Daniel Barrett and the Art of Teaching - Celebrating America's 250th

by Mary A. Jacobson

ABOVE: Daniel Barrett and students collecting a plankton tow in Long Island Sound. Courtesy of Daniel Barrett.

 

What makes a good teacher? Every September, thoughts of school and books and teachers and assignments come to mind to people of all ages. Some are young and anticipatory of the beginning of a new year; others are older and nostalgic for teachers of a bygone time.

This September, it seems fitting to highlight an unforgettable science teacher of Greenwich High School, Daniel V. Barrett, who was interviewed by Oral History Project volunteer Marian Phillips in 2007. His love of his pupils and his dedication to teaching were apparent in his interview. In addition, his ability to make hard work and constant inquiry “fun” are a testament to his mastery of the art of teaching.

It was the year 1958 when Daniel Barrett came to the “old” Greenwich High School (now Town Hall) to apply for a science position. “That was an interesting experience.” Barrett was brought to Charlie Wilcox’s biology classroom by Andrew Bella, GHS principal, who said, “Charlie, here’s someone who’s interested in teaching at Greenwich High.” Wilcox asked Barrett what he was learning at the time; Barrett replied, “the female reproductive system.” Wilcox responded, “Well, teach it. Why don’t you tell the class all about it.” As the half-hour lesson concluded, the bell rang. Barrett recalled, “It was perfect timing. The kids left and Wilcox said, ‘Come with me.’ We went down to see Bella and he said, ‘Andy, hire him!’… It was an on-the-spot interview, and an experience under fire, and I was hired. I’ve never forgotten.” Thus began a career of thirty-eight years at GHS.

The fall of 1958 marked one year after Russia launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. It orbited for three months, circling the Earth 1,440 times. The successful launch of Sputnik sparked new efforts on the part of the United States to encourage the enrichment of science education with more novel approaches. Barrett was selected to test one of the new curriculums emphasizing ecology and field studies.

Barrett and Principal Bella formed a weekly early-morning breakfast seminar with about twenty highly motivated science students. Each week, noted scientists would come “talking about science and how you get into science.” Barrett also began a twice-weekly marine biology seminar. Ever the experimental teacher, Barrett recognized the importance of field study. “My whole concept had to do with hands-on, after you would study it from a cerebral point of view.” A favorite trip was to the Fulton Fish Market. “It was a whole experience of knowing about fish, and their requirements in the ocean… on how you sell fish and keep it fresh. Then we’d bring it back and how you prepare fish, and then you’d enjoy it.” It helped that Barrett had two ovens in his classroom.

“We needed equipment and we needed a little boat which, of course, wasn’t fitting into our budget.” An unknown community “angel” was happy to supply one. “I’ve never found out who the angel was.” However, that initial investment eventually led to the formation of the Educational Oceanographic Foundation in 1967, “a tax-exempt group that can raise money, allow people to donate, and support the marine program.” Donations included boats which could be used or sold for funds for equipment and scholarships in the marine-related sciences. In addition, “We’ve had speakers and we’ve helped the school take field trips.”

At one point, the science and physical education departments were able to procure a van which enabled Barrett to take students to Greenwich Point for field studies. “My lab at that time ended up at the Queen Anne Building (now the Floren Family Environmental Center).” The building was “an old civil defense tower where people used to look for airplanes during the war. So that became my lab to put equipment in.” The Educational Oceanographic Foundation helped by installing sinks and a heating element for the winter. “We would do studies in the water with hip boots and run in and warm up in the building.” After a few years, Barrett “was able to get permission to use the upper level of the Chimes Building. For a number of years that was our next lab.”

