Since 1964…

Knollwood Garden Club members have been caring for the Seaside Garden at Tod’s Point since 1964. Volunteers plan and tend the garden and plan fundraisers and events to raise awareness of the garden for the benefit of the public’s enjoyment.

History of the Seaside Garden*

Greenwich Point is made up of the Tod estate, which joined two islands together. In 1918, the Tods commissioned Marian Cruger Coffin, (1876-1957) to design and build a walled garden. Coffin, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, worked with her friend and cousin Henry Francis du Pont at Winterthur’s gardens in Delaware for 30 years, starting in 1928.

In 1930, she received the Architectural League of New York’s highest award for landscape architecture for her designs in New York and Connecticut. Coffin also is known for her landscapes at the NY Botanical Garden, harbor front at Watch Hill, RI and campus plan of University of Delaware.

Coffin, while raised in the upper class, was herself impoverished by her father. Only homeschooled, she applied to and was rejected by MIT until she was sufficiently tutored to compete in advance studies. She graduated from MIT in 1904 as one of only four women in architecture and landscape design among a student body of 500.

In 1945, the Garden Club of Old Greenwich restored Mrs. Told/s walled garden. In 1964, the Knollwood Garden Club assumed responsibility for the care and preservation of the garden, reputed to be the only publicly owned seaside garden on the Atlantic seaboard. Under the chairmanship of Mrs. Donald Ambler, the Knollwood Seaside Garden, as it then became known, was completed in a little over four years.

*Sources: Greenwich Historical Society, The Watch Hill Conservator, Wikipedia and others