It is a conversation you often hear in New York City, people saying the noise and the crowds are driving them crazy and that they need to move away. In 1925 she answered a New York Times ad for an abandoned blueberry farm in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.
Photography by Jeanne Rostaing except where noted.
Millay explained her decision to move to the country by telling a reporter that, while the city was exciting and gave her a lot of ideas, she needed to go somewhere quiet to write.
Millay named her property Steepletop after Steeplebush (Spirea tomentosa), a spiky pink wildflower (also known as hardhack) that was growing there in abundance.
The land around the house eventually became the site of 13 garden rooms surrounding a tiny writer’s cabin where Millay spent her afternoons in creative solitude.
Photograph courtesy of the Millay Society at Steepletop.
As befits a poet who frequently used images drawn from nature in her work, Millay loved plants and would routinely devote time every day to working in her gardens.
The south terrace garden beside the house has not been restored but has been cleaned up so the plants which are left from Millay’s time (ferns, forsythia, hosta, hollyhocks, roses, and a crabapple tree) can grow unimpeded by invasive weeds.
The Millay Society acquired the house in 1986 after the death of Millay’s younger sister, Norma, who had lived in the house since shortly after Millay’s death in 1950.
The first step was to commission a cultural landscape report that showed what was planted where, and how Millay and her husband used the gardens.
To create as authentic a restoration as possible, he says he used the landscape report extensively as well as records in the Library of Congress and the meticulous notes and lists that Millay made about what she planted.
The first garden to be restored was the kitchen garden where Millay grew a bounty of produce for the dinner table as well as flowers and herbs.
The restoration of the kitchen garden was completed by Minchak in 2014. He says Millay was really ahead of her time in practicing companion planting and in combining vegetables with flowers.
Photograph courtesy of the Millay Society at Steepletop.
The stand of white pine which Millay planted as seedlings around her writing cabin reminded her of her childhood in Maine and were given to her by her mother.
In old stone-lined pathways used by cattle, Millay created beds for hollyhocks, rudbeckia, and bachelor buttons.
Photograph courtesy of the Millay Society at Steepletop.
An area called “The Ruins” was designed by Millay to fit into the stone foundations of two dilapidated antique barns that the couple had pulled down.
Walking through these gardens, you begin to notice the soundtrack. It comes from the old concrete swimming pool, where it is said Millay dictated that only nude swimming would be allowed.
Photograph courtesy of the Millay Society at Steepletop.
A closer look reveals a colony of small frogs who have taken up residence in the brackish water.
Mark O’Berski, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Millay Society, says that when the pool was built in 1931 it was provided with an ingenious gravity-driven plumbing system which brought water from a faraway stream on the other side of the road.
Perhaps the most poignant reminder of Millay at Steepletop is a flat open area she called “The Dingle.” During the time Millay lived there, it was a performance and gathering space surrounded by a massive arborvitae hedge that helped to screen the celebrity writer and her friends from gawkers.