It’s the holiday season—and even though for most of us the holidays will be very different this year, here are some great ideas to help celebrate the season, whether you are cozy at home or with your quaran-team!
Check out our Holiday Gift Guide below to help make it easier to find a gift for that special someone, or maybe yourself, this holiday season.
Thank you for supporting the Newport Restoration Foundation and for shopping local. All proceeds benefit NRF and help promote our mission. For a limited time, you can enjoy free standard shipping—as well as free local delivery and free local pickup.
Get Holiday Ready:
Holiday Collection: Celebrate the holidays with featured ornaments, exclusive products inspired by the museum collections, and special gifts (for you, or to share!)
Ornaments: From the iconic exterior of Rough Point, an homage to Doris’s passion for jazz, to brightly-colored handcrafted designs, these ornaments are perfect to display at home all year-round.
For Entertaining: Entertain in style (or dress up a cozy night at home) with these beautiful, collection-inspired, eco-friendly napkins, plates, coasters, and guest towels.
Unique gifts for all:
For the book-lover: From Doris Duke’s closets & collections, to historic Newport buildings, inside looks at Rough Point, colonial life, & Newport furniture, garden-related stories for gardeners & enthusiasts, and kid-friendly new favorites & classics—discover a book for everyone!
For the decisive decision-maker: Featuring a saying from a pillow gifted to Doris Duke, these items showcase Doris’s sense of humor (and your own!)
For the furniture fan: These items are inspired by Whitehorne House Museum’s collection of exquisitely crafted furniture and the stories of the people who designed, made, and purchased furniture and related crafts.
For your furry friends: Our pets deserve some TLC this winter season (*all products are rated two paws up!)
For the gardener: Stylish & sturdy gardening gloves, beautiful books, hand salve, & more. NRF Estate Gardener approved!
For hardworking hands: Soaps, hand butter, hand salve and more! Everything you need to pamper your hard-working hands. From relaxing to invigorating scents—go ahead and indulge. Locally made with organic and sustainably sourced ingredients.
For kids: Fun, educational, and whimsical products for the littlest explorers, artists, and gardeners.
For restoration buffs: Founded in 1968 by Doris Duke, NRF works to study climate change resilience in Newport, develop new community-oriented programs, preserve our museums and historic buildings, and steward centuries-old properties. You too can join us in supporting this work.
For the yogi: These custom yoga pants are relaxing, comfy, & stylish. Limited quantities!
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Our special holiday pop-up is located at Rough Point Museum, 680 Bellevue Ave. Open weekends during the holiday season, including November 27th and January 1.
As Rough Point Museum wraps up its regular season, our Estate Gardeners must also prepare the gardens for the upcoming winter. We took some time to interview Estate Gardener, Tessa Young, to see what goes into winterizing the grounds of Rough Point, what the camels will be up to, as well as what not to miss when you visit the museum this fall and winter. Listen here or read the transcript below!
Could you remind us about how many different people are on the Grounds crew, and then what it is that you do and how that would change during this time of year heading into fall and winter?
Tessa Young: Currently there are four people on the Grounds Crew. There’s one full time employee (he’s the Groundskeeper), one seasonal Groundskeeper, and then another employee who is an assistant to Grounds and Gardens. And then there’s me, as the Estate Gardener.
This time of year heading into fall, it’s a lot of leaf cleanup and leaf blowing after the drought of the summer. Typically in the past few years we’ve had droughts, so the grass is finally coming back. There’s minimal grass mowing, and that’s all on the Grounds side of things. Then on my side, it’s a lot of cutting back plants as they expire in the gardens and starting to slowly get all the plants cut down in preparation for the winter so that the gardens will be bare for the spring.
What happens to the [living sculpture] camels over the winter?
TY: Over the winter, the camels just hang out where they are. The plants go dormant and some of them do unfortunately die over the winter, just from the cold. And then in the spring we’ll get back to taking care of them and clean them up for when you guys come and visit when it gets warm out again.
Do you, as a gardener, typically spend this time doing more planning for the future, or is there stuff that happens indoors as well?
TY: In some ways there is planning. I’ve been walking around looking at bare places that could have fall flowers, and I’m thinking about what I could plant next year so that this time of year there’s more to offer in this season. Otherwise when it gets a little bit colder, I’ll start ordering more Dahlia tubers for the spring to plant and thinking about what kind of color scheme I might want out there next year. I’m also getting all the different Kitchen Garden seeds for vegetable crops in order and making a list of things that I might want to add, or different seed packets I might need to get for the future.
During this time of year as well, we winterize the fig trees in the Kitchen Garden and the Banana Tree in the Tropical Garden. So with the fig trees, this’ll be our second year trying this new method which worked very well last year. We tie them together into almost teepee shapes and then we wrap them with moving blankets. Then on top of that, we wrapped them with heavy duty, sheeted, plastic wrap and they stay there until it stops being so cold at night. When the temperatures start to regulate, then we take that all off. Sometimes there is some deadheading just from some frozen branches from the top down that we have to take care of. With the Banana Tree, I cage it off with some chicken fence and build a cage around it. I then layer a whole bunch of fall leaves on top of that to help keep it warmer in there so that the core doesn’t die and freeze over the winter.
