By late June the borough shifts into a quieter register. The Race Meeting crowd at Moorland Farm is still four months out, the fall foxhunts are further, and the roads off Route 202 belong mostly to the people who live along them. What's easy to miss is that a handful of the best places in Far Hills quietly rearrange their calendars for exactly this stretch of the year. Thursday evenings extend. Meadows peak. A putting green opens on a lawn most people drive past without noticing.
The thesis of a Far Hills summer, if it has one, is that the borough runs on a shadow calendar during July and August. Residents who only tap the borough on Saturdays are missing the good half.
The Thursday That Runs Until Seven
Ten minutes north of the train station, the Leonard J. Buck Garden at 11 Layton Road spends most of the year keeping banker's hours. From May through August, that changes on Thursdays. The garden stays open until 7 p.m. on Thursdays during those months, which turns the last light of a summer weekday into a genuinely usable window. You can leave a desk at 5:30 and still get an hour on the trails before the shadows hit the rock faces.
The garden itself is worth understanding on its own terms. It's a 33-acre woodland and rock garden operated by the Somerset County Park Commission, featuring native and exotic plants displayed in a naturalistic setting of woodland, streams, and rock outcroppings. The design was conceived by Leonard J. Buck, a geologist who bought the property in 1937 and renamed it Allwood, together with Swiss landscape architect Zenon Schreiber; the two began a 30-year collaboration in the deep ravine and rocky outcrops of the site. Roughly 2.5 miles of gravel paths run through it.
Peak visiting time is spring, but summer has its own logic here:
- The Fern Swamp, thick with ostrich ferns, wintergreen with berries, skimmia, hardy cyclamen, and slender limbs of Japanese maple
- The Heath and Heather Garden in planters in front of the Visitor's Center, where the heaths finish in April and the multi-color heathers bloom through summer
- The upper trails around Big Rock and Horseshoe Rock, where the path climbs above the valley into the tree canopy
- Colorful grasses, perennials, and aquatic plantings that brighten the summer garden
One caveat locals learn quickly. The park sits close to I-287, and truck traffic at rush hour is audible on the lower trails. After six on a Thursday, when the westbound flow has thinned, is when the ravine actually sounds like a ravine.
Dawn to Dusk at Fairview Farm
The other end of a Far Hills summer day is Fairview Farm Wildlife Preserve at 2121 Larger Cross Road. The 170-acre former dairy farm is the headquarters of Raritan Headwaters, holds five miles of trails through fields and woods, a scenic pond with a dock, a bird and butterfly garden, and a historic barn complex, and it's open to the public from dawn to dusk seven days a week. There is no admission fee, though the organization asks for donations toward stewardship.
Two small facts about the property are worth carrying. Thirteen cedar bluebird nest boxes are mounted four feet off the ground in the grass meadows, a height that allows good insect predation for the parents and a safe fledging height for the young. And the bird and butterfly garden in the barn complex peaks in mid-August, when a plethora of colorful flowers set the backdrop for butterflies, birds, and other native pollinators. That mid-August window is the single most underused date on the Far Hills summer calendar. Most people who show up at Fairview Farm in July return in October for the fall foliage and skip the exact fortnight the pollinator garden was built for.
The preserve rewards a specific kind of use. Passive recreational pursuits like nature walks, bird watching, photography, painting en plein air, nature journaling, and catch-and-release fishing are the intended vocabulary. It is not a place you jog through with earbuds and log on Strava. Neighbors who treat it that way tend to burn out on it in a season.
One tell that a Far Hills household has settled into its rhythm: the family walks Fairview Farm in the evening, drops in on Buck Garden on a Thursday, and knows without checking that Shedfest happens the first Sunday in June each year.
That June date is worth marking for next year. Shedfest is Raritan Headwaters' outdoor music festival and fundraiser at Fairview Farm, an afternoon of local bands, food, and the wildlife preserve itself. This year's ran on June 7, so the next chance is late spring 2027.
Nine Holes, Ten Dollars, and a Green Modeled on St. Andrews
Take the Far Hills exit off I-287 and follow it a few minutes south and you arrive at what is technically a Liberty Corner address but is stitched into Far Hills life anyway. The USGA Golf Museum and Library sits at 77 Liberty Corner Road, and the reason to know about it in July is not the museum. It is the lawn behind it.
The Pynes Putting Course is a 16,000-square-foot green modeled on the Himalayas putting course in St. Andrews, Scotland, with an undulating design that offers a challenging and entertaining experience; it is named for Percy and Evelyn Pyne, who once resided on the property that is now USGA headquarters. The course is open from April through November during normal hours of operation, weather permitting, plays nine holes in about 30 minutes, and costs $10 in green fees, which includes a putter and a souvenir golf ball. Appropriate footwear is required, so no high heels or heavy-soled boots.
That $10 is worth setting against a baseline. A round on any of the region's private courses runs into the hundreds before you count the guest fee, and even the county's public tracks charge more than that for a bucket of range balls. The Pynes Course is the cheapest legitimate putting practice in the Somerset Hills, and it happens to sit inside a museum campus that is the country's foremost center for the study and celebration of golf history and holds more than 70,000 artifacts documenting the game's greatest moments and champions.
Inside, the rooms are organized around specific champions. A clerestory-lit rotunda called the Hall of Champions houses all 15 of the USGA's original national championship trophies, bronze wall plaques commemorate every USGA champion from 1895 to present, and rooms are dedicated to Ben Hogan, Mickey Wright, and Jack Nicklaus. The building itself is the old Pyne mansion, which is why the driveway has the pace of a country estate rather than a museum.
For a resident, the practical use of the campus in summer runs the other direction from how tourists use it. Put 30 minutes on the course, buy the round for a visiting nephew, and walk the galleries only when the weather turns.
The Rest of the Evening
Far Hills is a small borough with a small dining bench, so the honest map of a summer evening usually crosses one town line. The nearest reliable options sit just over the border in Peapack-Gladstone and Bernardsville.
The Pendry Natirar campus, a few minutes south on Peapack Road, holds two of them. Ninety Acres embraces a farm-to-table philosophy and runs a cooking school that highlights local and seasonal ingredients. Ladd's Tavern, also on the Pendry Natirar grounds, offers outdoor dining with what one diner described as a bucolic setting and a gorgeous view. Both are the kind of places that reward a Thursday reservation more than a Saturday one, for the same reason Buck Garden rewards a Thursday evening more than a Saturday afternoon.
For something less orchestrated, the walk-up options cluster in downtown Bernardsville and the small Peapack strip near the station. A short train ride away, the Far Hills station itself sits on the Gladstone Branch. It's a quiet stop most weekends and a genuinely walkable anchor if you're routing an evening around a train back from the city.
The Fall Bookend
The reason July matters is partly that October is coming. The 105th Far Hills Race Meeting is set for Saturday, October 17, 2026, a day of steeplechase racing and traditions at Moorland Farm. The race falls on the third Saturday in October each year and supports six healthcare beneficiaries in the region.
The residents who get the most out of the Race Meeting are the ones who treated the summer as its own season rather than a waiting room. They already know the back way out of the Moorland Farm lot from a June wedding. They know which Buck Garden trail dries out fastest after a wet week. They know the pond at Fairview Farm holds bass, and the barn complex holds a butterfly garden they walked through in August.
A Far Hills summer is quiet, but it isn't empty. It's simply organized around a smaller number of very specific places, and the households that learn the schedule tend to keep it for years.
If you're thinking about the year ahead in the Somerset Hills, whether that's settling deeper into Far Hills or considering a move within the county, the team at Brown & McCrea is happy to talk it through. Contact Us whenever the timing is right.
