Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion

Frederick Thompson made his fortune in New York banking, but his wife had deep roots here: Mary Clark was the daughter of Myron Holley Clark, a governor of New York, and Canandaigua was her home ground. When the couple bought the property in 1863 it was just fourteen acres and a brick farmhouse, but as the bank prospered they added land and ambition, until in 1885 they began building the mansion that still crowns the hill.

The house was designed by the Boston architect Francis R. Allen and finished in 1887, a rambling forty-room pile of rusticated gray stone trimmed in reddish Medina sandstone, with a slate roof and all the turrets and gables of the Queen Anne style. The Thompsons summered here for years, and by every account it was a warm and well-loved home rather than a cold showpiece, which is part of why what Mary did next feels so personal.

Frederick died in 1899, and Mary, childless and grieving, poured herself into the grounds. Beginning around 1902 she created a whole series of themed formal gardens, nine in all, as a memorial to her husband and a place to lose herself in beauty. There was a grand Italian garden with clipped hedges and a fleur-de-lis pattern, a rose garden that today holds thousands of blooms, a rock garden threaded with streams and small waterfalls, and quieter spaces with names like the Blue and White Garden, the Moonlight Garden, and the Sub Rosa Garden tucked behind walls.

The showpiece is the Japanese garden, created in 1906 by a New York artist named K. Wadamori. Little arched bridges cross a narrow stream, a red torii gate frames the path, and a Kyoto-style tea house sits at the center, and it is often called the first residential Japanese garden built in America. Walking from one garden to the next, each with its own mood and planting, you get a rare, complete picture of how a wealthy family of the era thought a landscape should be shaped.

Between 1903 and 1915 Mary commissioned the great greenhouse firm of Lord and Burnham, the same builders behind the famous conservatories at the New York Botanical Garden, to raise a whole complex of glasshouses at Sonnenberg. At its heart is a domed palm house, and around it run greenhouses filled with orchids, cacti, ferns, and tropical plants, so that even in a hard Finger Lakes winter there is a warm, green, blooming room to step into. A neoclassical bathhouse and pool round out the grounds.

The estate nearly did not survive. After Mary died in 1923 the property left the family, and by 1931 it had been sold to the federal government, which built a veterans hospital on the surrounding farmland and turned the mansion into a nurses residence. The gardens fell into decades of neglect. In the 1970s local volunteers stepped in, formal restoration began in 1973, the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and Sonnenberg opened to the public for the first time.

New York State officially bought the estate in the mid-2000s, and it is now run as a state historic park. It stands today as one of the very few surviving Country Place Era estates in the country where the mansion, the greenhouses, and all the formal gardens still exist together, so you can read the whole vision of the place instead of a fragment of it.

Sonnenberg sits on Charlotte Street on the north side of Canandaigua, an easy few minutes from the lakefront and Main Street, at the northern tip of Canandaigua Lake in the Finger Lakes. It is an open, walkable site, and a tram runs from the parking lot up to the mansion if you would rather save your legs for the gardens themselves.

Plan on at least a couple of unhurried hours to do it justice: time to walk all nine gardens, step inside the palm house among the tropical plants, and tour the two furnished floors of the mansion. It is at its most glorious from late spring through early fall, with the roses peaking in June, and it quiets down for the winter. For a Gilded Age estate built out of one woman's love and loss, and kept whole against long odds, it is one of the most rewarding stops in the whole Finger Lakes region.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.