Category Archives: Private Gardens

A Denver Floral Extravaganza – The Garden of Rob Proctor and David Macke

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What a treat I had back in June, along with more than 70 other garden bloggers during our annual “Garden Bloggers’ Fling”, to visit the beautiful garden of Rob Proctor and David Macke in the Highlands district of northwest Denver – and then to visit it again in softer light, the following morning! So in the midst of a very busy summer up here on Lake Muskoka (during which I’ve scarcely had a moment to revisit my photos) I nevertheless wanted to share images from my visit.  If you arrive in June, this is what greets you even before you open the charming front gate.

In front of the house is a “hellstrip” from heaven, below, filled with a drought-tolerant symphony of plants in purples and soft yellows. It’s your first clue that the plantings here have been designed by a master colourist who is also a painter and botanical illustrator. Rob now appears on Denver’s 9NEWS twice weekly as a garden expert, but at one time he was co-director with Angela Overy of the Denver Botanic Gardens School of Botanical Illustration.  He also served as the DBG’s Director of Horticulture from 1998 to 2003.  As his friend and former colleague, DBG Senior Curator and Director of Outreach Panayoti Kelaidis said in an interview once: “He transformed a sleepy, provincial research garden facility and made us one of the great display gardens in America.”

Bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum) creates soft cushions of magenta blossoms in front of lavender-blue meadow sage (Salvia pratensis), middle left. At middle right is purple woodland sage (Salvia nemorosa).

Bees were everywhere, including this honey bee nectaring on the woodland sage.

Two unusual xeric plants are lilac-purple Kashmir sage (Phlomis cashmeriana) and golden drop (Onosma taurica), below.

At the eastern end of the hellstrip, a brighter colour scheme featured….

….. apricot desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) with basket-of-gold (Aurinia saxatilis).

A metallic green sweat bee (Agapostemon virescens) was nectaring on the desert mallow, while….

….. nearby,  showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) was awaiting monarch butterflies.

The word “hellstrip” is usually attributed to Colorado garden designer Lauren Springer Ogden, author of the acclaimed book The Undaunted Garden, among others. She and Rob also co-authored Passionate Gardening: Good Advice for Challenging Climates.  In an article she wrote for Horticulture magazine back in 2007, Ogden wrote of the Water Smart Garden she designed for Denver Botanic Gardens, shown in my photo below:  “The Denver Botanic Gardens’ former director of horticulture, Rob Proctor, played a crucial role in developing the full potential of the garden. The first couple of years it floundered—a good number of the called-for plants were not actually put in, and it fell under poorly trained and often careless maintenance. When Rob took over, he made it his priority to support the richness of the planting and the high level of care the garden deserved. He let me shop personally for many of the missing plants and add the beginnings of a collection of fiber plants that now brings so much to the dynamic year-round textures of the garden: nolinas, yuccas, agaves, and dasylirions—plants that just a few years ago were rarely used in Colorado gardens and often thought not to be hardy.”

Though I could have spent an hour exploring the luscious hellstrip, I was ready to find what waited on the other side of the gate in the ebullient gardens that surround the 1905 “Denver square” brick house that Rob and David moved into in May 1993.

I was invited in to look at some of Rob’s art.  I loved this botanical rendering of a passionflower, one of many of his works hanging in the house.

But I was anxious to see what was out back, so I made my way past Stranger, the stray cat that hung around Rob and David’s garden for such a long time that he first got the nickname, then his new home.

Though Stranger elected to stay behind on the sunroom table, Mouse accompanied me out onto the brick-paved patio.

And what a patio it is, nestled into its own little garden spangled with lilac-purple Allium cristophii. Here we see the first wave of hundreds of containers that Rob and David fill with annuals each season, adding to pots containing tropicals, bulbs, succulents or perennials.  Pots with tender plants are lifted outdoors each spring, nurtured and watered all summer, then transported back to the basement in autumn before Denver’s Zone 5 winter winds blow. Cobalt blue – a favourite colour – is the unifying hue here.

Teak benches and comfy cushions abound here and throughout the garden.