We still get people who comment on how spectacular and beautiful the grounds are even into the fall and winter. Even though it’s clearly different than when it blooming, is there something that you find special or attractive about the grounds when it’s in this stasis?
TY: The winter time is a great time on the Rough Point grounds to really notice how spectacular our Pines and Yews are here. We have a great number of really old Yews, which you don’t see a lot of at that kind of age. It’s a specimen tree. You don’t see a lot of those sorts of trees around very often. That’s really the time to appreciate evergreens. And if you’re here on a day that it snows, or there’s snow on the ground or in the trees, that’s really great too. Especially looking at the Turkey Oak because it’s such a big magnificent tree. Just having the branches laden with the snow is a really pleasant experience.
And even in the barrenness of the gardens, there’s something beautiful in that because you can use your imagination and try to think about what might be coming in the following spring, without it being so busy and already presented to you. That’s a fun [way to] look at it in the winter time.
Rough Point Museum closes for the regular season after Sunday, November 15. You can also join us for A Rough Point Holiday coming weekends this holiday season starting Friday, November 27. Click here to learn more.
For years now, NRF has been fortunate to partner with the University of Rhode Island Master Gardener program to assist in the care, interpretation, and programming of three gardens at Prescott Farm—an 18th-century vegetable garden, herb garden, and a three-sisters garden that attempts to replicate the growing practices of the Narragansett peoples who have called Aquidneck Island home for millennia. The Master Gardeners are all volunteers who train through the University of Rhode Island and volunteer their time to work on projects throughout the state. Typically, the Master Gardeners have donated all of their produce to Lucy’s Hearth, an organization dedicated to helping families experiencing homelessness. In 2020, the Master Gardeners continued that tradition but did even more.
Early in the year, our Director of Museums, Dr. Erik Greenberg, met with Susan Estabrook, who has overseen the Master Gardeners’ program at Prescott Farm for years, and asked if they could grow a pumpkin patch which NRF could then donate to the children at Newport’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center (MLK) in time for Halloween. Dr. Greenberg has dedicated much of his career to community outreach, and he has been working with the MLK Center to figure out ways in which the museums of NRF can be a resource to their staff and to the people who make use of the center on a regular basis. As always, Susan and her team threw themselves into the work with expertise and passion, growing enough pumpkins to donate to the center with more to spare.
“It was important to me to make sure the pumpkins we grew were all good eating pumpkins so that the kids could learn they are not just decorations but actually a great food source,” said Estabrook. “As we know, the seeds and the flesh are nutritious and can be eaten when prepared in a sweet or savory way.”
The gardeners decided to grow three different varieties of pumpkins. “Baby Pam” and “Small Sugar Pie” pumpkins, which are both small round varieties recommended for eating, were grown for the MLK Center. The third variety, “New England Long Pie Pumpkin,” which looks like an overgrown zucchini squash but orange in color, were grown to be donated to Lucy’s Hearth.
At Prescott Farm, the Master Gardeners chose a plot of land to grow pumpkins that was located to the east of the windmill, which was a prime spot full of sun and had never been used for growing crops before. They marked out the plot and covered it with cardboard, paper, and leaves. One of the volunteer gardeners brought in two dump trucks full of bagged leaves. After leaving the leaves and paper on for some time, they chopped the leaves and then covered them with compost. They then planted through it, never having to till the soil. The plants were started at Estabrook’s home first, then transferred to the farm and covered with row cover to protect them from critters and give them a boost of warmth. One devoted volunteer was in charge of watering, and once the plants got to the point of needing pollinators, they were uncovered and left to do their thing!
Many visitors to Prescott Farm watched the pumpkins grow and came back to see them when they were ripe. “It was a great learning experience for all and a good draw to the property for the local families,” said Estabrook. “We grew over two hundred pumpkins that amounted to over 500lbs.”
The pumpkins were delivered to the MLK Community Center on October 26th to be used in their education programs (preschool and after school) to not only decorate, but to explore. The Center’s preschool participates in “Pumpkin Science” as part of their STEM curriculum where students have the opportunity to explore parts of a pumpkin, measure the size and shape, feel the fibrous insides, and make nutritious roasted pumpkin seeds.
The students pictured are from the MLK Community Center’s preschool classrooms where they enjoyed working with their pumpkins the entire week. They did pumpkin experiments: Will they float or sink in water? How tall is it? They made scientific observations, learned about what’s inside both pumpkins and squash, and what happens outside as Autumn approaches.
Dr. Greenberg hopes that this is the first in a series of community-based projects that demonstrates NRF’s commitment to the people of Aquidneck Island, and he (as well as the entire staff at NRF) are deeply grateful for our longstanding partnership with the Master Gardeners. Thank you to all of the organizations involved in making this project possible.
