Skylands (estate)

Historic house in New Jersey, United States

Skylands is a estate property located in Ringwood State Park in Ringwood, New Jersey, a borough in Passaic County in the state of New Jersey. The Skylands property consists of the historic Skylands Manor mansion, The Castle at Skylands Manor and the New Jersey Botanical Garden; the botanical garden is and it is open to the public year round. The Skylands property is within the Ramapo Mountains and it is maintained by the Skyland Association. The property is marketed with the garden as New Jersey State Botanical Garden at Skylands. The house and gardens, including formal gardens and specimen plantings, were built in the 1920s by Clarence MacKenzie Lewis, a New York City stockbroker and civil engineer. Lewis hired architect John Russell Pope to design the 44 room Tudor revival manor house. The manor is a reproduction English mansion featuring rectangular, bay and oriel windows. A nine hole golf course once graced this property. The estate was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 28, 1990, for its significance in architecture and landscape architecture.

In 1966 the entire estate was bought by the State of New Jersey to form a State Botanical Garden whose settings include a Lilac Garden, Magnolia Walk, the Wild Flower Garden, the Crab Apple Vista, an allée of 166 trees extending almost a half mile, and the Perennial Garden. The entire section now comprises slightly over 4,000 acres (16 km2) of parkland. The Winter Garden included New Jersey's largest Jeffery pine (Pinus jeffreyi). Its east side features a weeping beech beside a century old upright beech, as well as a Japanese umbrella pine. Other interesting non native trees include an Algerian fir (Abies numidica) and Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica).