GUILDERLAND — For Phyllis Rosenblum, it was love at first sight.

“As soon as I walked in the front door, I knew,” she said. “This was it.”

The front door is actually a matched set of two ornately carved Victorian panels. They open to an equally grand hall with a walnut banister running down to a massive, many-sided newel post. Rosenblum has the receipt for those doors — “Twenty-eight bucks back in 1875,” she says.

Rosenblum grew up in a large Illinois farm family and, at the time she found her dream home, was living in a nice house in Albany with her husband, Edwin, and two sons, Joshua and Jesse.

She was itching to have a bigger yard to garden in and, one Sunday in the early 1980s, as she browsed through newspaper real-estate ads, her husband urged her to go have a look.

Ten days later, they had a contract on the Victorian mansion. And yes, it is a mansion by American lexicographer Noah Webster’s definition — it is a house with four chimneys.

Now 70, Rosenblum lives in the house by herself, with her brindle pit bull, a rescue dog named Sasha. Rosenblum walks her land with alacrity and, in the earliest days of spring, anticipates the renewal of her plants. She points to beds where flowers will soon bloom — Decoration Day poppies here, day lilies and irises there, and peonies over here.

“It was so cold,” she says. “Now everything is coming up at once.”

The original property — wide rolling fields with a backdrop of the Helderberg escarpment — was owned by the Frederick brothers: Matthias and Matthew had both fought in the Revolutionary War.

Rosenblum has a copy of the original 1789 deed signed by Stephen Van Rensselaer. Matthias Frederick is buried in her yard. His grave marker shows he had a long life — 84 years and 11 days.

Between the gravesite and the road stand towering pine trees — dark green Norway spruce and a lighter concolor fir — that Rosenblum planted with her son in 1990. “There’s a spring-blooming redbud in there,” she says, aware of the palette she has created although the blossoms are not yet in sight.

For most of its life, the property was a dairy farm, owned by generations of the Crounse family. Two other families owned the house and grounds between the Crounses and the Rosenblums.

Phyllis Rosenblum got the additional gardening space she wanted — 120 acres. The hayfields are farmed to keep them open, and she mows the sweeping lawn herself and tends to the many gardens, for both flowers and vegetables.

“I’m pretty much in the garden if it’s not raining or not dark,” she says.

“Much to do”

The farm originally had a Dutch barn, she says, but it had fallen into disrepair and was sold, for its parts, in the 1970s. When the Rosenblums bought the place, there was still a carriage barn on the property but it fell in and collapsed before they could put a roof on it. “There was so much to do,” she said.

Improvements are constant and ongoing. Rosenblum hired Mike Porter in 2003 to build a stone wall in front of the house and a stone terrace leading up to the front entryway. She just recently cut down old yews and hemlocks that were planted in front of the house and she is now envisioning the garden that will replace them. “I’ve got to put my thinking cap on,” she said.

The original house, now in back of the grand Victorian front, is from the early 1800s. It has a brick fireplace with a cooking crane.

“We used to start a fire on Christmas Eve and keep it going till New Year’s Day,” Rosenblum said.

The room’s hand-hewn beams were salvaged from other buildings. The mortise in one of the beams holds a small handmade wooden pillbox that was there when the Rosenblums bought the house.

Phyllis Rosenblum has identified some of the other beams as having come from a hay barrack. She has diagrams of the barracks and has deduced the notches match those in her back room, which she uses now as a cozy study.

One of her favorite features is a piece of tin that long ago was nailed over a rat hole between the wide, wide planks of the floor.

A door, also made of wide planks, leads to the outdoors. Rosenblum wanted it to open in the other direction so as not to block the light from a window. It turned out the sill was rotted as were the posts partway up the wall. The new sill was custom-cut to fit by the late Rudy Stempel at his mill in Berne.

“We had to tear the room apart,” recalled Rosenblum. “That’s the mushroom effect of old-house renovation.”

The outside of the house was sheathed in aluminum siding when the Rosenblums bought it. They removed the siding, insulated, added a layer of Tyvek, and installed cedar clapboards. The Rosenblums also lined all four chimneys and re-did or installed three bathrooms.

The back study leads into a kitchen with pine cabinets made by Adirondack Woodworking to Rosenblum’s design. The sink faces a sunny window while the stove and counter, topped with blue tile, stretch out into the room so cooks can work on either side of it at once.

