Operating Schedule
January 3 - March 16, 2012
The Breakers
Open Daily
The Elms & Marble House
Open weekends, holidays, and daily February 17-26 for Newport Winter Festival
See The Elms on PBS's This Old House, February 18.
Green Animals Topiary Garden
This small country estate in
Portsmouth was purchased in 1872 by Thomas E. Brayton (1844-1939),
Treasurer of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Company in Fall River,
Massachusetts. It consisted of seven acres of land, a white clapboard
summer residence, farm outbuildings, a pasture and a vegetable garden.
Gardener
Joseph Carreiro, superintendent of the property from 1905 to 1945, and
his son-in-law, George Mendonca, superintendent until 1985, were
responsible for creating the topiaries. There are more than 80 pieces of
topiary throughout the gardens, including animals and birds, geometric
figures and ornamental designs, sculpted from California privet, yew,
and English boxwood. 
Green
Animals is the oldest and most northern topiary garden in the United
States. Mr. Brayton's daughter Alice gave the estate its name because of
the profusion of "green animals." She made the estate her permanent
residence in 1939. Upon her death in 1972, at the age of 94, Miss
Brayton left Green Animals to The Preservation Society of Newport
County. Today, Green Animals remains as a rare example of a
self-sufficient estate combining formal topiaries, vegetable and herb
gardens, orchards and a Victorian house overlooking Narragansett Bay.
Location:
380 Cory's Lane
Portsmouth, RI 02871