The Property

Toad Hall is a beautiful seaside residential property located on 2.44 acres sitting atop a granite bluff overlooking the Sakonnet River in Portsmouth, RI. The original house was designed and built in 1998 by yacht designer Gary Hoyt as his family residence. The property was purchased by its current owner in 2007 and renamed Toad Hall after her 1951 Green Crosley Super Hot Shot nicknamed “Toad” in reference to Mister Toad of The Wind in the Willows. Where else is Mister Toad’s car going to reside but at Toad Hall!

The Collections

Toad Hall Arboretum is a garden in constant motion. The garden staff under direction of Ronn St. Jean and Mike Ferreira is always on the move changing and transplanting to fit the needs of the plants in a difficult ocean-swept environment and meeting the design elements of the owner. This accredited arboretum boasts an extraordinarily diverse array of trees, shrubs, fruit and vegetable crops, herbaceous perennials, and annuals. As the owner of this ever-changing and improving landscape explains, Toad Hall “…will continue to encourage our sister arboreta to expand and push the limits to become bigger and better. By doing so we can all help the environment we live in to improve.”

The Mission

The mission of Toad Hall is reach to out to local professional and educational clubs and organizations, promoting sustainable ornamental and vegetable garden designs in seaside residential settings by offering a location for workshops and trainings. The Toad Hall property welcomes outreach programs designed to allow educational opportunities to students as well as professional groups and garden clubs for meetings and training throughout the year.

Special Features

A GARDEN IN MOTION

The perimeter of the Toad Hall property is surrounded by a mixed texture conifer border of arborvitae, spruce, and pine. The front gardens showcase thousands of tulips and daffodils - every year is a different display of varieties (2019 showcased 12,154 bulbs) - mixed throughout garden beds interplanted with mature rhododendrons under a dappled shade canopy of red maple and tupelo. As spring colors fade, the ephemeral bulbs are replaced with the mottled green foliage of the property owner’s vast Hosta collection that she brought with her to Rhode Island from her previous residence in Maryland. Formal miniature hedges of boxwood surround and define the edges of Toad Hall bringing a formal appearance to the otherwise informal grounds of mixed textures and colors of the various species and cultivars of the outer gardens.

GREENHOUSE AND GARDEN BED

There is a small glass lean-to greenhouse providing winter protection to frost-tender tropical plants in containers that are used throughout the gardens in the summer. The back gardens are terraced and consist of three different vegetable gardens showcasing a variety of field and container grown vegetable and fruit crops. There are small nursery beds mixed throughout the back gardens interlaced with walking paths hinting at vistas of the Sakonnet river in the distance. The nursery beds contain miniature versions of various varieties of woody trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials awaiting transplant to their final homes through the property. A thick undisturbed buffer of native vegetation protects the bay, filtering and absorbing any runoff from the gently sloping property.

SHADES OF GREENERY

To create the vista of large shade trees with mixed shade garden below favored by Toad Hall’s owner, many of the additions since 2007 to the gardens were personally selected by her and sourced from various local nurseries. The shady understory of the mixed mature rhododendron varieties was collected from a local University’s trial gardens. The scores of young liner plants growing in the nursery beds in the back yard were specially collected and propagated.