Roxana Robinson - Treetop

About

Treetop is the garden of the novelist and biographer Roxana Robinson, set on the grounds of a rustic Arts and Crafts house built in 1928 by her grandparents. It’s an idiosyncratic hillside garden incorporating granite ledge, steep ravines, placid greensward, and a wooded slope down to a lake.

The gardens are separated into two areas. Closest to the house is the level terrain of “Sissinghurst,” with its decorous palette of blues, pinks, silvers, and purples, stone path, and birdbath. “Margaritaville” is a wild and rocky ravine with a riot of giant ferns, orange tithonia, scarlet crocosmia, red salvias, and orange asclepias. The garden contains a homemade frog pond and a house for the wren.

Around the gardens are deep woods. Here nature plays a larger part than nurture, and natives outnumber the nons. The owner’s grandfather was a nature writer, her parents were bird-watchers, and the owner writes about the natural world in her novels and essays.

The gardens are an attempt to make peace between the wild and the domestic, a response to the powerful surrounding landscape of forest and boulder that also reflects the owner’s love of roses and clematis.

This garden’s estimated size is 1 acre.

This Garden Host reports the following Terrain Notes about the garden: Visitors to this garden must walk up a steep driveway to access the garden. The garden is mostly flat, and after two steps onto the walkway it can be seen from a stone walkway, but to see all of it requires a walk down a slanted path and across a stone ledge and up stone steps. Be advised that apart from the stone walkway, the terrain is uneven.

2026 Open Day Date: Saturday, June 27

Open Day Hours: 10am–4pm