The off-white kitchen walls are bordered at top and bottom with a hand-stenciled pattern in red and blue.

“A different world”

Stepping from the kitchen to the Victorian part of the house, Rosenblum said, “When you come out here, you go into a different world.”

True enough. The 1875 part of the house has high ceilings, huge lace-covered windows with original woodwork, and many patterns of wallpaper.

Rosenblum commented on the “hubris” of those who built the house. “The wind comes out of the north,” she said. “The house faces north and has windows the size of patio doors.”

Throughout are carefully displayed treasures — some of them are from Rosenblum’s past, others are finds from antique stores or auctions.

The dining room, centered with a lace-topped table, has ornately carved oak furniture. “This is Dad’s highchair,” said Rosenblum, pointing out the family keepsake that was used by her own children. Her father was born in 1894.

She also displays favorite etched-glass goblets with ruby glass stems and bases. And she has a canister set — with labels for everything from prunes to rice — that she says is identical to canisters in the movie “Meet Me in St. Louis,” set on the eve of the 1904 World’s Fair.

She made the lace curtains that grace the windows and the coverlets that rest on the back of some of the chairs. One of them has 54,000 stitches on the border. Rosenblum tore out most of a side when she was knitting it because it wasn’t perfect. She’s glad she did. “Now, every time I look at it, I’m happy,” she said.

The dining room opens into the front parlor. There, a piano holds sheet music from Irving Berlin, and a period cabinet next to the piano is chock full of more sheet music.

The room is rich with patterns upon patterns upon patterns — from the wallpaper to the carpet to the upholstered chairs — one of them rescued from a curb in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

A red velvet couch that came with the house is filled with stuffed animals and the upright piano has a picture of Rosenblum’s grandchild midst all the furry animals. Her collection started with a giant stuffed mouse, wearing fuzzy cat slippers. Her own cat used to enjoy sleeping on the stuffed mouse.

Beautiful antique prints are displayed throughout the house, even in the laundry room. One that Rosenblum calls a “prize possession” is an 1896 Burpee’s print of sweet peas. She also has framed artifacts that were found in the house — a pair of antique spectacles, many old keys, and fragile paper documents including a recipe for bag balm, a bill for phosphate, and an 1875 tax receipt.

A bouquet of peacock feathers came from her parents’ farm where her father raised exotic birds.

One room is filled with a carefully arranged display of miniature Christmas village scenes. Tables with many felt-covered levels show off vignettes of Victorian life.

“My youngest son was married here with the Christmas music playing,” said Rosenblum.

Upstairs, each bedroom has its own personality. At the top of the stairs is a huge pier mirror, which came with the house, as did a settee in the hallway. One room has a dark walnut bedroom set; another, with yellow wallpaper scattered with sprigs of flowers, features Rosenblum’s childhood bed, a fanciful iron design topped with an afghan she started knitting when she was pregnant with her first son. In the medallions between the rows of cables she embroidered roses and daisies.

Rosenblum sleeps in her mother’s bed, a bed so grand that, for her entire childhood, she never saw the top of the headboard. The ceilings in her childhood home weren’t tall enough to accommodate it, so the top was stored in the attic. Now the parts are reunited.

At the foot of the bed, in its own cradle is Rosenblum’s childhood doll. She had it repaired at a “doll hospital” in New York City, which she found “creepy,” with all the dolls’ body parts on display. Her doll wears her uncle’s dress and sleeps under covers Rosenblum made.

She never named her doll. “I just called her ‘Baby,’” Rosenblum said.

“The garden of my dreams”

For 38 years, Rosenblum has been a Master Gardener with the Cornell Cooperative Extension, helping others learn the art and science of cultivation. She believes that gardening is empowering and has even helped start gardens for prisoners to tend at the county jail.

Her landscape is an ever-shifting palette of color and texture.

Out her back door are terraces she had built of stone walls. A week ago, Scilla was blooming profusely. She had planted it a quarter of a century ago and it continues to spread.

The centerpiece of her yard is a rustic, weathered shed, roofed with wooden shingles, which she has shored up and restored from the inside out to be her garden shed.

“They called it the pig pen,” Rosenblum said, but she doubts it was because it harbors no smell.

From the windows of her shed, she can gauge the day’s weather by looking at the Helderberg escarpment. “If you can’t see the mountains, it won’t be a good day,” she said.

She has a new window box under the shed windows. Because the shed has settled at an angle, the window box, she said, “could either be straight or look straight.” She chose the practical over the appearance so it would be better for watering.

