The Sunken Garden, an octagonal shaped space nearly an acre in size, features thirty-six beds with more than ninety varieties of annuals and perennials encircling a summer house surrounded by brick walkways. A sundial at the rear of the garden is set on a concrete plinth inscribed with the Latin phrase Ars Longa, Vita Brevis – Art is Long, Life is Brief.

The original garden was designed for Ada Brooks Pope and was completed by 1901 when the Popes moved into their new home. By the 1940s wartime shortages and economizing led Theodate Pope Riddle to have the flower beds replaced with grass and the paths removed. The discovery of a ca. 1920 Beatrix Farrand (American landscape architect, 1872-1959) planting plan for “Mrs. J. W. Riddle,” more than likely never implemented during Theodate’s lifetime, became the basis for garden restoration in the mid-1980s, a community service project of the Garden Club of Hartford and Connecticut Valley Garden Club. Landscape Architect Shavaun Towers guided the transformation.