People are fascinated with gardens. They give us a sense of wellbeing and whimsy, a connection with nature and, in the case of historic gardens, nostalgia for an earlier, romantic time.

The "Lost Gardens of New England" exhibition, currently at New London's Lyman Allyn Art Museum, gives viewers the opportunity to vicariously peek into gardens that no longer exist for the most part, through historic photographs, drawings and watercolors. Also included are landscape drawings - by professional and amateur garden designers - that illustrate how the gardens were imagined and executed.

The show is divided into sections that chronicle major themes of American landscape design: urban gardens, family gardens, professionally designed landscapes, Colonial-revival gardens and landscape structures.

Organized by Historic New England, the traveling exhibition features gardens in Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut. But Jane LeGrow, the museum's registrar and assistant curator, has "customized" the Lyman Allyn's exhibit by including prominent local gardens.

"I wanted to include some local sites to really bring it home," LeGrow says. "Garden design is everywhere and it is a very ephemeral art, and we do have lost gardens, as well as lost and found gardens, in our own backyard."

LeGrow focused on three sites in New London County: Westomere and Meadow Court - both lost gardens in New London - and Eolia, on the Harkness Estate in Waterford, an example of a lost garden being restored.

"I picked these because they all had interesting garden designers," LeGrow says, "and they're all representative of a particular moment in late 19th century, early 20th century when there was this bubble of wealth, and gardens are expensive things; especially these large estate gardens."

LeGrow points out that there was no minimum wage or income tax at the time and there had just been a great economic boom, allowing people to accumulate enormous wealth.

She says that like in England, popularized by the "Downton Abbey" TV series, the moment of the grand country estate in America really ended with World War I.

"New London was a fashionable place to live because of the Pequot Colony, and so there were a lot of these uber-wealthy people building estates all along the coast of southeastern Connecticut," LeGrow says.

"And one of the ways you spent your money was to create a beautiful country home for yourself," she continues, "which was really a huge estate on 10 or 12 acres of land, and you hired the best in the business to design it for you - relative to your interests and design preferences. But it also had to do with how the (estate owners) were influenced by certain strands of garden design movements throughout the U.S."

An example of this, LeGrow says, is Meadow Court, "which became the Lighthouse Inn … and is now for sale by the city. But it started out as a steel magnate's summer home, designed by prominent Boston architects, the Olmstead brothers. Their father, Frederick Law Olmstead, designed Central Park and was considered the father of American landscape architecture."

LeGrow says that Meadow Court is truly a lost garden that only existed for about 20 years. It was sold in the 1920s, and the property was subdivided. The same thing happened to Westomere, which originally was the George Palmer estate and is now Westomere Terrace, a housing community.

"Westomere was designed by Charles Platt, who designed (the Lyman Allyn), and a number of other big commissions. He was also a landscape architect."

LeGrow notes that Platt's ideas were very different from Olmstead's.

"With Meadow Court, you have very naturalistic plantings," she says. "It was called Meadow Court after a six-acre wildflower meadow. They wanted it to look like it had been there forever, even though it was planted from scratch - thousands of plants, just to make it look like they grew there on their own. It required tremendous labor to do this and the money behind it was enormous."

On the other hand, Westomere's landscape gardens are quite the opposite.

"It's sort of formal, neoclassical, everything is symmetrical," LeGrow explains. "There are long vistas with sweeping lawns and very narrow, straight gravel paths. He wants to control what you're looking at in the garden, which are really classical forms of beauty."

Beatrix Jones Farrand, one of the only founding female members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, designed the gardens of Harkness in the early 20th century.

"She was a big deal designer in her own right before the Harknesses asked her to come and work on their gardens, which were heavily influenced by her views on classic garden designs," LeGrow says. "She had resources at her disposal - the term 'keeping up with the Joneses' came from her family. And many of those gardens have actually been restored now. It's all a kind of archeology, having to figure out not just what she planted and where did she plant it but a garden happens over a course of seasons, so it's kind of a mystery to solve to restore a garden."

LeGrow believes that garden design is an art form, although it's not often recognized as one.

"I really do think it's like painting in time," she says. "It's a medium where you can't always control your materials. You can plant something, but whether it decides to come up, whether the deer decide not to eat it, is up to chance. But also, what is it going to look like today? What is it going to look like in three months? How are the colors going to work together? All of those things combined - and how do you think of man's relationship to his surroundings and our place in the world? - come into play in garden designs. So there are these interesting intellectual, artistic and aesthetic questions that get raised as far as it being another artistic field."

LeGrow thinks the exhibit will appeal to a wide range of people, in addition to gardeners.

"I think people who are interested in different kinds of art forms, history and local history - treasures that are lost and sometimes found again, like Harkness - will enjoy the show," LeGrow says. "I also think anyone who is sick of snow will enjoy this show."

Also on display are restored and reconstructed garden gates by Clint Wright, a blacksmith at the Noank Factory. And there is a garden room where children can "plant" a garden with rakes and tools.

IF YOU GO

What: "Lost Gardens of New England" exhibit

Where: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St., New London

When: Through July 31

Info: www.lymanallyn.org