Gunston Hall Garden

The house was built, c1755 for George Mason (1725-1792), who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights and influenced the 1791 US Bill of Rights. Gunston Hall is a Georgian house with a restored garden. Before the historic garden restoration there was a re-created garden on the site (designed by Alden Hopkins, who also worked on Colonial Williamsburg). The historically more accurate garden which can be seen today is less attractive than the Hopkins design, but on this important site the trustees were surely right in their decision to prefer accurate restoration to an imaginative pastische.