Alice's Garden

Alice's garden in fall

NPS Photo

Quick Facts

Location:

105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA

Amenities

1 listed

Benches/Seating

This small sitting garden, tucked just outside the formal garden, along the east wall of the short addition at the rear of the mansion's ell, invites visitors to sit and enjoy the surrounding landscape.

Alice Longfellow hired her cousin, architect Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr. ("Waddy"), to design this space in 1905, a year after the larger formal garden's redesign by Martha Brookes Brown. Waddy shared with Alice an interest in colonial history and the Colonial Revival, so it is no surprise she chose him to design her little garden sanctuary on the east wall of the former billiards room (now the site's visitor center).

The defining feature of this small garden is a wide bench sheltered by a thirty-foot-wide tri-part arched trellis structure. The design of this structure is both distinctively Colonial Revival and Classical Revival in character; it modestly evokes triumphal arches and Romanesque church architecture. A terracotta and metal-reinforced concrete bas-relief sculpture of the Madonna and child once adorned the apse above the central bench.