Planting Fields
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Planting Fields Arboretum
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Coe Hall at Planting Fields Arboretum
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| Nearest city | Oyster Bay, New York |
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| Built | 1915 |
| Architect | Guy Lowell; Walker & Gillette |
| Architectural style | Tudor Revival, Other |
| NRHP Reference # | 79001598 |
| Added to NRHP | January 25, 1979 |
Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park, which includes the Coe Hall Historic House Museum, is an arboretum and state park covering over 400 acres (160 ha) located in the village of Upper Brookville in the town of Oyster Bay, New York.
Near the end of America's Gilded Age, the estate named Planting Fields was the home of William Robertson Coe, an insurance and railroad executive, and his wife Mary "Mai" Huttleston (née Rogers) Coe, the youngest daughter of millionaire industrialist Henry H. Rogers, who had been a principal of Standard Oil. It includes the 67-room Coe Hall, greenhouses, gardens, woodland paths, and outstanding plant collections. Its grounds were designed by Guy Lowell, A. R. Sargent, the Olmsted Brothers, and others. Planting Fields also features an herbarium of over 10,000 pressed specimens.
The name "Planting Fields" comes from the Matinecock Indians who cultivated the rich soil in the clearings high above Long Island Sound.
The history of the present-day property on the famous "Gold Coast" of Long Island began between 1904 and 1912, when Helen MacGregor Byrne – wife of New York City lawyer James Byrne – purchased six farming properties which she collectively referred to as "Upper Planting Fields Farm". The Byrnes hired landscape architect James Leal Greenleaf between 1904 and 1910 to create hedges, perennial borders, and espaliered fruit trees. Though notable features from this period are the Rose Arbor, the Circular Pool and the Green Garden Court, Coe recalled in later life, "Mrs Byrne had done very little in the shape of landscaping. She had a small lawn around the ridge of the residence" and next to it a cornfield. Most of the property, Coe recalled, was "just a jungle of scrub, locusts, and other trees".
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