These days, the garden at Oak Hill nourishes the spirit more than the body, although it does keep Gayle in fine physical shape: She spends up to 30 hours a week, often in the company of her yellow Labradors, Biscuit and Maisie, tending what’s now an informally formal showplace. The 3 ½-acre, five-tiered bowl garden sinks down to a central birdbath, ringed by terraces brimming with a feast of color, form, contrast and texture. “I’ll just check every terrace and see what’s offensive,” says Gayle, “and see if I can take care of it.” Round heads of allium, purple or white, sway above feathery, lower-growing Ward’s yews. “I did this all by myself,” she says, indicating a shade bed of white bleeding heart, columbine, epimedium and bruneria tucked at the southeast wall of the garden, under an old crab apple and a couple of weeping cherries. Nearby, deep red, divine-smelling roses tumble over a wall.
Of course, there are nearly two centuries and a few owners between Monroe’s truck garden and today’s horticultural confection. The estate passed to the family of Confederate Lt. Col. John W. Fairfax (no relation to the Lord Fairfaxes of p. 128) in the 1850s, to Frank Littleton in 1920 and, finally, to Thomas N. DeLashmutt, Tom’s father, in 1948. The Tom H. DeLashmutts and their two daughters, India and Abigail, moved in 15 years ago, after the death of Mrs. DeLashmutt Sr. Each family made its own mark, and each built upon the work of those who’d gone before.
“When the Fairfax family owned it, it became more of a lady’s garden,” says Gayle. “The descriptions are ‘a gently sloping, southern-facing garden,’ and it was outlined in roses and lilacs.” Some of those lilacs remain.
It was Frank Littleton who laid the primary bones of the current garden, the formal brick terraces that make the bowl. Gayle describes Littleton as “a local fellow from Leesburg … he married a rich Yankee and managed to spend all of her money” between house and garden. “He got in the heavy equipment,” she adds. “He leveled it going east-west. And the beautiful walls—he was a man with a lot of vision and very good taste, and I think he probably designed it himself.”
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