Janet Mavec remembers her first visit to her then-boyfriend’s property in rural New Jersey. The historic farm, once the home of the publisher of the Nancy Drew series, seduced her with its rolling hills and meandering paths, and its vast but disorderly gardens (or what could be gardens), all hugged by dense woodlands. “If you ever need any help here …” Mavec told him, swooning over not just the grounds but their outdoorsy owner, now her husband. “Little did I imagine,” she adds, laughing, having spent the past two-plus decades nurturing and transforming Bird Haven Farm.
The property’s three houses, two barns, and springhouse felt disconnected until Caruncho organized them like a medieval village, corralled by a surrounding wooded greenbeltNgoc Minh Ngo, Reprinted from Bird Haven Farm by Janet Mavec, Rizzoli, 2025.
In the spirit of the unflappable girl detective, Mavec patiently unraveled the land’s mysteries, waiting five years after they were married before making changes. “I first watched and listened to what was happening here,” she says. Mavec then tapped Spanish landscape architect Fernando Caruncho to help bring order and cohesion to the 25-acre garden’s disparate elements.
Bird Haven Farm includes numerous garden outbuildings and mid-19th-century red barns that have been carefully restored and woven into Mavec and Caruncho’s garden design, with the connecting paths planted as verdant corridors. Here, zinnias and cardoons mix with an array of annuals and perennials, while climbing hydrangea and Boston ivy scramble the building.Ngoc Minh Ngo, Reprinted from Bird Haven Farm by Janet Mavec, Rizzoli, 2025.
“His genius is editing,” she says of Caruncho, who imagined the farm as a medieval village. “This wasn’t about additions, but boiling things down to a simpler form. There were various buildings, a pond, and a springhouse, but none were talking to each other.”
A courtyard pond anchors the central square.Ngoc Minh Ngo, Reprinted from Bird Haven Farm by Janet Mavec, Rizzoli, 2025.
Caruncho centered his “village square” around the 19th-century stone house, creating a courtyard with a ground-level pond as the “garden’s solar plexus,” Mavec says. She loves walking along herb-scented paths that radiate out from that center. Stone walls outline cutting and vegetable gardens filled with peonies, irises, cardoon, squash, and “overgrown beans for my husband’s cassoulet,” she says. Groves of lilacs and early-season hellebores give way to snapdragons (“A fabulous but often overlooked flower,” she notes).
A spring-fed swimming pond draws the eye to the pastoral vistas and treescapes surrounding Bird Haven Farm. The graceful simplicity of a weeping willow and understory dogwoods frame the pond’s edges, where yellow flag irises thrive in the damp soil.Ngoc Minh Ngo, Reprinted from Bird Haven Farm by Janet Mavec, Rizzoli, 2025.
Mavec is equally captivated by distant vistas of a hay meadow, a robust apple orchard, and a natural pond where her grandchildren and dogs swim. Those elements were already there, she notes. “We just pared back so the beauty could shine through.”
2026 World’s Most Beautiful Gardens winner. This article was originally featured in the July/August 2026 issue of VERANDA. Produced by Grace Haynes Wall; written by Stephanie Hunt.
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