So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens

“Oh, the comfort, the delight I have had in my garden,” an octogenarian grande dame of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, recalls in an 1888 memoir. Alan Emmet’s glimpse into more than two dozen gardens that graced New England’s towns and countryside from just after the American Revolution into the twentieth century has delights of its own. Drawing from diaries, correspondence, historical records, sketch maps, and paintings, Emmet treats the garden—ranging from small urban retreats to ornamental esta…