Tropical foliage plants mix with colourful annuals and succulents like Sedum rupestre ‘Angelina’ pair with potted lilies. Incidentally, Rob is an expert in bulbs in pots, having written The Oudoor Potted Bulb: New Approaches to Container Gardening with Flowering Bulbs way back in 1993, the year they moved here.  It’s one of sixteen books he has authored or co-authored.

Though their property is more than a half-acre with several discrete garden areas, the patio is a lovely intimate extension of the house.

When I visited the first time, Rob, left, in his trademark vest and David, a retired geologist, right, held court out here.

I was impressed that David was able to reach out and pick a succulent pea….

….. from a pot of dwarf ‘Tom Thumb’ peas on the coffee table.

However on my second visit, it was just Mouse and me.

I enjoyed the sound of water from the raised goldfish pond….

….. and the splash of water from a unique watering can fountain set among pots on the stairs to the house.

But I was anxious to head out to explore the garden. When Rob and David moved in 26 years ago, the first thing they did was cut down eight “half-dead Siberian elms”.  Said Rob in a 1995 article for American Horticulturist, he wanted to build perennial borders. “Because of the relatively formal look of the late Victorian Italianate house, I chose a strong, geometric layout of long borders. Occasional half circles soften the straight lines. Within this framework, I indulge in the controlled chaos that we associate with traditional herbaceous borders.”  He carved out two rectangular beds each measuring 16 x 60 feet (4.9 x 18 metres) with an 8-foot wide strip of lawn in between. He then designed a backdrop of 12 brick columns – six per bed – connected by lattice screening and had a mason erect them on deep concrete footings.  That resulted in four 8 x 60 foot perennial beds, two of which are visible below. At the far end on the property’s south boundary line is the gazebo, built atop an old carriage house and featuring a winding staircase to the flat roof and a shady dining area within.  “Climbing the staircase,” wrote Rob, “it’s possible to view much of the garden from above.”

Mouse followed me dutifully out into the garden.

The colours here in June were exquisite, with purple and blue catmints, campanulas, cranesbills, meadowrues, salvias and veronicas enlivened by brilliant chartreuse. “Borders are like paintings,” said Rob. “Each one starts as a blank canvas. Working with a palette of plants, rather than paints, the possible combinations are limitless. The twin borders that cut through the middle of the garden contain the colors that I naturally gravitate towards – the blues, purples, and pinks.”

Each border held dozens of ideas for combinations. When I visited on June 17th, star-of-Persia onion (Allium cristophii) looked perfect with Kashmir sage (Phlomis cashmeriana)…..

….. and softened the flowers of broad-petaled cranesbill (Geranium platypetalum).

By the way, if you ever want to go down into a taxonomic rabbit hole, take a look at my blog on Allium cristophii.

The bold foliage of American cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum), below, offers a strong contrast to the soft colours and shapes of the central border.  Later in summer, the white flower umbels reach up to 8 feet (2.5 metres).  In one of the 2018 video clips from 9NEWS, Rob gives some pithy advice on how to handle this phototoxic native – just don’t!  Clambering over the lattice in the back of this photo is golden hops (Humulus lupulus ‘Aureus’), one of a number of vines that Rob encourages for its lovely effect. As he wrote:  “The golden hops vine needs little encouragement to thread through five or six feet of pink and blue flowers in this border, providing fresh, almost springlike foliage even in midsummer.”

Rob has used the red-leaved rose Rosa glauca as a background feature in one border, less for its single June flowers than for its strong foliage accent in order to enhance the massive beauty bush flowering in the background.

This was the view north along the twin central borders back to the house.

The third long border to the east featured white roses and the tall spires of Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Arctic Summer’….

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…… nestled in a snowy cloud of sea kale (Crambe cordifolia).

The fourth long border on the west side is a confection of pinks and burgundies – peonies, roses and cranesbills in June. As it turns west near the immense beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis), Rob gave special consideration to the unique colouration. “The beauty bush, its pale pink blossoms tinged with coral, inspired the color scheme of the surrounding plantings as the border turns to the west”. For the garden nearby, he chose sunset colours in lilies, red valerian, red sunroses, salmon pink nicotine and coral bells mixed with chartreuse and bronze foliage, to name a few.

