96 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine House of the Month et across more than century with the orig- inal Beckett, who discovered a way to di- vine and interpret the genius loci of Beck- ett’s Castle. “My mother had this sort of contagious character,” Abby says. “Her favorite spots were the kitchen and her rose gardens. She loved to cook. She really adored the people tween the savage granite outcroppings of the castle’s spectacular vantage. So successful was she in creating these surf gardens with landscaper Lynn Shafer that word of her castle’s beautiful mantle crossed the Atlantic. World-renowned ro- sarian Peter Beales came from London to visit Nancy and see the wonders of Beck- ett’s Castle’s gardens for himself “a few years before his book The Vision of Roses, came out in 1996,” her daughter says. Of this coffee-table book, realtor Tish Whipple says, “If you flip to the garden be- fore Nancy’s, you’ll see it was the Queen Mother’s.” So it was Nancy Harvey herself, in a du- Only a handful of vacation houses graced the Maine coast before Beckett’s Castle. “To the best of my knowledge, the first summer cottage on the Maine coast is Glen Cove Cottage on Cape Eliza- beth, which dates from 1853 and is now the home of Dr. Bruce Nel- son on Shore Road,” says Maine State Historian Earl Shettleworth, Jr. “The next one would be Grove Hall, the Goddard Mansion at Fort Williams, which dates from 1858 and is now part of Fort Wil- liams Park. The first Bar Harbor Cottage was built by Alpheus Hardy in 1868 and is no longer standing. Several Bar Harbor cottages were built in the late 1860s and early 1870s–about the time of the construction of Beckett’s Castle. Thus, Beckett’s Castle is not the first summer cottage on the Maine coast but an early example of the building type.” One of the Early Birds