If you’re heading to New England this summer, Road Trips Gardeners, here’s an event to mark on your travel calendar.

Connecticut Historic Gardens Day takes place from 1 to 4 p.m. June 23, 2013, at Roseland Cottage, 556 Route 169, Woodstock, Connecticut (map).

Celebrate the event’s tenth anniversary with a guided tour of the formal parterre garden. Learn the history, significance and theory behind the garden layout and design, and hear about Historic New England‘s ongoing boxwood restoration project. Guided tours begin on the hour.

Built in 1846 in the then newly fashionable Gothic Revival style, Roseland Cottage (a National Historic Landmark) depicts the summer life of Henry and Lucy Bowen and their young family. Prominently situated across from the town common, the “cottage” epitomizes Gothic Revival architecture, with its steep gables, decorative bargeboards, and ornamented chimney pots. The interior is equally colorful, and features elaborate wall coverings, heavily patterned carpets and stained glass — much of which survives unchanged from the Victorian era.

Henry Bowen was a Woodstock native who returned to his hometown after establishing a successful business in New York City. While Lucy Bowen enjoyed summers away from the city, her husband used Roseland Cottage as a place to entertain friends and political connections, including four presidents of the United States.

Roseland Cottage’s picturesque landscape includes original boxwood-edged parterre gardens planted in the 1850s. The estate includes an icehouse, aviary, carriage barn, and the nation’s oldest surviving indoor bowling alley. The entire complex of house, furnishings, outbuildings, and landscape reflects the design principles of Andrew Jackson Downing, a leading nineteenth-century “tastemaker”.

(Photo courtesy of Roseland Cottage)