Skylands Botanical Garden

Francis Lynde Stetson (1846-1920) assembled 'Skylands Farms' in the Ramapo Mountainsand employed Samuel Parsons, Jr., a protégé of Frederick Law Olmsted, to lay out the estate. Parsons, a founder member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and New York City parks commissioner, used photographs Skylands in his book, The Art of Landscape Architecture, Its Development and Its Application to Modern Landscape Gardening (1915). Skylands was then bought by Clarence McKenzie Lewis (1877-1959), a trustee of the New York Botanical Garden who built a new Tudor mansion in a material never used by the Tudors: granite. John Russell Pope designed the new house and Vitale and Geiffert to design the gardens. (Geiffert also designed the Rockefeller Center and the grounds of Princeton University). New Jersey purchased Skylands in 1966 and New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean designated the area surrounding the manor house as New Jersey's official botanical garden. The result is midway between a Victorian garden and a botanical garden.