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When Janet Mavec’s husband bought Bird Haven Farm in Western New Jersey in the 1980s, it had been the long-cherished retreat of publishing maven Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, whose most famous character was Nancy Drew. Nancy had been invented by Harriet’s father, who also came up with the Hardy Boys and earlier characters with evocative names like Dashaway Dan. His untimely death meant that his daughters inherited Miss Drew before their father was able to enjoy her success, and Harriet played the central role in turning Nancy into a publishing phenomenon. Janet, who has lived at Bird Haven Farm for 30 years, maintains that the original old stone house is haunted by Harriet.
It’s okay, she’s quite happy: on reading Janet’s entertaining and splendidly photographed book, Bird Haven Farm: The Story of an Original American Garden, it is clear that she approaches the farm’s bounty and generosity in a similar way to Harriet, sharing it with friends and family. For Harriet, it was a retreat that was also a venue for writer’s parties (her domestic focus was on the vegetable and cut flower garden). But the property’s collection of buildings, set within 100 acres, was not terribly functional, and after some sleuthing into its past, Janet decided that the renowned landscape architect Fernando Caruncho was just the person to make sense of the landscape’s clues.
Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo, except where noted.
When Caruncho first visited Bird Haven Farm in 2001, he recalls, the property’s layout “evoked a sense of unease and constraint, as if the trees of the neighboring forest were an encroaching army, encircling the property.” Trails were cut through to invite in shafts of light and tree canopies were raised at the forest edge to highlight their forms.
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