One of the fascinations of the Big House at Malabar Farm State Park is they way it seems to have remained untouched through the years.
Most of the family’s furnishings remain as they were at the time Louis Bromfield left this world in 1956, so it is easy to feel like the place is preserved intact.
But there is one element of the place that is quite different today than it was in Bromfield’s time, and that has to do with a quality of wildness.
Bromfield liked to have the place a little overgrown. That tangle of wildness suggested to him rich soil and abundant fertility.
In his 1955 Malabar Farm Calendar he wrote, “The Big House at Malabar is almost hidden in summer by trees and shrubbery … lilacs, catalpa, black walnut, forsythia and by grapes and wisteria and climbing clematis.”
Back then the pond was not even visible from the road because there were massive overgrown shrubberies lining the yard; and many of the fields were hidden behind huge walls of multiflora rose.
The farm and the house are much more tame today; sedate, clipped and trimmed.
