Grey Gardens may be one of East Hampton’s most notable estates, but the eccentric Beale family members who made the home infamous overshadow the work of an even more impressive prior female resident, Anna Gilman Hill (1872-1955). This photograph, from the collection of the Garden Club of East Hampton, is one of several documenting the gardens she designed for her Georgica area estate.
She and her husband, Robert Hill, initially leased Margaret Bagg Phillips’s Apaquogue Road house in 1913 and 1914. By 1915, they bought the property from her and were settled in their home for the summer of 1916, according to The East Hampton Star’s “Cottage List.” The house was designed by Joseph Greenleaf Thorp in 1897 and built in 1901. Anna Hill hired the pioneering landscape architect Ruth Bramley Dean to help her design the gardens, and Spanish walls were imported. It took Anna Hill time to adapt to the cloudy beachfront conditions that inspired the home’s name.
By 1920, she was the director of the Garden Club of America, serving for six years. In 1921, she became assistant editor of the group’s journal, a role she held until 1945. In 1924, the Hills sold their home on Apaquogue Road to Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Phelan Beale, and they moved back to Anna’s childhood home in Palisades, N.Y., an estate called Niederhurst.
Her gardens were extensively documented. Colored lantern slides capturing the flowers and taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt are in the Library of Congress collection, along with some similar black-and-white photographs and a garden plan showing the beach walkway into the dunes.
The next Tom Twomey Series lecture, “Historic Gardens in East Hampton,” at 5:30 p.m. next Thursday in the Baldwin Room with Blue Carreon, the author of “The Gardens of the Hamptons,” offers more about the gardens Anna Hill and Ruth Bramley Dean created at Grey Gardens.
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Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is head of collection for the Long Island Collection.