Despite being a native of Rhode Island, Doris Duke was a stranger to me prior to my summer internship in collections at Rough Point. Over the weeks, I made Duke’s acquaintance in the most personal of ways: through an examination of her clothing. Each day, I climbed three flights of stairs to what had been the servants’ quarters to my solitary workroom. There I opened box after box of a donation of her personal wardrobe from Shangri La, Duke’s Hawaiian estate. I carefully documented the contents by examining each object, assessing its potential provenance and condition, and then repacking it. With the sense of time travel that objects of the past imbue, I became a steward of Doris Duke’s personal belongings, like the servants who had occupied this space before.
I traveled through time and space with Doris, via her clothing, in a distinctly non-linear fashion; from the 1960s in Mumbai, possibly back to the 1930s in North Africa, and then forward again to the late 1970s in New York City. Clothing, especially for the fashion-conscious like Doris, is an unmistakable expression of self-identity. Each garment and accessory is chosen purposefully, to reveal or to conceal the body, to impress others, or to express support for a cause. Some items were souvenirs from her far-flung travels, a way to commemorate a place and time, while others, clearly handmade and without labels, were probably commissioned from a local seamstress. The haute couture and designer pieces clue one in to the social circles Doris might have circulated in, and when she may have been abroad on a shopping trip. Duplicates of one item, bought in different colorways, can indicate what colors she preferred based on which garment has the most evidence of wear.
Few other museums, if any, are fortunate enough to have most of a singular person’s wardrobe, and therefore to be able to interpret their lives in this way. The Western European concept of the fashion exhibit, especially of contemporary clothing, developed in the late 20th century. People did not purchase their clothes with the anticipation that these garments, sometimes including their undergarments, would eventually be on display in a museum, and used to document and interpret the history of their lives.
Two months is a short time to try to get to know someone – even though I had over 730 “opportunities” (the number of objects I documented) to do so. I was left with many questions– I will elaborate on just one here. Duke’s sense of style seems to have flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequently so do the number of pieces from that period in the collection, whereas the dearth of midcentury garments compounds the mystery of her life at that time. A rare, haute couture, green velvet Dior coatdress with leopard cuffs from 1947 was one exception. The design of this piece clearly fits with Duke’s style markers of dazzling jewel-tone colors, metallic trimmings, and foreign inspiration (according to the designer history, it was supposedly inspired by Russia).
In contrast, some of her other pieces from the post-war, New Look-era are a filmy, off-white, strapless bouffant gown and a beige hostess gown (a robe-like garment sufficiently elegant enough for entertaining guests) in a floral-patterned ikat taffeta. These are both beautiful, but not visually striking. The wearer could easily fade into the background. Why might Doris, typically a bold dresser, have chosen to own and wear them?
The obvious question, for today’s readers, however, is “what to wear in lockdown?” Here, Duke’s answer is easy to imagine…the house dress is the perfect balance of comfort and fashion when one must hide away from the world.
By Alyssa C. Opishinski
Summer 2020 Collections Intern and URI graduate student studying Fashion History and Textile Science in the Dept. of Textiles, Merchandising, and Design. More about Alyssa’s summer internship can be found on Instagram: @thesartorialsleuth and #dukesdailypattern
Click here to watch October’s Second Sunday From Home program where we join the crew of Oliver Hazard Perry Rhode Island to learn more about wind and sails. See below for instructions on how to make a pinwheel that catches the wind like sails do!
Making a pinwheel:
Supplies
Paper (cut into 6”x6” size)
Scissors
Straw
Push pin or brass fastener
Crayons/markers/colored pencils/etc.
Instructions
Decorate both sides of your paper however you would like!
Fold your paper in half to make a triangle, then unfold.
Fold your paper in the opposite direction to make a triangle, then unfold. There should be two creases in the paper, forming an X in the middle
Cut a 3” slit from each corner toward the center
Fold one corner in towards the center and rotate counter clockwise, folding the corner of each towards the center, so that they overlap.
Hold in place and insert a brass fastener or push pin through the center
Place fastener through the top of the straw. If needed, place tape on the back of the push pin.
Depending what size flowers you would like, cut the tissue paper into equal pieces. Generally, 12×6” size paper works well for medium-sized flowers.
Take three pieces of tissue paper (can be all the same color, different colors, whatever suits you!) and place them on top of each other in the same direction. Fold the tissue paper like an accordion—first, make a 1” fold along the short edge, then flip it over and make a 1” fold going in the reverse direction, until the whole sheet has been folded like an accordion.
Place your pipe cleaner in the center of the tissue paper (centered on the long edge), and loop it around the tissue paper, twisting to ensure it stays in place. This is your stem!
Gently open up the tissue paper folds you made, and separate the tissue paper sheets to make your flower bloom. This can be tricky, so it’s important to be very gentle when pulling apart the sheets.
Share your flowers with us on social media by tagging us @nptrestoration.
