APRIL
The Testament of Ann Lee comes to Stissing House
Shaker Supper. The Testament of Ann Lee is a masterpiece, and Celia Rowlson-Hall’s work on the choreography deserves special attention. On Thursday, April 16, we invite you to step into a live scene from the film. You’ll have the opportunity to watch—and even participate in—a dance performance in our upstairs barn. We’ll serve a Shaker supper, and you’re welcome to bring your questions for Celia, who will be joining us in conversation with our Aron Kelly. Tickets are limited. More details here.
Vitsky Counter Takeover. On Saturday, April 25, Rebecca Ellis joins forces with Ariel Yotive of Vitsky Bakery to bring a little Stissing House to Wassaic. Expect peanut brittle cornmeal cookies, Boston cream donuts, and more. See you at 8:30 a.m. at Vitsky!
Hot Cross Buns at Home. If you live too far away for pickup, or missed ordering your baker’s dozen, you can still enjoy Stissing House hot cross buns at home. We’ve shared our recipe—along with all of Rebecca’s top tips—on The Best Bit. Gather your ingredients today, fire up your mixer tomorrow, and bake the perfect buns for Easter morning. Find the recipe and more from Rebecca here.
Our yearly check in on the gardens of Pom Shillingford.
For our very first newsletter in October 2022, we introduced our Salisbury, CT floral supplier, the lovely and talented Pom Shillingford of English Garden Grown, who had been dropping off buckets of flowering branches, extraordinary tulips, peonies, and cow parsley since the day we opened. A lot has happened since.
Over the past few years, Pom has gone from dropping off flowers to creating all of our arrangements, designing and planting our front garden, and bringing her singular eye to weddings and feasts of all kinds at Stissing House. She launched a Substack, built a new website, and added garden design services to her repertoire. And then, as if the garden weren’t already asking enough of her, she went and moved it. All of it.
After fourteen years spent building what she describes as an English garden in “the misnomer of a New England climate” — a three-acre labor of love, obsession, and hard-won wisdom in Salisbury — Pom and the Silver Fox (aka her husband) sold the house, packed the dahlias, hauled over a hundred crates of forced bulbs, and started again. Five miles down the road, yes, but from scratch nonetheless.
We sat down with Pom as mud season gives way to something greener, plans are beginning to germinate, and the first tulips she planted the day after Christmas (in a narrow window between snowstorms, with a closing that had just happened faster than anyone expected) are about to show their faces. She shares what she left behind, what she brought with her, and what it feels like to fall in love with a garden all over again. Follow her over @englishgardengrown for her near daily updates in a writing style that will make you wonder when she’s writing a book!
You spent fourteen years creating an English garden in what you call “the misnomer of a New England climate.” Now you’re starting over five miles down the road with all of that hard-won knowledge. What do you know now that you wish you’d known on day one of the last garden?
I’m so glad I didn’t know as much as I know now, when I started the last garden. It was only because of my navieté that I attempted things from which, with a bit of knowledge, I would have most likely been deterred. Some ideas were admittedly not advisable but others spectacular successes. Either way I learned something. But if I had to say one thing I wish I had done differently, it would have been to plant more trees and to have planted them sooner. I won’t make the mistake of waiting this time.
You’ve written about reminding yourself how long it took to create the last garden (i.e., years and years!). When you stand in your new space right now, and look at brown grass and mud, what do you see? What’s the new version in your head? You know we love details.
In the last garden I tried to keep it very much a garden with the growing areas for cut flowers an integral part of that. This time I’m making life so much easier for all of us and having a separate growing area specifically for cut flowers out in the paddock. Deer and rabbit proof fence, flat wide paths between the beds and once central water supply. In the actual garden-garden, let’s just say I am going to try my hardest to make it a bit more low maintenance than the last one! I will always love the Arts and Craft-style of gardens and I am definitely adopting that approach of seeing this garden as an extension of the house. This time though, there will be less hedges and formal flower borders, more trees, more shrubs, more bulbs. A bit more – a lot more - wildness – just still with enough structure to see me through the winter months.
You moved the garden as well as the house — hauling plants over in cars and U-Hauls for weeks. Which plants made the journey, and which ones are you most desperate to get back in the ground?
