The Innisfree entrance road and the landscape surrounding it retain layers that date from the Beck era and the transformation of Innisfree into a public garden. While it doesn’t wrap around Tyrrel Lake like the garden proper, the entrance road is a cup garden and is an important part of the visitor experience at Innisfree.

A gently undulating lawn, loosely edged by trees but open to the lake, which is characterized by its simple, functional design. It serves as an elevated vantage point from which visitors can see how the garden wraps around the lake and orient themselves in the landscape.

Lester Collins designed the Lake Path as the main organizing feature for Innisfree as a public garden, a physical and experiential journey encircling Tyrrel Lake. The path takes on a different character as it traverses a variety of different cup gardens.

The Kwan Yin Path borders the northern end of Tyrrel Lake. In the 1930s when the first garden features were designed here by the Becks, the Kwan Yin Path itself was nearly level with the lake and typically quite wet. In 1969, Collins dredged the north end of the lake and used the resulting material to raise the level of the Kwan Yin Path, particularly at the northernmost point of the lake past the Kwan Yin Bog. This keeps visitors’ feet dry and brings them closer to the pair of important water features that bracket the East Rock Garden on the north side of the path, described below.

Atop a large roughly north-south rock outcropping that begins above the Kwan Yin Path and extends into the meadow. Heather Hill boast commanding views of both Tyrrel Lake to the east and the Meadow and Terraces to the south and west respectively.

Lester Collins believed that the Meadow, visually central and a nexus of connecting paths and spaces, was the most important cup garden he created at Innisfree. The Meadow is an irregular shape that surrounds Heather Hill, includes Dumpling Knoll and the Meadow Stream.

The North Lawn and North Meadow run successively northward from the current location of the Corduroy Bridge at the top of the meadow, up a small valley between Hemlock Hill and the original driveway to the Becks’ main house.

Walter and Marion Beck selected a location for their main house (no longer standing) that is the only place on the property from which one can look across part of the main lake and down the channel and lower lake for a stunning view of a long body of water bounded by steep wooded hills.

The South Lawn lies between the terraces, including the former house site, and slopes gracefully down to the point. It is a verdant, undulating plane poised between dense woodland on the west and Tyrrel Lake to the south and east. This simple and soothing composition is a visual rest between the design density of the Terraces above and the Point below, and a perfect frame for the long view of lower Tyrrel Lake so prized by the Becks.

The Point, which projects south into the lake, was the southernmost extent of the garden during the Beck era and where they focused their earliest garden-making efforts. In the 1930s, Walter Beck designed a series of stone retaining walls and steps that give clear north-south orientation to a natural peninsula in the lake. Instead of an organic slope arcing across the peninsula, he created three largely flat terraces with this structure—two larger and another the path the lake shore.

Very rough, wide slate steps lead to a somewhat semicircular intermediate level paved in irregular slate, defined by a low stone wall along the north arc. On axis with the steps and the grass terrace above, a short, sloped lawn drops to the level of the path, the lowest level, directly beside the lake. Parallel to the retaining wall above, a low stone wall, also with a meandering footprint, divides the path from the water in the Lotus Bog (see below).

As Collins describes the most famous aspect of the Point:

[in] probably his finest work…Beck placed the three rocks which compose the Point cup garden in 1937. The center rock, a rather homely boulder, became important when it was given stone feet. It became dynamic yet amusing, a friendly dragon guarding the south water entrance to the garden. The huge, flat, upright rock called Owl Rock faces east, forming a foil to the forest trees behind. The pine tree, leaning into the space, binds together the Owl Rock and the Dragon Rock, leaving the Turtle Rock, the third rock, isolated, its influence bearing on the water. The three rocks and the pine lift this cup garden out and up from the Lake. Interchange the rocks and the picture is shattered.

Pine Island is integral to Collins’s overall design vision for the sight. Its wooded character stands in contrast to the more clearly designed and high-maintenance cup gardens on the opposite site of the Lake. This more naturalistic character continues through the Corn Crib Bog, Hemlocks Woods, and the East Meadow.

Collins did some of his most innovative work in the Corn Crib Bog, collaborating with nature to create gardens with particular aesthetic effects through carefully manipulating native ecosystems. Here, he created three bog gardens, each with distinct visual qualities and plant communities, simply by intervening in the natural succession process at different intervals.

Like on Pine Island, Lester Collins created an important but rustic cup garden by utilizing an existing stand of a single species of trees. The experience of Hemlock Woods is dramatically different from Pine Island. Here the topography is steep and rocky, the ground plane is a highly textured maze of tree roots, the scale is more intimate than that of the soaring verticals of pines, and the smell of the hemlocks is distinct. Even the sound visitors’ footsteps make is different: near silent on the pine straw and almost hollow traversing the hemlocks’ surface roots over rock ledge.

The Cottage and surrounding tree cup gardens are set against the sweeping expanse of the most naturalistic parts of the East Meadow, underscoring the rustic quality of this side of the garden. This native meadow mirrors the size and planar quality of the lake, creating an incredible sense of scale and extending literal and figurative fields of light back to shadowed woodland edges. Like the north meadow, this naturalistic cup garden serves as a visual transition between the more intensely designed parts of the garden with neatly mown, bright green lawns to the unimproved woodland around it.