The Garden at Federal Twist

About

When we moved into a mid-century house overlooking the woods, I immediately knew only a naturalistic garden would be appropriate to the place. The garden is hidden. You enter through a woodland pathway circling around the house, where you first glimpse the broader landscape behind—a large, sunny glade, its roughly oval shape, an oculus open to the sky. Federal Twist is a landscape garden, with multiple intersecting pathways, immersive plantings, and surrounding tall forest trees that create an illusion of spatial immensity. The garden is designed to encourage exploration and attention to detail, and to evoke strong emotion through encounters with the immersive plantings and striking chiaroscuro effects created as the sun passes behind the surrounding trees, evoking a sense of mystery.

Begun as an experiment to explore garden making in the challenging conditions of unimproved, heavy, wet clay, the garden uses a strict ecological approach (right plant, right place), with plants carefully selected for Federal Twist’s woodland edge ecology. It promotes biodiversity by layering plantings to create structural complexity, and through ample use of dead wood and organic debris to enhance habitat for microorganisms, invertebrates, and other life forms. 

Federal Twist has been featured in the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, Gardens Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other magazines and books, including Thomas Rainer’s and Claudia West’s Planting in a Post-Wild World, Claire Takács’s Dreamscapes, Christopher Wood’s Gardenlust, and Wild by Noel Kingsbury and Claire Takács. Federal Twist was also featured in the BBC television series Monty Don’s American Gardens and in his book of the same name. James Golden’s own book on making the garden, The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves, will be available for sale.

This garden’s estimated size is 1.5 acres. 

2026 Open Day: Saturday, June 20

Hours: 12-6