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Bettesworth Construction
Bedford garden

Take a Tour of Martha Stewart’s Most Beautiful Gardens

Explore four distinct garden stories: Turkey Hill’s season-spanning color, Bedford’s estate-scale plantings, Lily Pond’s roses and Skylands’ Jensen-designed landscape.

By Bettesworth Construction Team 4 min read
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Martha Stewart’s gardens are not one repeated design: Turkey Hill’s colorful, season-spanning borders gave way to Bedford’s large-scale plantings, while Lily Pond’s roses found a new home and Skylands retains a landscape designed decades before she bought it. Together, they show how place, history and scale shape a garden.

Four gardens, four different stories

Garden Status and setting Defining character
Turkey Hill Former home in Westport, Connecticut; Stewart lived there from 1971 to 2007. Colorful perennial borders, orchards and all-season structure.
Lily Pond Former beach retreat in East Hampton, New York. Heirloom, climbing and English roses, later moved to Bedford.
Bedford / Cantitoe Corners Stewart’s Bedford, New York, property, developed from open land into an estate garden. Large plantings, focused color groupings, orchard, vegetable plots and structured garden areas.
Skylands Mount Desert Island, Maine; purchased by Stewart in 1997. An established landscape designed in the 1920s by Jens Jensen for Edsel and Eleanor Ford.

The distinctions matter: Turkey Hill and Bedford reflect Stewart’s evolving gardening practice, Lily Pond is a former garden remembered in part through its transplanted roses, and Skylands is an inherited design she stewards rather than one she created. The current Martha Stewart Living garden tour, updated September 19, 2026, describes the properties and their changing landscapes.

Turkey Hill: color and bloom across the seasons

At Turkey Hill, Stewart developed a six-acre garden influenced by Claude Monet’s Giverny and by books about Helena Rutherford Ely. The design brought orchards, perennial borders and flower beds into view from the house, pool and outbuildings, with planned bloom from early spring through fall. Her retrospective recalls that “My work eventually paid off in all-season gardens that had structure, texture, and wonderful, varied plant material.”

Her recollection of the color palette is specific rather than prescriptive: after seeing Giverny, she combined purple Higo and Siberian irises with orange-red and pink Oriental poppies and columbines. It was an expression of her own aesthetic, not a universal planting formula. In her account of Turkey Hill and her peony garden, Stewart says, “I would not be who I am today without the vast knowledge I gained there, on that small bit of paradise.”

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Lily Pond: roses that moved with the gardener

Lily Pond was Stewart’s former beach retreat in East Hampton. Its roses included heirloom, climbing and English varieties; Stewart later transplanted them to Bedford before selling the property. The move links the two gardens, but Lily Pond itself should be understood as a former private garden, not as a public destination.

Bedford: a garden built at estate scale

At Bedford, also known as Cantitoe Corners, Stewart developed formerly open land with trees, an orchard, vegetable plots, flower gardens, shade plantings, greenhouses and farm features. The landscape changes as conditions change: storms fell trees, light shifts from shade to sun, plants outgrow their places, pests prompt adjustments and new interests lead to new plantings.

A representative June walk

A June 9, 2023, garden-tour post traces a route from the front gate through the flower cutting garden, beneath pin oaks, along the Boxwood Allée and through the stable, then past the peony bed and clematis pergola to the terrace parterre. Head gardener Ryan McCallister led that particular tour; Stewart said she could not attend because of work commitments. The post describes more than 200 fruiting trees in the orchard, along with beds featuring dianthus, alliums, lupines and poppies. These are observations from that June, not a guarantee of what will be flowering on another visit or date.

The Boxwood Allée is a strong example of how structure organizes the Bedford landscape. The current official tour gives its length as 650 feet. Boxwood, paths and trellises recur across the gardens, framing varied plantings without making the sites feel interchangeable.

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The peony bed: mass planting with a long season

Bedford’s peonies illustrate Stewart’s shift from carefully planned beds toward mass plantings and focused color groupings. Her account describes 11 double rows containing 22 varieties, with 35 bare-root plants in each row. She chose among them for color and form, and to extend the bloom period. The figures describe her estate planting, not a recommended scale for a home garden.

The vegetable garden: logistics on a large plot

Stewart’s vegetable-garden account describes a 90-by-150-foot plot with rows oriented north–south, a 7-foot fence, 10-foot cross-axial paths, 30-inch rows and 12-inch paths between rows. It also describes rotating vegetables among beds to reduce disease and interrupt pest life cycles, and using salt-hay mulch. Those dimensions belong to Cantitoe Corners; the transferable idea is to plan access and crop rotation around the particular space, not to copy an estate’s measurements.

Skylands: stewardship of an established landscape

Stewart bought Skylands in 1997, but the garden was already established. Danish-born architect Jens Jensen designed the landscape in the 1920s for Edsel and Eleanor Ford. Fir and spruce, moss, stone pools, meandering paths and a long drive contribute to its character. Stewart has said, “I revel in the fact that I have a landscape designed by someone of such importance, who in my mind made absolutely no mistakes whatsoever.” Here, the story is not of designing from scratch but of caring for a significant earlier landscape.

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What connects the gardens

Across the properties, structure and variety work together: allées and paths provide order, while plantings respond to each site’s history and conditions. Turkey Hill emphasized seasonal continuity; Bedford explores planting at a larger scale; Lily Pond’s roses demonstrate how plants can carry a garden’s legacy to a new place; Skylands shows the value of preserving an existing design.

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Stewart describes her own approach simply: “For me, gardening is all about scent, color, and variety, variety, and more variety.” The gardens make that principle visible in different ways, while their changing light, plant growth and seasonal bloom mean they are never a fixed picture.

These are private properties, and the sources do not establish public access or a current tour schedule. The garden descriptions and bloom references are tied to particular seasons and dates.

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