By: Sean Mahar
Graeme Hardie is the kind of man who makes you feel like you belong somewhere before you have even looked around. Tall, elegant, with a South African accent that gives his words a certain unhurried weight. He moves through his garden the way a host moves through a party; pointing things out, slowing people down, making sure nothing gets missed. He wants visitors to take it in.
On April 4, there was plenty to take in.
The temperature hit 72 degrees and the sky was clear. Yellow daffodils lined the rear lawn in waves, framing a stretch of open green that seemed too large to exist behind a residential street in Nutley, N.J. Visitors moved along brick paths that curved and looped through countless plants and past sculptures gathered from across the world. Some stopped at the koi pond. Others just stood still observed.
“People were sitting there just enjoying the time,” Hardie said. “It was so calm.”
The Mountsier Garden opens to the public just four times a year through the Garden Conservancy. The rest of the year it stays private, invisible to anyone passing by on the street outside.
“It’s great for Nutley to have that sense of space,” Hardie said. “It’s just people don’t know.”
Dominic Paldino and his partner, Lisa Wald, were visiting for the first time. Wald is a Garden Conservancy member who suggested it as a weekend outing. By the time they had walked the property, Paldino was in awe.
“It’s spectacular,” he said.
Wald smiled beside him, “I love how everything changes in every corner that you look at. The path has movement in it. Even the statues have movement in them.”
Shayne Martin has been coming to the Mountsier Garden since grade school, back when the garden was still being actively restructured into the form visitors see today.
“In our neighborhood, which is very much a commuter town for New York, a lot of people who live here work in the city and reside in Nutley,” Martin said. “It’s so important when you come back here to have some type of green space; trees, shrubs, just beautiful.”
She paused at the water. “It just brings me back down to a good base.”
Martin’s connection to the garden stretches back to a time when most of its rear section did not yet exist.
The garden belongs to Silas Mountsier, an investment banker who has called Nutley home since childhood and who turned 98 on April 9th. He started shaping the property from bare dirt in 1945 and quietly accumulated a life’s worth of stories in the soil. Eight of his friends and clients, people with nowhere else to go, were cremated then buried on the property. Hardie described it simply: “That’s sort of like holy ground.”
When Hardie arrived from South Africa in 1992, he was asked to help restore what had been left to grow wild.
“You couldn’t see the house,” Hardie said. “Everything had grown up.”
Mountsier’s directive was simple: start the garden. Hardie brought in a young horticulturalist named Richard Hartridge, whom he had just met while serving as an associate dean for the School of Design at N.C. State. Hartridge replanted the drive, put dogwoods in along the side and restructured the back into something with form and intention. Silas had a lot of trust in Hartridge to turn the garden into what he wanted.
“He had a dream,” Hardie said of Mountsier. “He always had a dream of making this bigger. Richard came along and made the dream work.”
The garden’s reach has extended well beyond Nutley. It has been featured in numerous publications and was showcased in “Garden to the Max” by Teresa Woodard, a book celebrating exceptional American gardens. During the interview, Hardie stepped aside and returned carrying a copy, opening it to a page featuring the Mountsier property. He pointed to the photographs with quiet satisfaction before setting the book down without another word about it.
The garden holds 80 sculptures in total, gathered over decades from exhibitions and private collectors across the world. Two tall columns near the front entrance were from Rome, others were gifts, but each one has a unique story.
When asked what he considers the garden’s greatest achievement, Hardie does not mention the sculptures, the national recognition, or the annual fundraiser and events the garden has seen.
“I’d say the trees,” he confidently says.
Hardie is a member of a tree conservation group in Nutley and dedicates much of his time to tree advocacy. He highlighted the 300-year-old Alaskan cedars at the Mountsier Garden that cool their house so effectively there is little to no air conditioning on the property.
“We need more trees,” Hardie said. “People don’t realize the value.”
The gate will open again this summer. Someone will walk through it for the first time and stop in the middle of a path, looking up at trees that have been standing for three centuries.
Hardie will be there, pointing things out, slowing people down, making sure nothing gets missed.
Sean Mahar 