Great Bedford garden, 4-bedroom contemporary hit the market for $2.4 million

Can a great garden sell a house in Bedford? Pepe and John Maynard certainly hope so.

For the last 30 years, they’ve been tending an 8-acre garden that’s considered one of the best private gardens in the Hudson Valley. But now that they’re moving to Massachusetts to be closer to their two sons and four grandchildren, the Hook Road property — garden and all — is on the market for $2.4 million.

(Photos here by our Tania Savayan; I’ll post mine later.)

Along with the enchanting four-season oasis, the buyer gets a four-bedroom contemporary, which the Maynards built as a weekend home in 1973. Of course, it’s not exactly the same as it was back then: In 1984, they added a light-filled master bedroom with his-and-her dressing rooms and bathrooms, and in 1998 — six years after the house became the family’s year-round home — they installed an indoor lap pool. But despite these additions, the home’s big draw remains the garden.

“It’s a very special property, and I think there are people who will get it,” says Diane Weber, one of two listing agents with Houlihan Lawrence. “You stand there in that garden and you think: ‘This is an Impressionist painting.’ ”

“We would love to steer a gardener here,” John says. “I think the hardscaping has been done and they can play with the plant material to their hearts’ content.”

John and Pepe:

The Maynards’ garden and the 4,100-square-foot house, which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows in most of the first-floor rooms, play off each other in every season.

“Every window has a view of the garden,” says Pepe, an accomplished high-end garden designer with clients throughout the Northeast. “When I placed stuff outside, I came inside first to see what it looked like.” The master bedroom addition, for instance, juts right out into the garden.

“If I woke up in that bedroom every day — looking at the gardens and that fabulous view — I’d have such a smile on my face,” says Weber.

Dozens of beautifully crafted stone walls lead out from the house in every direction. A massive bluestone terrace sits outside the dining room, and stone pathways lead visitors to and from the many garden beds.

Raised by two great English gardeners on a 1,000-acre ranch in Kenya, Pepe learned as a child to follow the paths of wild animals through the brush. As a result, she believes in creating walkways that follow “paths of desire,” trails that lead to where your body naturally wants to go.

She also learned the proper Latin botanical names of all the plants in the garden — Callicarpa bodinieri for a beautyberry shrub or Nyssa sylvatica for a black gum tree, for example — at a very young age.

Pepe carved much of the Bedford garden right out of a steep hill that looms over the property, adding a series of graceful terraces and retaining walls to create level spaces for ever-more garden beds that overflow with bulbs, perennials, annuals, grasses, long-blooming shrubs and, most of all, trees.

Over the years, she and John have added hundreds of evergreen shrubs and trees — hemlocks, hollies, umbrella pines, magnolias, spruces, rhododendrons and andromedas — to the oak and dogwood forest that was here when they bought the property in 1969 (they built the house four years later). Seedlings that were mere twigs are now fully grown trees. “There is nothing more beautiful than a tree,” Pepe likes to say.

Tall oaks dominate the whole landscape, and their canopy adds a dramatic verticality that takes your eye up toward the sky. Back on the ground, most of the plants are low-maintenance and fuss-free, so novice gardeners could be at home here, too. “By the time I do everybody else’s garden, there’s no time for my own,” Pepe says.

The property also includes a walled vegetable garden, a heated barn, a greenhouse, a garage, an outdoor pool, a wood shed and a chicken house with raccoon-proof runs around it. All it needs now is another sure-handed gardener to take charge — or, at the very least, an enthusiast who’d be willing to learn.