HAIG-BROWN HOUSE TOUR

Explore the Haig-Brown Heritage Properties
through the words of Roderick Haig-Brown

"The land we live on is a rough square of twenty acres, based on eight or nine hundred feet of river bank. A dusty gravel road divides the twenty acres, nine acres on the river side of the road, eleven acres on the other side. The house stands just about in the center of the nine acres...over a hundred feet from the edge of the river," (Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 8).
Photograph to left © Mary Randlett

"The barn is on the far side of the road and three or four acres of rough clearing around it make up the Barn Field. Behind that are the Alders...with a pleasant creek flowing through one corner--Kingfisher Brook,"
(Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 9).
Photograph to right © Mary Randlett

"Between the house and the road is the Driveway and the Birches, a strip of rough ground where two thick, dark green balsams dominate twenty or thirty birch trees and other hard woods,"(Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 9).
Photograph to left © Mary Randlett

"West of the house are the Garage and the Cottage, backed by a stand of tall evergreens. West of these again are two more fields, the Poplar Field (wherein lies Kingdom Come) and the Big Fir Field. Along the river, from the edge of the Main Orchard well out into the Big Fir Field, is the Vegetable Garden," (Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year). pp. 9-10).

"The strip of bank below the cribbing at the foot of the lawn is too open to have served many purposes...but just above it is the lower end of the Swimming Place, behind the Dam. Until I changed it a few years ago this was a series of three or four canoe bays, built by Indians who piled rocks across the current to form narrow stalls in which they could beach their canoes," (Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 10).

"East of the house there is a one-acre pasture along the road... Between that and the river is the Old Orchard, a collection of plum and cherry and pear trees,"
(Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 9).

"Then there is the Hedge, a hundred-and-fifty-foot line of Douglas firs, moved in from the woods...and clipped each summer. Inside that is the Border, a twelve-foot strip of perennials, then the Lawn," (Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 9). "My small border is rich...with irises and columbine and lupins and violas. And over and among them all the peonies, growing with a fine freedom and blooming with a magnificence that no gardener of my careless habits and feeble skill has any right to expect," (Roderick Haig-Brown.Measure of the Year. p. 82).

"The study juts out into the Lawn from the rest of the house. From under the study window the Rose Border runs down to the river," (Roderick Haig-Brown. Measure of the Year. p. 9).