If you stay long enough at Pleasantdale Chateau, thoughts of the world outside begin to drift away. That was the intention of industrialist Charles Walter Nichols who built his 40-acre estate in 1935 on 40 acres of farmland to serve as a refuge.
In 1995, the Knowles family, who had previously owned the Manor and Highlawn Pavilion, saw value in the whimsical qualities of the historic property and its natural beauty and bought the property to convert it into a wedding venue.
Last year, their efforts to preserve the forest received an important recognition from the Department of Environmental protection when it was accepted into the prestigious Forest Stewardship Program. The program, reserved for private landowners with at least four acres of land, requires the owners to come up with a 10-year plan that ensures the health of not only trees but the wildlife, waterways, and wetlands.
It is only the fourth property in Essex County to participate. It was a rigorous process that culminated in a 60-page report drafted with the help of Mike Hart, a forester with the USDA Forest Service.
“It’s not about the recognition,” Wade Knowles, co-owner of Knowles Hospitality. “It’s important for us to maintain the forest here, because it’s really disappearing quickly in other places.”
After Nichols died in 1963, he willed the property to Allied Chemical, where he had served on the board. The corporation used the home as a corporate retreat and there wasn’t as much attention paid to the health of the forest and the neglect began to show, Knowles said.
“They would fly in, have business meetings, eat dinner, and leave,” Knowles said. “There wasn’t so much focus on the outside so a lot of things weren’t replaced that naturally disappeared over 40, 50, 60 years.”
Knowles quickly became the defacto arborist at the property, planting more than 200 trees. Not only has the forest been nursed back to health but a new generation is growing from the acorns of trees that both Nichols and Knowles planted.
“That’s another part of what we’re trying to do here — save the parent genetics of the trees and grow them ourselves, rather than buying trees from a nursery elsewhere and shipping them in,” said Keith Sly, director of public relations.
This week, during a tour of the property, the trees at Pleasantdale Chateau were somehow holding on to their peak autumn foliage as if they were informed ahead of time that they would be protographed. Knowles, co-owner of Knowles Hospitality, pointed out different species of trees on the property and named them as if they were relatives in a family photo. Across the grounds are 265 placards identifying 111 varieties of trees to help visitors learn about the different species when Knowles is not present to share their names and stories.
The Knowles family are still caring for many of the tree species that Nichols planted on the property, including Dutch elms and even a redwood.
“Because it was a private estate going back more than 100 years, the Nichols family had put in some pretty interesting species here, some of which have survived and are quite rare now,” Knowles said.
There wasn’t an awareness in the early 1900s of the importance of indigenous species but that has changed in the last three decades under the guidance of Knowles.
Today, walking on the grounds, visitors will find pawpaw trees, an important and delicious food source for the Lenape. Near one of these indigenous trees lies a small pre-colonial stone mortar, one of the many easter eggs found around the property.
Knowles went to boarding school at the Cardigan Mountain School, known for its unconventional curriculum that includes lessons in outdoorsmanship. It is there that he developed his love of forestry that he passed on to his son, Trevor Knowles, who is an arborist. It was his son that recommended leaving some dead trees standing because they become habitats for wildlife. This is not a philosophy common at wedding venues known for their manicured landscaping, but it seems Knowles is steering the business toward a new way of doing things, a new ethos, that includes composting tons of coffee grinds, and eggshells, and organic waste that comes out of the banquet hall and reusing them in the soil. The fallen logs are even used to warm the six fireplaces at the Pleasantdale Chateau.
“He’s planting trees whose shade he may not even sit in,” Sly said about Knowles, quoting the famous proverb. “But that’s the interest we have in the future — it’s not just about what we can get from the property today.”