In fact, he captured all three tints of beauty bush flowers in the cushions on the chairs placed strategically under its flowery boughs. This is colour perfectionism!  Because of its size, Rob estimates the shrub was planted fairly soon after it was introduced to the west via Ernest “China” Wilson, who sent seed to Veitch’s Nursery in England in 1901. Flowers did not appear on the first seedlings for nine more years.  It became very popular in gardens in the mid-20th century but deserves to be planted in gardens where its size can be contained.

This view melted my heart.  And there were bees in that pink rose… scroll down to the video at the end of my blog and you’ll see them.

Clematis recta is a superb June-blooming herbaceous clematis.  I’m not sure how Rob manages to keep his upright, but it does benefit from some kind of support, like a peony ring.

Further along, near the nuts-and-bolts of the garden (compost bins, potting shed, etc.) I noted one of Rob’s favourite strategies to introduce a splash of colour into the borders: a well-positioned pot with a bright red annual coleus.  He does the same thing with red orach (Atriplex hotensis ‘Rubra’).  Later there will be larkspur here.

We’ve arrived at the back where the gazebo is sited on the foundation of an old carriage house.  A spiral staircase climbs to the top; it must be a lovely spot to sip a glass of wine and look back on the borders.

Down below, there was a table and chairs under the roof, providing a nice view and much needed shade in Denver’s notoriously hot summers.

Luscious tuberous begonias thrive here.

What a great spot for al fresco dinners – surrounded by tropicals and foliage plants. I loved the louvered panels at the back.  And what do you suppose lies behind that dark picket fence?

Well, it’s an alley. A place where most gardeners would be content to create a couple of parking spots and leave it at that. But not David and Rob…. all that sunshine!  So they not only reserved places to park their cars, but….

… also designed a potager divided into eight Native-American-inspired “waffle” beds, which are dug down below grade to capture precious rainwater, just as waffles collect syrup.

Bordered in thyme, the beds contain different types of seed-grown vegetables.  At the centre of the potager is an artful cluster of pots.

As with every part of Rob and David’s garden, there is a comfy, colour-coordinated place to sit and relax – even in the alley!

Biennial clary sage (Salvia sclarea) is one of many plants allowed to self-seed here.

I loved this succulent-filled strawberry jar in the midst of the vegetables.

I headed back into the garden and made my way down the east side, where an old driveway has been re-imagined as the “gravel allée”.  It’s a series of tableaux: sitting areas with colour-matched accessories and plants.  Periwinkle blue and rusty-orange… sigh. You can imagine how enchanting this is for someone who called her blog “thepaintboxgarden”!

Such an inviting scene……

Double clematis are often less hardy than small-flowered species and varieties, so Rob pots them up and takes them to a less exposed area for winter.

Speaking of CLEM-a-tis, I liked hearing Rob educate his news colleagues on proper pronunciation of the vine.

Mouse was getting a little impatient for me to leave, so led me down the gravel path….

…. to containers nestled around a birdbath. Have you been counting the pots? I understand there are more than 600!

I’m a big fan of red-with-green in planting design  and this section of the path tickled my fancy.

Under the mature trees here was another semi-shaded sitting area set in amongst shrub roses with yet another bench.  I loved the row of potted aloes!

Now I was gazing at the house through a delightful thyme parterre herb garden.

I walked around to the south to see the view….

…. and then from the corner nearest the house. This is such a classic design – also created in the lowered waffle bed manner – and so lovely when the thyme…..

…. and the rose are in flower together.

I had a plane to catch later that afternoon, so gathered up my things and headed around the house to the front. There on the west side under the shade of the trees was one final treasure in Rob and David’s garden. It was a patio filled with shade-loving plants adjoining their sunken garden (down the stairs and just out of the photo below).   As Rob wrote in 1995: “One weekend, while digging up self-sown tree-of-heaven saplings, we kept hitting brick. We determined that it was the foundation to a building, about 15 by 10 feet. Friends joined us for some urban archeology as we excavated it, finding hundreds of patent medicine bottles, broken china, and a waffle iron designed for the top of a wood stove. The foundation may have supported a summer kitchen or an earlier house, perhaps a farmer’s. We stopped digging at about four feet and, exhausted, decided our sunken garden was deep enough. We mixed in extra-rich compost to nurture the shade-lovers we intended to plant there.”

