Oatlands is a former mansion house home, garden and wheat plantation near Leesburg, now considered a National Historic Landmark and under the care of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The main house was built of brick at the very end of the 18th century and in the late 19th century the porch was added with wooden painted columns, beautifully carved at the top. At that time the house was also rendered and painted to resemble stone.
The large, lean-to greenhouse - unfortunately empty apart from a few oversized cactus, is the second oldest greenhouse of its type in the US.
We had an interesting guided tour of the house which focused on its previous owners - quite wealthy and well-connected families who restored it after the Civil War when it's time as a plantation with a large enslaved labour force came to an end.
No photography was allowed inside the house but the gardens - spread over 4 acres and terraced in two directions, provided some elegant walkways and views as well as beautiful individual plants.
In the grounds were lovely mature trees. One of them, labelled as the Osage Orange, had very beautiful bark and extraordinary fruit.
The fruit was heavy and the size of a large orange but in fact no relation, being filled with a milky sap and not edible!
I also found my first American conker!
Wow! These are lovely and shame on me for never visiting here. You have such a great eye for beaurty and composition, Juliet. BTW, the osage orange fruit is said to keep cockroaches away -- but it's usually only available during the autumn and winter when cockroaches are scarce. So I never knew if it was really effective or just good marketing on someone's part. :)
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