Mount Cuba Center
Greenville, Delaware, USA

Mount Cuba was the home of Lammot du Pont Copeland and his wife Pamela from 1937 until her death in 2001. They sited their Georgian house (Victorin and Samuel Homsey, architects) atop one of Delaware’s highest hills with magnificent views across steep hills and deep valleys of the Eastern American Piedmont, to the Delaware river and the Coastal Plain below. Thomas W. Sears was engaged to lay out the drive and formal gardens which were almost completed as the Second World War broke out. Terraces for outdoor living and floral displays surround two sides of the house, with walkways leading through formal plantings, to the large cutting garden and out into the larger landscape. After the war, and on the advice of Henry F. du Pont of WINTERTHUR, Marian Coffin (1880-1957) was commissioned to complete the formal gardens. The Round Garden, a small, formal flower garden, with a dipping pool in the form of a Maltese cross, was designed for seasonal displays of tulips, delphiniums, lilies, roses, and a variety of annuals and chrysanthemums. Mount Cuba is most celebrated for its naturalistic plantings of native wild flowers, ferns, shrubs, and trees begun in the early 1950s, fulfilling a love of native plants Pamela Copeland had since childhood. In young tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) woodland, grown up on an eroded cornfield abandoned in the late 1920s, a series of ponds was created, connected by sounding rills, and accessed on paths surrounded by foliar tapestries and, in spring, a wealth of wild flowers, trilliums, wood poppies, foam flower, Virginia bluebells, and deciduous azaleas.

-Dr. William Richard Lighty

From The Oxford Companion to the Garden which The Washington Post recently called “the perfect guide for anyone who wants to learn in an entertaining way about magnificent classical to contemporary gardens of the world.” Every Friday in August we’ll highlight a different public garden from the Companion to the Garden.