Another Secret Garden

This is a place in Saratoga Springs, NY that I have many happy childhood memories of . It is Yaddo. The property used to belong to Spencer and Katrina
Trask at the turn of the century. The name is after one of the Trask's daughters who when little couldn't pronounce "shadow", but said "yaddo" and this was adopted for the name of the estate. Besides a vast layout of rose gardens, there are statues, goldfish ponds and fountains, a long arbored walkway covered with climbing roses and the Trask mansion. Today the mansion is being used to house artists who come to be "inspired", and the gardens are open to the public.
There is more history besides the childhood memories for me. When my maternal grandfather was a young teen, he and his parents lived in the caretakers' house, working for the Trasks. My great-grandfather was a gardener and my grandfather was a chauffeur for Mrs. Trask and those staying at the mansion. He also had the job of lighting the gas lamps along the long driveway to the mansion. Sometime during this period, he met my grandmother. They married when he was 19 and my grandmother only 17; my mother was born a few years later (but that is another story).
Some of the Trask history is tragic; all four of their children died young of childhood diseases and Spencer was killed in a train wreck in 1909, leaving Katrina to run the mansion. She died in 1922, the year my grandparents were married. You can read more about Yaddo at: http://www.yaddo.org. You can read more about the Trasks at: http://diglib.nypl.org/dynaweb/ead/human/mssyaddo.
But as a child, I knew nothing of this tragic history, only that my grandpa had worked there as a young man. We would go as a family at least once a year to look at the roses and I would imagine it as the setting for "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. There was even a gate in the shadow of the pine trees leading to the mansion made of Adirondack style cut logs which held much mystery for me; imagining what the mansion was like on the other side of the gate. When I was a teen, I thought someday I would like to be married there, walking down the long rose arbor (this didn't happen, I was married in October). Many Spring weddings do take place there though.
So, Yaddo has many happy memories for me, mixing real family history with imagined fantasy to take me into a wonderful world of mystery and beauty. I would encourage anyone who is in the Saratoga Springs area to visit there, especially in June when the roses are in bloom.