Inside a Legendary Newport Garden with the Rare Miss Newport Rose

Victoria Leiter Mele calls the garden her favorite part of her entire Newport, Rhode Island property — and with good reason. Designed by her mother, the legendary Marion "Oatsie" Leiter Charles, the garden was once considered one of the premier gardens in the United States and is now preserved in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Gardens. Overlooking Cliff Walk and the ocean, it remains a living tribute to Oatsie's remarkable eye.

At its heart grows a rare climbing rose called Miss Newport — a strain so unique to this property that for years no one could identify it, until it was eventually named for the very place it seemed to grow almost nowhere else. Blue hydrangeas, which Victoria considers the essence of a Newport summer, fill the beds, alongside ornamental grasses that shimmer when the herons pass through and the wind rolls off the water.

The garden is dotted with beloved follies and treasures: the "Temple of Doom," a garden-show folly gifted by her mother's landscaper that became famously expensive to install, and a carved stone head of Angela Davis that Oatsie loved and shipped back from Poland in the early 1970s, complete with peace and love motifs. Many plants are new this year and still filling in, but Victoria promises the garden will once again be spectacular — a multi-generational Newport sanctuary where the same families, and the same roses, return summer after summer.