How, might you wonder, could a high school schedule enable the kind of laboratory experiences that Barrett provided? “In the 1970s, I was able to get my morning classes to meet for double periods, two hours at a time… because you can’t function under a forty-five minute class and do what I used to do… I had a van; I had a lab at the beach; and I had two hours. It took a while for the town and curriculum development to give me that.” On occasion, when studying beaches, sand structure, groins and jetties, longer field trips of a day or two were required. “We’d look at maybe six beaches. I’d go all the way down to Lighthouse Point at New Haven, Hammonassett Beach, beaches in Rhode Island, and what the towns in each beach were doing or could be doing.”

Students kept journals in which they analyzed what they had experienced.

Towards the end of each year, Barrett devised a project that required the removal of all the furniture from the classroom. “I would mark off big four-foot squares on the floor… and we would form teams. I would in a hat pick the teams. And each team had to design a beach community.” Then, probably to the dismay of the school custodians, buckets of sand would be brought in along with “little grasses. Everything in miniature. They had to build groins, jetties, boardwalks.” When the student teams were finished designing their beachfront communities and meeting the required criteria, “they would have to stand up, and we’d all gather around their community, and they have to defend it and, of course, everyone would argue and say, ‘Well, that wouldn’t work.’ And we’d go to the next community” and analyze that one. Barrett would videotape it. “I still have some of those videotapes.” Barrett was quick to confirm that “when we were all done, we put everything away, swept up the (linoleum) floor, and brought the furniture back in.”

To summarize his view of his profession, Barrett stated, “I loved teaching. I loved it. I had great students… In the school setting, I found I had lots of support to get out in the wild and do things. I’ve always felt hands-on, feeling, smelling, walking in a marsh, smelling the sulfur… That’s where my strength came, to get students to dig in. And touch it.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Sleepy Cat Farm:A Garden for the Ages - Celebrating America's 250th

 

Garden views with a reflecting pool. Photo by Brian Jones. Courtesy of the Garden Conservancy.

By Mary A. Jacobson

The word “garden” is an understatement when used to describe Sleepy Cat Farm, a wondrous thirteen-and-a-half-acre delight in Greenwich. It is more of an experience, an enchanted setting, a cultivated landscape utopia.

What was the inspiration behind this horticultural gem? Pat Norcross, a volunteer with the Oral History Project, interviewed owner Fred Landman in 2024 to document the history of Sleepy Cat Farm. It all started in 1994 when Fred Landman bought a home on six acres on Clapboard Ridge Road in Greenwich. At that time, updating the house was his focus. “A wonderful house, brick Georgian house, and that sort of became fun to do, working with an architect, working with a decorator.”

As work continued, a landscape architect was engaged to help answer the question, “How does this house relate to the landscape?” In time, the vision of the property became the creation of a sense of harmony between the two. “I said, well, we’ve got this whole woodland area; we can do something there… And then we did the Golden Path with the Spirit Walk (a raised walkway made of Spanish cedar) through the Iris Garden, and it was great fun.” The Golden Path is a gold colored decomposed granite pathway, inspired by the Golden Path designed by landscape architect Russell Page in 1980 for PepsiCo’s one-hundred acre Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, NY. The Golden Path at Sleepy Cat Farm leads the stroller to an adventure of discovery.

Serendipitously, four years later, a neighbor asked Landman, “Would you like to buy two (adjacent) acres?” And I said, “Sure… It was the excitement of what we could do.” This new, enlarged acreage resulted in “making a big vegetable garden, a walled vegetable garden and a big greenhouse… and then, we ended up building what we call the barn, which is a wonderful entertaining space. And the whole new vocabulary is French-Norman.” Visitors were often surprised to learn that the additions, which “were meant to look like they had been here forever,” were only four years old.

Part of Landman’s personal education for the design of his gardens came through his long-term association with Charles Stick, a renowned landscape architect, prized nationally for his work. “Whenever I’d go somewhere, he (Stick) said, ‘You know, you should see this garden, this garden, and this garden in this area.’” Landman has visited gardens in Italy, England, Ireland, France, China, and Japan, among others. The ones he appreciates the most “are the ones that draw you in. You get lost. Your sense of self has disappeared and you’re just in there.”

