H. Rodney Sharp worked for industrialist Pierre S. du Pont and was married to his sister, so the development of the six-acre Gibraltar gardens can be compared to Pierre's contemporaneous Longwood Gardens a few miles north. (Pierre often visited the Sharp's garden at lunchtime and, in 1915, proposed to his wife amid the roses.) Coffin created a series of “rooms” (1916) and designed a curving marble stair that sweeps down from the house. Photographs of the 200-foot bald cypress allee (designed 1919) appeared in garden magazines. The twenty-four cypresses, planted in spring 1921, were cut into formal specimens to answer the same purpose as a hedge, though today they are towering. A one-foot-high ivy-covered wall, smoketrees, and statuary lined the path, which terminated at a three-arched Italian-style tea house with imported rosso verona columns. Garden restoration was undertaken in 1998–1999 by Rodney Robinson.