Gordon and Mary Hayward’s Vermont Farmhouse | The Gardener’s House

Over the past 30 years, a famous garden designer and his wife have transformed a dilapidated Vermont farmhouse into a study in harmony between indoors and out, where garden views are always in focus.

Town life never suited Gordon and Mary Hayward. They found that out firsthand in 1981, when they bought an 1850s-era white Cape in the heart of Saxtons River, Vermont. Over the next two years, the couple, both teachers at the time and the parents of a young boy, fixed up the old place and rebuilt the small gardens around it. But living on Main Street proved too busy for the Haywards, avid gardeners, both of whom had grown up on old farms—Gordon in New Hartford, Connecticut; Mary in the North Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire, England. They wanted more country, more land. “We wanted a large garden, but we had no concept of what it would look like,” Mary says. “We just knew we wanted to grow things.” Then, one day while driving to Brattleboro, where he taught high-school English, Gordon spotted a tired-looking 1780s Cape in Westminster West. The house, which sat on a rolling dirt road, looked so neglected that he couldn’t tell whether somebody was living in it, but he loved how it perched atop the slight rise of a south-facing hillside. He loved its attached barn and old pastures. There was one catch: The home, still lived in and still in the hands of the family who had originally built it, wasn’t for sale. So the Haywards began talking to real-estate agents about finding a place like it. “We’d tell them that we were looking for an older place, built in the late 1700s, early 1800s, with some cleared land around it,” Gordon says. “Something that we could fix up and didn’t cost that much. And they’d say, ‘Yeah, and you want a stream and a pond and 11 acres of sugarbush, too, right?’ They’d heard it before.” Over the next year they talked to anyone who would stand still for a minute about what they wanted. Then a teacher with whom Mary was working heard rumblings about a dilapidated Cape in Westminster West whose owner was looking to sell. It needed a lot of work, they were warned, but it had some land and sat on a little rise of land just off a pretty dirt road lined with big maples. “I knew exactly the house she was talking about,” Gordon says. “We made it down there in about a minute and a half.” On a cold December day in 1983, the Haywards moved in. The house satisfied the couple’s eagerness to renovate. The plaster walls were crumbling, the house lacked central heat and insulation, and the well had long ago ceased working. The grounds were just as much of a project. Overgrowth and old car parts populated the acre of land. At one point the Haywards had 14 different brush fires going. Out of the barn and the woods they hauled seven large truckloads of scrap metal.

Much of this early heavy lifting the Haywards did themselves. They stripped plaster walls of tattered wallpaper, refinished them, and painted them white; they seeded newly cleared grounds with grass. Color choices and experimental plantings could wait. “It was a matter of getting it to a point where we could manage it,” Mary says, “so we could keep it under control.” “At one point, I got up on the metal roof, which was just covered with rust, and I wire-brushed the whole exterior of the house—roof and sides,” Gordon says. “We were driven.” With a laugh, Mary adds, “We were into work.”

During those early years, the property became an experimental site for Gordon, who quit teaching in 1985 and launched himself as one of the country’s leading garden designers, with landscape projects that have taken him all over the United States. He’s the author of 11 books, including Your House, Your Garden, which was lauded by the American Horticultural Society as a top title in 2004, and he’s been a regular contributor to Horticulture and Fine Gardening magazines. “When we bought this place, we had an opportunity to express what interested us,” Gordon says. “It became our laboratory, where we learned about plants, where we learned about design.”

Today, the Haywards’ home is a full expression of their identity as gardeners and Vermonters. Theirs is a house not overrun by indoor plants but instead is oriented toward the work they’ve done outside it. Exterior doors open up to paths that lead to the garden, while windows frame the view of the grounds: trees and shrubs, arbors and statues.

“One of the big things I stress when I lecture is this goal that we should live in a house in a garden, and that the two should relate to each other,” says Gordon, whose property now includes a 1.5-acre garden bordered on two sides by 18 acres of reclaimed pastures. “What you see out the windows is just as important in the winter as it is in the summer. You live in a house 12 months a year, and the gardens should answer that.” That means that even in the depths of winter, the Gordons’ views reveal spots of color. A small orchard of crabapple trees bear red fruit deep into the season, while hedges and other evergreens show something other than white throughout the year.

The importance of the landscape is embedded in the home’s interior as well. The couple long ago moved away from their familiar white walls. Now, soft reds, yellows, and oranges help brighten the home, even on a bitter January morning or a raw March afternoon. The Chinese red in the living room reflects the deep foliage reds found throughout the grounds, while the dining room’s terra-cotta connects to the 50 different pots on display in their garden. “Each room has one major color and many complementary subordinate colors,” Gordon says, “so when you look from room to room, wall colors in the foreground, middle ground, and background play together to enliven what we see.”

The sense of place is also hard to miss, from the milled-in-Vermont cedar and hemlock that were used to rebuild the barn, to the locally produced soapstone countertops and wall tiles in the kitchen. Gordon’s office, a converted hayloft, densely populated with books and dried flowers, looks out over a back pasture and the garden; a desk by Vermont furniture maker Charles Shackleton anchors the space. Even the artworks—Brian Sweetland’s oil paintings, Richard Brown’s photos—speak to the couple’s appreciation of a landscape that gave birth first to this Early American farm and now to the Haywards’ continuation of it.

  “More than anything, we’ve tried to honor the past,” Gordon explains. “The new grows out of the old, the established. Our decisions about our home and our gardens have been about defining a sense of place. And so the way we’ve decorated our house has come up naturally out of the place where we live, our own experience, and our own relationships.”

Hayward House Project Resources

Ewald Tileworks: Handmade tiles for kitchens and baths. 3400 Westminster West Road, Putney, VT. 802-387-6661Hubbardton Forge: Newly blacksmithed lighting fixtures and accessories. 154 Route 30 South, Castleton, VT. 802-468-3090; hubbardtonforge.comKenzer Furniture: Custom-made furniture and cabinets. 136 East Putney Falls Road, Putney, VT. 802-387-2347; kenzerfurniture.comShackletonThomas: High-end handmade furniture and pottery. The Mill, Route 4, Bridgewater, VT. 802-672-5175; shackletonthomas.comVermont Marble & Granite: Custom-cut, Vermont-quarried marble and granite, plus limestone, slate, and soapstone. 1565 Main St., Castleton, VT. 802-468-8800; vermontmarbleandgranite.comVermont Soapstone Company: Custom-made sinks and other home accents since 1856. 248 Stoughton Pond Road, Perkinsville, VT. 802-263-5404; vermontsoapstone.com   For more on Gordon and Mary Hayward’s landscape design and services, visit: haywardgardens.com