It was so hot that day in June, I would have loved to settle in the shade on those blue and red cushions and contemplate the lovely caladium. But it was time to go.

So, reluctantly, out I went through the gate entwined with Virginia creeper, to meet my ride.

As a bonus, I created a little musical tour through David and Rob’s enchanting garden, co-starring a selection of the bees that find nectar there:

Rob and David have shared their garden annually for many years now. It’s for a cause near and dear to them – and to Stranger and Mouse, too. And I’m so glad I was able to share their garden with you, too.

Visiting Marjorie’s Garden

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I have a free summer afternoon in Toronto and call my dear friend, garden writer and designer Marjorie Harris. Could I come to see her and bring my camera?  Of course, says she gracefully. Thus, on a hot afternoon at the very end of July, I walk up her midtown street. It’s never difficult to find Marjorie’s house. It’s the one with the luscious green floral tapestry in front. And it’s the one with the biggest ‘Sun King’ aralia (A. cordata) I’ve ever seen. It seems to extend its golden foliage over most of the frontage, on a narrow city lot that measures 20 x 137 feet (6 x 42 metres).

It’s also the garden with rare Japanese umbrella pines (Sciadopitys verticillata) hiding in the undergrowth, along with hellebores and golden hakone grass…..

….and a tiny, jewelled ‘Hana Matoi’ Japanese maple keeping company with Japanese painted fern.

But seriously…. that aralia! I can’t think of another perennial that creates such an element of privacy as this one. However, as Marjorie reminds me, her garden soil is really rich in compost (“lashes of compost” is a favourite phrase of hers) and she has an irrigation system that targets water on plants that really need it.

Marjorie and I spend a half-hour chewing the fat on the front porch. She and I have known each other for three decades. She is a straight shooter (calls a smart woman a “dame”), well organized, energetic and very involved in the cultural heartbeat of the city. And she is still head-over-heels about the garden she created behind the Annex home she has shared with her husband, novelist Jack Batten, for over 50 years. In it, they raised their children — two each from previous marriages — and enjoy visits from their three grandchldren.

She’s just as beautiful as she was in the mid-90s, when she was the editor of Toronto Life Gardens. I wrote articles and book reviews for her in those days, like the one below on landscape designer Neal Turnbull.  It’s hard to imagine this was 23 years ago! (Click for larger versions of the photos).

Later, she became editor-in-chief of Gardening Life magazine and we worked together then, too. (Interestingly, in her Summer 2005 editorial, below, she talks about Larry Davidson of Lost Horizons Nursery, from whom she acquired many of the choice trees and shrubs in her garden.)  Sadly, most of our beautiful, glossy gardening magazines have since disappeared from the publishing landscape in Canada, which is a crying shame.  But that’s a story for another day.

She’s been an ardent feminist all her life. Once, when I was looking through old magazines in my office, I found a 1973 Vancouver Sun Weekend magazine I had saved because it contained an article on the company I worked for at the time (a jade mine… long story). But as I flipped through the pages, I also found a piece titled The Invisible Women by Marjorie Harris.  The topic was “women’s liberation”. That was the beginning of her freelance career, after time spent on staff at Maclean’s and Chatelaine,

And, of course, she’s written tons of books, including the masterful Botanica North America, (to which I contributed some images). Published in 2003, this heavy tome was a rich, encyclopedic treatment of selected naive plants of the biomes of North America.

She was the Globe & Mail‘s gardening columnist for years and does features for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), among many other gigs. As well, she has her own landscape design business, and designed four gardens on her own block. And she goes to France every winter with Jack and makes us all jealous as we shovel the snow back home!

