Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion — Located at 151 Charoltte Street in Canandaigua, is a fifty-acre estate that includes nine formal gardens, a green house conservatory, ponds, statuary, and a forty-room mansion built by Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson in 1887.  The architecture of the rusticated gray stone mansion, trimmed in red Medina sandstone, is a blend of Elizabethan, Richardson Romanesque, and Tudor.

    The Palm House is the centerpiece of the greenhouse complex with 1,100 pieces of curved, frosted glass.  The Peach House, which contains its original iron trellises, is now the Peach House luncheon restaurant.  The mansion houses two gift shops and the Finger Lakes Wine Center, which represents over thirty Finger Lakes wineries, is located in the Bay House at Sonnenberg Gardens.

    The Italian Garden is laid out in four large rectangles containing silver and red fleur-de-lis arrangements bordered by seventy-two hand-trimmed cone-shaped yews. Adjacent to the Italian garden is the Blue and White Garden, called the "intimate" garden by Mrs. Thompson. This garden, planted only with blue and white flowers, is ensured privacy by walls of hedges and vines.

    The Pansy Garden, designed as a place for meditation and reflection, has a six-foot high fountain that flows into a marble bird bath shaped like a pansy. The small Moonlight Garden, behind a row of cherry dogwood and bordered with privet hedges adjacent to the Pansy Garden, was planted with fragrant white flowers in Victorian times, to be enjoyed by moonlight. 

    The mansion and gardens have been preserved for display to the public.

Excerpt from Persons, Places and Things In the Finger Lakes Region
by Emerson Klees

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