The result of decades of passion and dedication, Innisfree is a 200-acre preserve in Millbrook, New York, 90 miles north of New York City. A masterpiece of Oriental influence on a distinctly American landscape, the garden is the creation of painter Walter Beck and his wife Marion, beginning in the early 1930s. Rather than surround their newly completed Queen Anne-style mansion with typical English gardens, the Becks went on a year-long sojourn searching an alternative. In London Beck discovered the scroll paintings of the garden of eighth-century Chinese poet and painter Wang Wei. The paintings inspired Beck to create a series of self-contained landscapes, using natural elements such as rocks, streams, and plants to compose and frame nature. The three –dimensional compositions that he termed “cup gardens” are exquisite from any angle.

Upon Beck’s death in 1954, landscape architect Lester Collins reinterpreted his work at Innisfree. Collins, a student of an ancient Japanese gardening handbook, Sensai Hisho, or Secret Garden Book, incorporated Beck’s many cup gardens into a larger, more unified design, allowing visitors to gracefully traverse the space along paths of gravel, grass or brick that surround the 40-acre Tyrell Lake. Following Marion Beck’s death in 1959, the garden came under the domain of the Innisfree Foundation, created to preserve and maintain the property, and opened to the public in 1960.