Dozens of color and bandw photographs, ranging from the construction of the house to snapshots of family members, illustrate the text which recounts the history of the estate from its founding early in the century through its recent transfer to the National Trust. It tells how each successive generation left its stamp, and includes never before published reminiscences of five generations of Rockefellers. Contains a family tree, visitor information, and a map of the gardens. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Larry Lederman takes readers on a privileged photographic tour through the Rockefeller family gardens in the Hudson Valley and Maine. The Rockefeller family is synonymous with great wealth, extraordinary philanthropy, and exceptional stewardship of unspoiled landscapes. In their private world, the Rockefellers have created extraordinary gardens. Over the course of a century, their grounds have matured and evolved to reflect the layered visions of three generations of the Rockefeller family. At Kykuit in the Hudson Valley, John D. Rockefeller valued broad expanses of lawns with a noble forest of evergreens at the perimeter. His son—John D. Rockefeller Jr.—molded this landscape into a more formal Beaux-Arts garden design. This garden was later enhanced by Nelson A. Rockefeller’s addition of an extensive collection of twentieth-century sculpture, which is still in place today. In The Rockefeller Family Gardens, photographer Larry Lederman gives readers unprecedented access to the two Kykuit gardens—the expansive Beaux-Arts–style garden and a little-known Japanese garden, brought to life by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. This book also takes readers inside the garden at Eyrie, the family summer retreat in Seal Harbor, Maine. There, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller collaborated with noted designer Beatrix Farrand to design a walled garden inspired by Asian aesthetics at the perimeter and filled with traditional perennials. Lederman’s photographs capture the beauty of these gardens in all seasons, focusing on the geometry of the designs and the color and light that animates them. This tour through the spaces is accompanied by text from Todd Forrest of the New York Botanical Garden, Cassie Banning of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, and Cynthia Bronson Altman of Kykuit to provide commentary on the design and plant materials featured in this captivating collection of photos.

What it was like to be as rich as Rockefeller: How a house gave shape and meaning to three generations of an iconic American family One hundred years ago America's richest man established a dynastic seat, the granite-clad Kykuit, high above the Hudson River. Though George Vanderbilt's 255-room Biltmore had recently put the American country house on the money map, John D. Rockefeller, who detested ostentation, had something simple in mind—at least until his son John Jr. and his charming wife, Abby, injected a spirit of noblesse oblige into the equation. Built to honor the senior Rockefeller, the house would also become the place above all others that anchored the family's memories. There could never be a better picture of the Rockefellers and their ambitions for the enormous fortune Senior had settled upon them. The authors take us inside the house and the family to observe a century of building and rebuilding—the ebb and flow of events and family feelings, the architecture and furnishings, the art and the gardens. A complex saga, The House the Rockefellers Built is alive with surprising twists and turns that reveal the tastes of a large family often sharply at odds with one another about the fortune the house symbolized.

Follow Tommy Pack's travels as he crosses the United States and Canada with his family and friends. Join in the fun and adventure as you read his accounts originally published in the Inman Times.

From Italy to Switzerland, Germany to Spain, and Philadelphia to New Orleans, Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq describes the beauty of different historic gardens in this collection of essays. A Grand Tour of Gardens: Traveling in Beauty through Western Europe and the United States showcases her excursions to historic gardens around the world. Through her own experiences LeClercq enables the garden adventurer to anticipate the world of color, design, and horticulture in each magnificent garden described here. The essays in A Grand Tour of Gardens are filled with history, plant lore, anecdote, and high-society gossip of the most famous public and private gardens of the United States and Europe. A Grand Tour of Gardens begins with an essay by LeClercq's mother, the late Emily Whaley. "Gardening as Art and Entertainment" discusses Whaley's iconic garden on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, and its other gardens that she knew and describes here. For every garden visited, LeClercq vividly details new combinations of horticultural art forms and enlivens the reader's imagination. Traveling to Claude Monet's Garden at Giverny, France; Frederick Law Olmstead's Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; and the garden of Beatrice Rothschild on the Cote d'Azure, LeClercq features these gardens in words and illustrations. A Grand Tour of Gardens serves as a roadmap for viewing gardens worldwide and provides a set of rubrics for assessing design elements of each garden. The tips shared in these essays provide a visitor with the tools for deciphering the "language" of a nursery. In eight fun-filled chapters, A Grand Tour of Gardens takes the reader on a worldwide visit to the discovery of historic gardens as a source of art, inspiration, and entertainment.

Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair - the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on ...