Ah bien, let’s stop chatting on the front porch and head out to see the back garden. And “seeing the garden” is a brilliant reality at Marjorie’s house, even before you actually go outside, because of the fabulous folding glass doors that span the lowered dining room. Designed as part of a 2005 renovation by Lisa Rapaport of PLANT Architect Inc., the glass expanse opened up the view to Marjorie’s exquisite woodland — a mélange of carefully chosen shrubs and trees, many evergreen, whose architecture creates four seasons of interest.

Now let’s step outside into the garden and look back at the house through the colourful tapestry of trees and shrubs. Beside the urn is a red-leaved Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Atropurpureum’).  “It was my first expensive plant,” says Marjorie. “I paid $20 for it at Ron’s Garden Centre in the 1980s. Couldn’t believe I’d spend that much money on one plant at the time. It led to madness of course“.

At first it’s not easy to discern a path forward through the abundance, with interesting plants drawing my eye from ground-level to the leafy canopy above. That’s part of Marjorie’s design strategy. As she says: “I find that too often designers miss out on the mid layers in a garden design:  I think mainly about foliage and how leaf shapes relate to one another and then I think about the height of each plant’s maximum effect and how that relates to the whole garden.”

Fittingly, I have to reach above my head and point my camera down to capture this delicious duo, a fullmoon Japanese maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) with colourful barberries below.

On the fence is Clematis ‘Betty Corning’, a spectacular, easy vine that Marjorie laments as being essentially unavailable in the trade.

There are few annuals allowed out here and those invited to stay must pay their rent, like purple-leaved Strobilanthes dyerianus with chartreuse ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine.  Behind is a glaucous evergreen Marjorie bought to decorate her Christmas table at the corner jug milk store one autumn, “then out to the garden to see just how big it might get,” she recalls. “I love it“.

It’s the exquisite little touches that draw the eye, like this ‘Geisha Gone Wild’ Japanese maple and gold hosta.


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A few choice conifers lend structure and interest in Toronto’s interminable winter, like ‘Algonquin Pillar’ Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra). “My garden looks good every day of the year except for about 10 days in early spring,” says Marjorie, “when it’s flooded and looking kind of crappy, with all the stuff I haven’t cut down for the winter being brazen enough to be obvious. That I usually clean up myself just because of the shame of it.”

She spends a lot of time looking up at her trees, a remarkable collection, especially given the size of the garden.

There is a beautiful katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) with its heart-shaped leaves and burnt sugar autumn aroma…..

….. and a gorgeous Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus), below, with its intricate compound leaves, the largest of any Canadian native tree.

It’s a favourite among her Carolinian forest natives, including tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus) and ruby-flowered Calycanthus, below.  “Oxydendron croaked on me,” she admits, “as have several others. I keep trying.”  

A pretty pink astilbe purchased from John’s Garden in Uxbridge grows in dappled shade here, too.

Walking towards the back of the garden, I reach an obelisk adorned with clematis and a nicely pruned blue falsecypress (Chamaecyparis), another one of Marjorie’s Christmas decorations.  Back in the 1980s, Marjorie’s garden featured a unique geometric checkerboard design, with half the spaces in flagstones and the other half choice plants.  In 2002, she hired Earth Inc. to design and install pergolas.  “All seemed fine,” recalls Marjorie, “until the dining room was added in 2005 and then the checkerboard just began to look too fussy.”  So a more streamlined path was substituted leading to this series of pergolas, which allowed space for a more interesting mix of woody plants.

The metal grate under the pergola covers the sump pump.  “The property is build on Seaton Pond flood plain, which rises every spring now that there are not enough trees to drain it properly,” Marjorie explains. “There is an underground stream which is an off-shoot of Taddle Creek, which comes through our garden and under the house. Hoses take the excess ground water out to the street storm sewer; and the stream is dealt with by in-house sump pumps and out through the sewage system.”