Landman views Sleepy Cat Farm as a series of rooms. “Some are rather formal with very clipped hedges. One has that undulating hornbeam hedge… and behind that, that’s an ilex hedge, which you can see crenulated. Those are adjacent rooms.” At last rendering, Landman could count eight different projects at Sleepy Cat Farm in which Stick had been engaged. “I’m not a gardener. I had no formal training, but I’ve spent thirty years listening carefully to some very good people… I listened and they listened.”

Landman regards his garden as a continuing creation. “Gardens are never done. They’re always evolving.” In 2012, when presented with the opportunity to acquire another three-and-a-half acres Landman created a limonaia, a controlled environment for lemon cultivation, where an abandoned storehouse had previously existed. Inspired by limonaias he had viewed in Italy, this rebuilt structure provided for a unique and architecturally distinct setting for Meyer lemon cultivation, as well as a place for quiet reflection.

What does Landman want others to experience as they stroll through his garden? “A sense of wonder. People say, ‘Every time I turn, you had something else for me to see.’ The pathway’s meant to draw you down… you hear the sound of water, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. As you come around the bend… there’s a grotto and a water-babbling brook that goes into a pond where Venus is looking at her reflection… It’s just sort of great fun.” Over thirty statuaries have been placed throughout the, now, thirteen-and-a-half-acre property. Landman recalled, “People always say, ‘Oh, I just don’t have a garden like this.’ And I say well, you don’t need a garden like this. Do something you really like, that pleases you aesthetically, and that’s your garden.”

Sleepy Cat Farm has a close affiliation with the Garden Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to “preserving, sharing, and celebrating America’s gardens and diverse gardening traditions for the education and inspiration of the public.” Since 1995, the Open Days program of the Garden Conservancy has enabled thousands of private gardens across the country to be visited by the public. For approximately the past twenty years, Sleepy Cat Farm has participated in these scheduled open garden tour days. The most recent occurred on June 7; the next one is scheduled for August 29. As the most well-attended tour in the Garden Conservancy national garden visiting program, tickets for Sleepy Cat Farm are capped at 900 visitors per day.

In July 2026, the Garden Conservancy relocated its headquarters from Garrison, New York, to 4 Greenwich Office Park and a closer collaboration with the Sleepy Cat Farm Foundation. The goal of the Foundation is to endow Sleepy Cat Farm with sufficient funds to allow it to be maintained for many decades to come. It would remain private, open to Garden Conservancy tours and to other garden interest groups. When the main house on the property is no longer occupied, the plan is for it to transition into the headquarters of the Garden Conservancy, with continuing educational and cultural programs.

As Fred Landman says, “I want this to go on forever… I can’t think of a better organization to be here.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration “America’s 250th|Greenwich: Greenwich History is American History.” Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Chinese Pavilion surrounded by a koi pond. Photo by Kathy Landman. Courtesy of Sleepy Cat Farm.

Greenhouse and walled vegetable garden. Photo by Kathy Landman. Courtesy of Sleepy Cat Farm.

Beautifying Greenwich - Celebrating America's 250th

 By Mary A. Jacobson

A living flower flag – collaborative project by three garden clubs: Hortulus, Greenwich Garden Club, and Green Fingers Garden Club. Depicted as the Betsy Ross flag of 1776. On Flag Day, to reflect the Star-Spangled Banner flag of 1813. On July 4, it will depict our present flag. Photo by Christopher Shields. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

Greenwich is fortunate to have a number of local garden clubs and organizations whose membership contributes tirelessly to the beautification of our town. This year, in celebration of America’s | 250th Greenwich, three of them – Hortulus, Greenwich Garden Club, and Green Fingers Garden Club have collaborated in creating an American flag of flowers to be displayed beside the Bush-Holley House on the grounds of the Greenwich Historical Society. This patriotic floral display will reflect, from June to September, three versions of the flag which have been featured in our country’s history.