On the other side of her shed are rustic twig chairs under an arbor where a trumpet vine, in season, forms a roof. “You plant it and run out of the way so it doesn’t grab you,” she said, quoting a gardener’s wisdom on the trumpet vine.

On the far side of the shed is Rosenblum’s vegetable garden. She went to England in 2000 to look at gardens. “I came home and built the garden of my dreams,” she said.

The gardens in England were based not just on production, but also on beauty, she said. With a degree from Cobleskill in landscape design, she had no trouble sketching out her garden.

Rosenblum’s original vegetable garden had problems with drainage. She recalled wryly her adventure in the rain that followed Hurricane Hugo in 1989. She had winter squash in the garden that needed rescuing and so got her boots on and went out in the rain to harvest it. “I realized I was getting stuck,” she said. “As I sunk in mud to the top of my boots, I thought, ‘They’ll find me in here in the spring, rotted with the squash.’”

Her redesigned garden features eight big beds and six smaller ones. The big beds, edged with hefty timbers, are arranged geometrically around a metal obelisk where she plants Grandpa Ott morning glories. “My grandparents are Otts,” she said.

Gravel paths run between all the beds. She rotates her crops each year. “Everything moves 90 degrees,” she said, explaining that, for example, cabbage and tomatoes can have diseases that stay in the soil.

Rosenblum tests the soil every four or five years. “Compost can be high in pH. You want 6.8 for most vegetables,” she said, describing how to make the soil more acidic or more basic. “You can adjust with lime or sulfur in the fall. Like everything else, a stitch in time saves nine.”

Her beds are edged with lavender — “It smells good,” she says — and some with lemon and tangerine marigolds — “They self-sow and are pretty.”

The crops include eight to 12 varieties of tomatoes — “some hybrid, some old-timey” — peppers, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, onions, peas, lettuce strawberries, beets, and beans — green, yellow, and purple.

In season, all she has to buy at the grocery store is milk and cheese, she said, and she has considered raising goats.

“I don’t can,” said Rosenblum. “I eat it or give it away.”

The garden is surrounded with a picket fence that has been high enough to keep the deer out and has chicken wire at the bottom to keep the rabbits at bay.

Rosenblum likes the old farm implements that remain on the land and wouldn’t sell them when someone came and offered to buy them. He returned with a sculpture made of old parts, which she likes and has placed in her garden. The statue has part of a transmission line for feet, a shovel for a face, a chain for hair.

She fertilizes with “Moo Doo,” made from cow manure, and reuses the bags it comes in around the base of her plants. She wishes she could buy it in bulk.

“I hate plastic,” says Rosenblum. “It’s out of place in this house and this garden.”

Even her compost bins are made of wood.  They are modular so the sides can be raised or lowered. They are just outside her vegetable garden’s picket fence where their weathered gray wood blends in.

A place to watch the moon

On the other side of the house from the vegetable garden is a pond with a well house beside it. The well, hand-dug and edged with stone, draws from the same stream that fills the pond.

As Rosenblum walks toward the pond, she picks up twigs that have fallen over the long winter. She will bundle them to use to start her fires come next winter.

She also notes the Canada geese swimming in the pond. She doesn’t mind a single mating pair taking up residence to raise a family, but, with more than that, she says, “The place is covered with goose poop.”

Looking down into the well, Rosenblum says, “In the winter, you can shine a light in there and see big old bullfrogs.”

Rosenblum has planted daffodils along the edge of the pond where her sons used to swim in the summer and skate in the winter. Joshua lives now in Chicago and Jesse in Brooklyn.

“My goal was to have so many daffodils, if I picked them, I’d never know,” she said.

As she walks the perimeter of the pond, crossing over a rustic bridge the Rosenblums built, she notes the cleanup that needs to be done and points out the remains of a blue heron.

“It made me very sad,” she said of the heron’s death; the heron’s body lies beneath the branch of an enormous fallen black willow. The trunk-sized willow branch continues to live.

Rosenblum recalls how her Jack Russell terriers, Winston and Clementine, named after the Churchills, once were tortured by the blue heron that strutted back and forth in front of them, just on the other side of their electrified invisible fence.

She settles in a bench against the well house and says, “I like to sit here and watch the moon come up.”

When it’s fully dark, she said, “The mosquitoes go to sleep. At sunset, they’d pick you up and carry you away.”