Marjorie’s pink floss tree (Albizia julibrissin), below, has now survived three winters. It’s the cultivar ‘Ernest Wilson’, purchased from Jim Lounsbery’s Vineland Nurseries and named for the famous plant explorer who found it in a Korean garden in 1918 and brought seed home to Boston’s Arnold Arboretum. He wrote about it in a 1929 bulletin.  “The origin of the plant in the Arboretum affords a good illustration of the importance of obtaining for northern gardens types which grow in the coolest regions they can withstand. The particular tree was raised from seeds collected in the garden of the Chosen Hotel at Seoul, Korea, by E. H. Wilson in 1918. It grows wild in the southern parts of the Korean peninsula but appears quite at home in the more severe climate of the central region. A few seeds only were collected and seedling plants were set out in the Arboretum when about four years old; several were killed the first winter but one came through with but slight injury and since that time has not suffered in the least. From its behavior during the last seven or eight years there seems reason to believe that this Korean type will prove a useful and valuable addition to gardens. It has a long flowering season, continuing in blossom throughout August.  Albizia is a member of a tropical tribe of the great family Leguminosae and it is astonishing that this tree should be able to withstand New England winters. Apparently it is happy in fully exposed situations, where good drainage and a sandy loam prevail.”

Shredded umbrella plant (Syneilesis aconitifolia) comes from one of Marjorie’s favourite wholesalers, Connon Nurseries, and has the most interesting flowers.

Here is a closeup of those unusual flower panicles.

At the back of her garden is a raised planter filled with an eclectic collection of plants. Says Marjorie: “If a plant looks awful in a client’s garden, I will replace it and I usually bring it home and put it in the Jardin de Refusée. If I don’t want it, one of the crew will and we baby these things along and then they become a respected part of our own gardens. I’ve never sold one of these babies back to clients even though they’ve done well in my garden.  In this garden, you have to drop dead to be removed.”

I try not to take that last sentence as a metaphor as I walk back towards the house, past a young striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), centre, and a ‘Slender Silhouette’ sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), right. “Getting the right plant in the right place is a whole lot harder than most people understand,” notes Marjorie. “They want copies of stuff they see in magazines and online and most of the time just won’t work in our climate, our neighbourhoods.  Finding the ideal plant is always my goal, and will it work with the ecosystem I’m trying to build up to satisfy both birds and bugs I want to draw into the garden.  I cannot express how boring those so called minimal “modern” plant designs are.  They don’t work ecologically and they require huge amounts of work to keep on looking neat.  Nature is not neat.”

But gazing back past the Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’, left) and the ‘Herman’s Pillar’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii), right, below…

….. I think that this lovely paradise in the Annex represents a leafy manifestation of Marjorie’s life and career: long, rich, full of interesting things acquired with care and intent, and a joy in every season.

Finally, here’s a little taste of a mid-summer day in the garden. The birds and cicadas are a bonus. Thanks for the visit, Marjorie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oJtmQaZTmk&feature=youtu.be

Visiting Panayoti’s Garden

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If you’re invited to visit Quince Garden in Denver, Colorado, you could always start your tour along the walkway to the front door. All those tiny plants embracing the risers of the stone steps will delight you….

… and no doubt you’ll admire the well-grown annuals: the ‘Mystic Spires’ salvia, and the blackeyed susan vines (Thunbergia alata) in pots at the front door.

You’ll be intrigued by the planters and troughs lining the walkway, filled with dozens of plants whose identities you can’t begin to guess at.

Your appetite whetted, you’ll surely be tempted to meander down the path of the hillside skirting the house, as we did in June during my Garden Bloggers’ Fling, on our visit to the home and garden of Denver Botanic Garden’s inimitable Senior Curator and Director of Outreach, Panayoti Kelaidis (aka “PK” to his friends.) Over his 30+ years at the garden, he designed the plantings for the amazing Rock Alpine Garden and helped with the design and implementation of Wildflower Treasures, the South African Plaza and the Romantic Gardens, among others.  He is also the recipient of the Award of Excellence from National Garden Clubs and the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award, the highest award from the American Horticultural Society.

