Tashiding: Beyond Earth and Sky

“Tashiding is one of the oldest and most venerated monasteries in the historic Himalyan Kingdom of Sikkim. Loosely translated, the word means ‘a very auspicious place.’ We appropriated the name for our auspicious place” – Douglas & Tsongie Hamilton

Tashiding: Beyond Earth and Sky presents a sumptuous portrait of a 100-acre rural landscape and stunning residence, in Maryland, USA, developed in connection with the land and the environment. Stunning photographs and the book’s elegant design take readers on an exquisite visual tour of the property and its development, including the origins and culture of its owners—Douglas Hamilton former president and chairman of The Walters Museum in Maryland and Tsognie Wangmo, the eldest child of the last king of Sikkim, shortly before the Himalayan royal kingdom was taken over by India. This is the poignant and inspirational story of the origins and creation of Tashiding, which was developed by Douglas and Tsognie without plans, a design on paper, or a professional landscape architect or garden designer, personify their intuitive sensibility and innate knowledge—approaches that every gardener can use, and every designer will appreciate.

Tashiding showcases the joining of two distinct cultures, and how their Western and Eastern backgrounds are manifest in the landscapes, garden themes, sculpture, ornament, and the house’s interiors. Everyone who has visited Tashiding is moved by the experiential sensation of the landscape’s different places. In developing Tashiding’s four-seasons gardens, Douglas and Tsognie envisioned an environment that invites a sense of harmony and well-being—part arboretum, part park, and part Xanadu. It is a garden for both walking and quiet contemplation, for feeling the thrill of the wind on a cool March day or for sitting in the tea house on a rainy afternoon, watching the wind form abstract ripples on the surface of the lake. Collecting and arranging the extraordinary quantity of rocks, boulders, trees and shrubs, they see their hands in all they did. Yet as the years have passed, each tree and plant grows in its own unique way, knitting together to form a new and perhaps more naturalistic landscape.