Riverside Garden Club turned to Putnam Cottage, also known as Knapp’s Tavern, for their unique contribution to our nation’s semi quincentennial. There, at the site of a former tavern that served lunch to George Washington and was later named in honor of General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary War fame, the Riverside Garden Club restored a colonial herb garden. Hops plants were discovered, possibly similar to those used to brew ale in Washington’s time. On June 7, it is anticipated that visitors will have the opportunity to taste the ale made from these hops, a contribution donated by Two Roads Brewery of Stamford.

This year, Greenwich Green and Clean is celebrating its fortieth anniversary enhancing the parks, streetscapes, and natural spaces of Greenwich. One of their most visible and welcome contributions has been to Greenwich Avenue with its seasonal hanging baskets that adorn lampposts throughout the year, fashioned and hung gratis by Sam Bridge Nursery and Greenhouses. This year, in celebration of America’s 250th, these iconic and well-loved baskets will be adorned with red, white, and blue plantings throughout the town.

While these examples are just “a drop in the bucket” of the many people who work in service of beautifying the town, the Oral History Project would like to highlight one of its earlier narrators, Gertrude duPont Howland, who focused her efforts on Greenwich Avenue when there were few trees which adorned it. Her almost “one-woman” effort, as a member of Green Fingers Garden Club in midcentury, helped to translate the Avenue to the leafy street it is today. Interviewed in 1987 by Oral History Project volunteer Margaret French, Howland described the “absolutely bare looking” condition of the Avenue of the 1940s.

According to Howland, the onslaught of Dutch elm disease had infected “the beautiful elm trees that used to be up and down the Avenue. (They) were being taken down one by one… They were cutting off the trunk as low as they could get it, and then cementing over the area, and that was it. Nothing new was being planted. And as one tree after another came down, there was nothing.”

Therein, began an eight-year crusade on the part of Howland, to bring trees back to Greenwich Avenue. With each step of seeming progress, another obstacle appeared, which only strengthened Gertrude Howland’s resolve. When informed that planting trees on the Avenue could disrupt electric, telephone, water, and/or gas utility services, she set about with volunteer help from the local engineering firm S. E. Minor to map out the utility lines from each building on the Avenue in order to record where the various utilities entered from the outside. However, that information only marked the beginning of an often-frustratingly long mission to get more trees planted on Greenwich Avenue.

Howland had to deal with many governmental and landlord concerns: namely, that tree roots would make the pavement uneven; that citizens might then fall and sue the town; that tree roots would break the water mains; that the flow of air to overhead apartments would be disrupted; that the owner of each building would need to give permission; that trees might disrupt window displays; that dropping leaves would become slippery when wet, and so on. It was not until Howland obtained the support of Mayer H. Cohen, then president of the local merchants’ association, that these concerns were mollified. “Somebody told us that if we could get him to let us plant trees in front of his buildings, it would make a great difference… Not only did he permit us to plant trees, he spoke to the others at some merchants’ meeting and, in no time at all, permissions were flowing in.” In addition, Joseph Dietrich, Tree Warden of Greenwich at that time, “was enthusiastic about the idea. And he agreed that Greenwich Avenue should have trees all up and down.”

According to Howland, “There were so many obstacles to overcome, and each time I thought it was the last hurdle. But, of course, it never was.” After eight years of efforts there was finally an official celebratory planting of pin oaks, with a gathering of garden club members, the press, and Joseph Dietrich to mark the occasion. Local garden club contributions and private donations helped “to keep it going.” In 1987, Green Fingers Garden Club awarded Howland with a citation that read, “But for her, the trees on Greenwich Avenue would not exist.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration “America’s 250th |Greenwich: Greenwich History is American History.” Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Tree replanting on Greenwich Avenue, circa 1950s. Photo by John Gotch. Courtesy of Greenwich Library local history collection.

Festive hanging baskets celebrating Greenwich 250th provided by Greenwich Green & Clean. Photo by Sally Davies. Courtesy of Greenwich Green & Clean.