been a huge downpour.

The seven-acre gardens that surround the Glen Burnie House are both impressive and intimate. Designed by MSV benefactor Julian Wood Glass Jr. and his partner at the time, R. Lee Taylor, the creation of these formal gardens began in 1956 and evolved over the latter half of the twentieth century. Today the MSV maintains this living collection in a manner that is considerate of the garden creators’ vision for the landscape.

The Glen Burnie Gardens invite discovery and were designed to support formal entertaining. Boxwood plantings are present throughout the site and create the Parterre Garden and Knot Garden. Just redesigned and replanted, the Rose Garden is comprised of hundreds of individual plants, and the Perennial Garden presents flowers in a rainbow of colors summer through fall. The Vegetable Garden is planted in a formal pattern that changes annually. Bordering the northern edge of the property, Kathie's Spring Garden was added to the formal landscape in 2015. The new garden boasts a pond and a variety of trees, shrubs, bulbs, and spring ephemerals.

The landscape also includes a garden of Asian influences and a Water Garden, where golden trout swim in a spring-fed pond and water cascades down a natural embankment. The Pink Pavilion and Fountain Courtyard, frequently used for entertaining, are also visitor favorites. In addition, the historic Wood and Glass Family Cemetery is part of the landscape.

Currently undergoing a multi-year restoration project, the Glen Burnie Gardens are open for self-guided tours from April through December. Read more about the garden renovations in the MSV Garden Blog.

The Glen Burnie House sits on land that Winchester founder James Wood surveyed, claimed, and then settled in 1735. The oldest portions of the house were built by Wood’s son Robert in 1794 and 1797. After passing through generations of Wood and Glass families, the 254-acre Glen Burnie property came to be owned by Wood descendant Julian Wood Glass Jr. (1910–1992) in the 1950’s. Glass preserved and renovated his ancestral home from 1958 to 1959. Then, aided by his partner at the time R. Lee Taylor, he transformed the house into an opulent country retreat surrounded by six acres of formal gardens and furnished with one of the most remarkable private collections of decorative arts ever assembled in the Shenandoah Valley.