We went to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden our first day. It’s very exclusive – you have to make reservations beforehand, and there’s no sign for the entrance. They have several layers of security docents with lists of people with reservations to go through before you can park and walk to the garden.

It is a very beautiful piece of land, all mossy forest around the outside of the gardens. It has a very interesting blend of Asian-inspired and English Garden styles that is combined very well and artistically.

The garden is walled, and has many interesting doorways in, with different shapes and angles. The Spirit walkway is the main way in, and is lined with Korean funerary statues. There is a native plant landscape with blueberry bushes, cranberry, native grasses, and hay-scented fern that looks very causal, but Brittney told me it’s an insanely difficult kind of landscape to achieve.

Inside you see the English influence, with beds of many colors and textures combined in beautiful combinations. I really like the style of English gardens. French gardens are often geometric patterns made with different colors and textures of flowers, but the English style combines them more naturally.

The stone walls were covered in different colors of clematis, and there were tall roses, dahlias, lilies, delphinium, and foxgloves planted in the back, against them. Warm colors were on one side, and cooler colors on the other.

There was a frog pond, with very tame frogs, used to being approached and photographed!

We walked up to the foundations of the Erie House, where the Rockefellers once had a “cottage” mansion and admired the view and the roses. Clothilde managed to snap a few Paprazzi photos of the teenagers, who were mooning around off to the side together.