Naumkeag

Author's Comments

The Blue Steps are the photograph everyone comes for, and I will not pretend I came for anything else my first time. Fletcher Steele designed them in the nineteen thirties and they still feel improbable - four flights of arched fountain pools, painted a blue that has no business existing in a Berkshire garden, lined on either side by paper birches whose white trunks rise in perfect counterpoint. It is one of those rare designed spaces that photographs better than it has any right to. Morning is the hour. The steps face in a way that catches early light through the birches, and what you want is the dappled version, not the flat one. Arrive when the gates open. The light moves quickly here, and by mid-morning the contrast collapses into something less interesting. I have made the wide shot from the top looking down and from the bottom looking up, and I think the bottom is the stronger frame - the birches lean inward, the arches stack, and the sky reads as a small bright shape at the top of the composition. But the photograph I did not expect to care about was a detail shot of a single pool, the blue paint chipped slightly at the edge, a birch leaf floating on the surface. That one I keep going back to. October weekends are crowded and require booking ahead. I prefer late September, when the maples on Monument Mountain have just started to turn and the gardens are still full but no longer at peak performance. The estate itself, the shingled cottage and the long views toward the hills, deserves time too. Most visitors give it twenty minutes. Give it two hours.

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