Green Spring

Green Spring is a historic designed landscape of about 9.5 acres in Fairfax County, Virginia, now part of a public park. Its centerpiece is a brick house probably built soon after John Moss bought the property in 1777, along with a stone spring house, formal and informal gardens, and archaeological remains of an eighteenth-century outbuilding. In 1942 the owners, Belinda and Michael Straight, hired landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and architect Walter Macomber. Farrand laid out a semicircular boxwood-edged garden with granite retaining walls and stone steps leading to garden rooms above a ravine. Macomber added wings to the house and redesigned the interiors in the Colonial Revival style, using woodwork salvaged from a Maryland tavern. The property was listed because it preserves the only known collaboration between these two figures, and Farrand's only Virginia garden. Much of the 1942 plan, including view lines and original plantings, survives under county park management.