Deep Cut Gardens

Deep Cut Gardens is a public botanical garden in Middletown Township, New Jersey, in the United States. Adjacent to Tatum Park, the 54-acre (22 ha) garden is dedicated to home gardening, and is visited by 100,000 visitors a year. The park features a variety of gardens, including a rockery, a display greenhouse, a rose parterre and a Japanese garden. The gardens also host a variety of educational programs relating to home gardening, and the 4,000-volume Elvin McDonald Horticultural Library.

The garden passed through a number of owners before being acquired by the Monmouth County Park System, with the most famous being mobster Vito Genovese. Although Genovese's mansion on the grounds of the present park burnt down in 1937, the park contains numerous traces of his ownership, including stately Sargent's weeping hemlocks, the rock garden and a small rock replica of Mount Vesuvius, alluding to Genovese's birthplace of Naples.

The land making up Deep Cut Gardens was first settled by Europeans after the Monmouth Tract was granted to Quaker settlers in 1665. The site was divided into several family farms until 1890, when the town sheriff took over the property due to unpaid taxes. The land subsequently passed through several interim owners before being purchased by New York businessman Edward Dangler and his wife Teresa for $38,000 in 1926. In 1928, the Danglers built a two-storey, eight-room Colonial Revival mansion on a hilltop overlooking the property and with views of Sandy Hook and New York Harbor.

In 1935, the Dangler mansion was sold to the mobster Vito Genovese, who was looking for a summer home and a place where his three children could be "out in the country". In the following years, Genovese undertook an ambitious renovation of the house and the property. Genovese remodeled the c. 1900s gardener's cottage into a garage with servants' quarters overhead, and expanded the mansion to twelve rooms. To landscape the grounds, Genovese hired landscape architect Theodore Stoudt to plan a new garden surrounding the house. Genovese reputedly gave a free hand to Stoudt, with his only condition that the gardens contained a small rock replica of Mount Vesuvius as a reminder of his birthplace in Naples. On special occasions and parties, a flame was stoked inside the Vesuvius replica and it would "erupt" smoke and fire.

Over the next two years, Stoudt would end up directing "a small army of stonemasons, carpenters, landscapers and nurserymen" to transform the property. Stoudt, during an interview in 1991, recalled that he "saw the garden design as a mixture of English and Italian", and did not think an Italian garden would "suit the house — or the Don's wallet." Therefore, Stoudt opted to build a "pseudo-Italian" rock garden on the steep slope behind the house, with terraced water pools, large Sargent's weeping hemlocks and the Vesuvius replica. On the foot of the hill, Stoudt wanted a garden which was "big enough to make an impression from the top of the hill", and thus opted for a rose parterre, featuring a large pergola and with plants imported from Italy. In addition to the landscaping, Genovese also constructed a large swimming pool, a three-hole golf course, two tennis courts and a greenhouse.

Nevertheless, by 1937, Genovese's fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. After allegedly ordering the murder of fellow mobster Ferdinand Boccia, and with New York prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey singling out Genovese as a target, Genovese fled to Europe. While Genovese was in Europe, on February 23, 1937, a fire broke out on the first floor of Genovese's mansion. The fire, which required 4,000 feet (1,200 m) of hoses and two hours to extinguish, resulted in the complete loss of the mansion and an estimated $80,000 worth of damages, although the gardener's cottage and greenhouse were saved. The following year, one of the landscaping contractors Genovese hired placed a lien on the property for unpaid bills.

In 1949, with the gardens falling to ruins, Genovese sold the property for $35,000, subsequently living in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.

On December 31, 1953, Karl and Marjorie Sperry Wihtol bought the neglected property, by then named "Deep Cut Farm" after a stream on the property, and built a ranch-style house on the site of the former mansion, moving in December 1954. Marjorie, who was the daughter of Thomas Sperry, was an avid horticulturist and restored the dilapidated Genovese-era rock garden and greenhouse, planted ornamental trees and built a pool, a Japanese garden and a vegetable garden.