Cornelia Guest, heiress to her late mother C.Z.’s house and gardens on Long Island, shares how she’s walked into her mother’s “wellies.”
One weekday, while in New York City shopping around the concept for this magazine, I had a brush with destiny in the fitness center of my hotel.
A beautiful, vaguely familiar-looking blonde boarded the treadmill next to mine and we began to converse, in that easy way that fellow traveler/exercisers do.
I realized after a few exchanges that she was, in fact, Cornelia Guest.
After establishing that I had gone to school with her brother, and that I was in the city on a “flower” mission, Cornelia blithely scribbled down her phone number, handed it to me, and said, “You’ve got a great idea here; call me if it works out, and you can do a piece on my gardens on Long Island.”
Cornelia’s mother, C.Z., had left this earth the year before, and Cornelia was grappling with the challenges of being the new chatelaine of “Templeton,” her ancestral home in Old Westbury.
Fast forward one year and much hard work later, developing the concept and prototype of flower Magazine. I retrieve the phone number from my files and call. Cornelia remembers me, and the magazine, and is most graciously willing to be written up. I get busy contacting Michael Mundy, a world-class photographer, based in New York. We’d met on a shoot for another magazine, and I had also filed his number away.
With all the players in place, I fly to Long Island on a monsoon-like Sunday in August. The shoot was arranged for Monday, and part of Tuesday, but the weather had arranged for a total washout.
With the confidence of a zealot, I assure Michael and Cornelia that “it’ll all work out. At the very least, we can do a portrait and the interview then return in the spring to shoot the gardens.”
All the alternate plans are obviated by the immediate cessation of rain as we turn into the rambling drive leading up to “Templeton.” On our arrival, we’re lead, literally, down the garden path, through rows of dahlias the size of my hand, up the back steps of the house, and into the foyer…
My first impression is of a warm, welcoming, elegant, yet livable home.
My next impression serves as further confirmation when Cornelia, sporting a white terry cloth robe, wet hair, and no make-up, enters and gives me a huge hug, with one dog in her arms and several others lounging around on their beds and on the floor.
“This is Pansy,” she explains. “She’s a pound puppy.” Cornelia’s love for animals apparent, abundant and endearing, our conversation is punctuated by her leaning out the window to beckon her pet donkey, Madonna (who we all agree needs to be a presence in the shoot).
We sit and talk about the weather and decide the colors will pop in the gray; and the flowers, though a tad damp, are still exquisite, and eminently photographable.
When Michael is satisfied that he’s captured Cornelia, her gardens, and her menagerie, we return to the coziness of the toile-filled den off the kitchen, where I begin to ask the questions I’ve been longing to ask: What’s it like stepping into your mother’s “wellies”? What have you learned since taking over? Who feeds all these dogs?
She responds that she has had amazing help from several different quarters.
“Eldon McDonald is my gardening father,” she says. “He was my mother’s gardening husband so he inherited me when she died.” Cornelia is both grateful and humble describing the experts she relies on: Peter, the orchid guru, and Tim and Jack, the tenders of the gardens.
“I have the good fortune of being surrounded by people who know more than I do about flowers and gardening,” she attests. “They’re very patient with me. I didn’t know much about flowers when I inherited this place, but I’m learning.”
One has the sense that Cornelia’s a quick study and an eager student. “Luckily, Mother Nature gives us seasons, so I don’t have to learn everything all at once. I’ve also learned that it’s okay to make mistakes. Mother Nature is very forgiving,” she says.
As we explore the brief history of her tenure at “Templeton,” Cornelia gets a twinkle in her eye and shares that the first winter after her mother died, every single rose bush was dead. “I’m convinced she killed all of them from wherever she is, just to keep me on my toes,” she says. Then, pausing to show me a photograph of her mother, she calmly confides, “I miss her everyday.”
I take in the image of the icon that was C.Z. Guest—the shock of white blonde hair, stylishly cropped, the bronze skin from countless hours spent in the garden and on the beach, the elegantly draped scarf and most of all, the kind, intelligent eyes.
From there, we shift to questions of entertaining and flowering style. Cornelia has an unerring aesthetic and personal style, as well as the confidence to implement them.
A friend once asked, before a dinner party Cornelia was giving, “Where are you going to put the dog beds?”
“What do you mean?” she responded. It never occurred to her to pretend, to be other than she is.
“I love home; I’m a homebody, really,” she says. “I love entertaining here, small dinner parties. My flowers are inevitably low and understated. I want the guests to be able to see each other and to be able to talk without having to lean around some huge arrangement,” she explains.
As we chat, I observe with delight the different size and shape glass bottles lining the window sill. They act as containers for the ostentatiously big and bright dahlias cut from the garden.
“Dahlias are my favorite flower,” Cornelia reveals, “I mean, look at them! I’m not an experienced arranger, but with these flowers, and my collection of antique bottles, I’m in good shape.”
Though basically a self-described country girl, Cornelia also spends time in L.A. where she’s pursuing an acting career—in her latest effort, a movie coincidentally titled Gardens of the Night, she plays, as she terms it, “a naughty judge’s wife.”
She owns a bungalow on the West Coast that boasts a small but well-loved garden. “Just big enough for three hydrangea bushes, because I have to have flowers,” she insists. Her travels have inspired another creative endeavor, a sumptuous line of travel candles she designed for Slatkin and Company.
“They’re formulated and named to recall some of my favorite places—Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and, of course, Old Westbury,” she adds.
Though Cornelia loves to travel, she sighs pleasantly, “I always come home.”
After a delightful day at “Templeton” with its delightful new mistress, I can see why.