Actually, very few plants made the move. We were told not to raid the garden and our move happened so fast I didn’t have time to take cuttings. I did dig and save all my dahlia tubers, along with some hellebores. We also hauled across the 100-plus crates of forcing bulbs from the cooler that I had already potted up. Along with the 8000 tulip bulbs that had arrived in September and were waiting for a new home in which to be planted. My hysteria about a quick closing had nothing to do with us having a roof over our heads but having ground to get these into in time. We managed to find a tiny window between snow storms the day after Christmas to finally plant them.
Scenes from mud season in the new garden plot.
You inherited a double garage, four stables, a tractor barn, and a meadow. For a gardener, that’s less a blank slate and more a set of invitations. What’s speaking to you most loudly right now? What do you already know you have to do in those spaces?
Our realtor thought we were nuts as we were more excited about the outbuildings here and the basement – THE dream basement for forcing bulbs – than we were about the house. As much as I love my husband (aka the Silver Fox), being able to have our own spaces out there so my floristry tables are no longer littered with his carpentry projects is going to be a joy. There is even chat of turning one of the stables into – drumroll please - a greenhouse!
You described a moment when you drove past the old house and felt only a brief pang. Do you think the garden you’re about to build will feel like a continuation of something, or genuinely something new?
It was definitely easier driving past the last house in the depths of winter with the garden buried in snow. Now that things are beginning to wake up again and I know how things are emerging there, I’m back to taking the long route into town again. Gardens are always so much of the person who created them so there will definitely be a continuation here to some extent of the last one – there are some plants I am never going to be without. My last garden started as an attempt to recreate my grandmother’s English garden and forge a connection I felt was lacking in my life here with home and my roots. It was definitely an enormous emotional wrench walking away from it but just as the essence of her garden came with me there, so it will continue here.
The forced bulbs in the basement — the Gypsy Princess hyacinths, the Mount Everest snowdrops — seem to have been doing real emotional work this winter. Do you think gardeners have a particular relationship with waiting, or does starting over test even that muscle?
Gardening teaches us the necessity of patience but even more so the reward of it. Just the idea that I am once again going to have the privilege of watching new trees turn from saplings into established beauties again gives me solace now. Being patient and waiting for this new garden is akin to being pregnant. Along with a level of dread and angst of what is required is the knowledge that I’m going to experience the magic of falling in love again.
What’s something new you’re planting in this garden?
Before the winter of never-ending snow, we managed to clear a large area around the house that had been home to an army of dead pines and invasives. (It might have ended up being an area somewhat larger than I originally planned!). So, while I am thinking the closest area to the house will be more formal, I’m making the most of this unexpected opportunity and going native. Grasses, perennials and shrubs – all natives. I’m not sure I would quite call it a meadow but close. The idea of being able to forage all those hedgerow beauties from the garden itself is deeply appealing.
What’s the Silver Fox’s first big project? And how excited is he about it?
The Silver Fox has so many ideas. Mainly to do with the tractor barn and the river, so I think it’s safe to say he is not exactly over the moon to first have a shopping list of beds, fence, gates and irrigation systems to build for my cutting garden before he can get to any of those. First priority for everyone is to have somewhere to plant out my seedlings and tubers. He did get to have some fun at least last week installing an electric fence around the tulip beds. Anything that requires multiple trips to Agway and Herrington’s and he’s a happy man!
Quickfire!
Best thing about your move: finally clearing out a lifetime of hoarded emotional baggage from our previous attic. The things I had thought I had to keep and the joy/relief of letting them go.
Most surprising or unexpected thing about your move: all the lovely things people said when they found out that while we were moving house, we weren’t actually moving away. It was a bit like being alive at your own wake to hear how sad people were at the idea of you being gone.
Most loved space or thing in your new home: the span of huge windows in our living room - the morning light is sublime even on the gloomiest day.
Unpacking playlist: Anything the kids wanted to listen to so they would actually help!
Dream dinner party in the new dining room: It was the Silver Fox’s birthday two weeks after we moved in. I had no working oven so we had take-out curry and invited all the friends who had helped drag the contents of our barn and all my garden gear over here before Christmas while I was living it up at Craft Feast.
Favorite bulb (currently): Winston Churchill narcissi – the scent is divine.