Landscape Information
Designed for Mary Stewart by Florence Yoch and Lucille Council in 1922 for a dramatic hillside site, Il Brolino, means “the little garden.” Yoch’s original plan, conceived in concert with George Washington Smith’s Italian villa-style house, included a series of diverse garden rooms possessing both simple and complex geometries. Many of the iconic spaces and features of an Italian villa were present including parterres, bosco, rose garden, sunken garden, paved terraces, a cutting garden, lemon house, pergola, and a signature topiary garden. All of the architectural features were designed by Yoch and were intended to frame the site’s panoramic views. These architectural embellishments, such as a monumental exhedra, were designed to establish a strong foreground contrast to the mountainous landscape beyond the garden. For her design, Yoch drew inspiration from many celebrated Italian villa features including the fountain at Rome’s Villa Medici, complete with its raked gravel surround, and the exhedra at the Sienese villa, Vicobello.