Apart from travelling the world collecting and viewing rare plants, as he is doing this very moment in the Tibetan Himalayas, he writes a plant-rich blog called Prairiebreak (currently featuring rare meconopsis species from said trip). He also lectures everywhere (in more than 70 cities so far) mostly on plants that grow in the alpine regions and steppes of the world. Wikipedia defines a steppe as follows: “In physical geography, steppe (Russian: степь, IPA: [stʲepʲ]) is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes. The prairie of North America (especially the shortgrass and mixed prairie) is an example of a steppe, though it is not usually called such. A steppe may be semi-arid or covered with grass or shrubs or both, depending on the season and latitude.”  So passionate is Panayoti about this topic that he recently co-authored a book called Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions, along with Michael Bone, Mike Kintgen, Dan Johnson and Larry Vickerman.

We wandered down the hill past the silvery yuccas…….

….. and the statuesque Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium).  We could see rain and the odd fork of lightning in the distance, but not one drop fell on the garden.

Flanking the path were little planters filled with cacti and succulents. And there were sentry-like spires of giant silver mullein (Verbascum bombyciferum). Panayoti particularly likes this mullein, and has written with his usual wit about finding it growing on Turkey’s Uludağ.

Look at this! So darling. But the gardener knows the provenance of each of those little treasures.

In the hottest, unirrigated part of PK’s hillside, cacti were in flower, like this pink prickly-pear (Opuntia sp.)

Here it is with Onosma taurica, a European plant – clearly drought-tolerant – that I saw in a few spots in the Denver area.

More giant silver mulleins, and a place to sit and relax as well.

Panayoti’s garden seemed to be a happy marriage of plant-collecting on a refined scale and Gertrude Jekyllesque cottage-gardening.

Desert species were at home among plants with similar cultural needs from the world over.

I loved these table-top displays of special cacti from PK’s 300+ collection.

Brilliant pink desert penstemon (P. pseudospectabilis) added a rosy note to the various cactus species.

Desert penstemon is just one of many native penstemons I coveted on my visits to gardens in Denver, as I wrote in a previous blog. Check out that lovely pea gravel.

Where the soil was a little richer, there was amsonia.

Salvias, too.

Altai onion (Allium altaicum) was in flower, front. Behind were plant stands filled with a pretty collection of cacti and succulents. (Not sure what was happening behind the mesh screen.)

After visiting the botanical garden at Würzburg, Germany in 2016, Panayoti swore he would have his own Asphodeline taurica…. and here it was, looking very fetching with orange rock roses bringing up the rear.

Near the bottom of the hill, there was a starry cloud of crambe and a brilliant yellow mullein (Verbascum olympicum, I’m guessing.)

Everywhere in the cottage garden at the bottom of Panayoti’s hill, brilliant orange horned poppies (originallyGlaucium grandiflorum x flavum hybrids) flung themselves around with abandon. As a lover of colour, I particularly admired this hot pairing of the poppies with a fuchsia-pink rose, cooled ever so slightly by cobalt blue Veronica austriaca.

Amidst all the self-seeding wonderfulness, there were more of the collector’s curio cabinets, this vignette backed by a luscious purple smoke bush.

After a little swing back up the hill towards the rear of the house, all the eclectic xeriscape lollapalooza suddenly became very refined, with a luscious, traditional June border filled with meadow cranesbills, red valerian (Centranthus ruber), pink gas plant (Dictamnus albus var. purpureus), roses and a white-flowered fringe tree (Chionanthus) and dark-leafed ninebark (Physocarpus) in the rear.

This rosy, romantic June confection proved a lovely backdrop….

Children over nine should take one capsule pharmacy australia cialis twice a day. buy levitra This solution is not meant for ladies and children and hence it should be kept away from them. All such ingredients make this pill to be the most effective and popular of all. viagra cheap price is one of the most popular prescription medications used by men who are not too concerned about increasing their penis size. These herbs are processed and tadalafil online cheap made into drinks. …. for a portrait of Panayoti and his partner, Jan Fahs.

And this is Jan’s iris, ‘Afternoon Delight’.

At the back of the house, an alpine garden wall rises from a patio filled with pots of plants and two chairs. Because, of course, there would be lots of time to sit and relax in a garden this easy to care for…….

A sunken pool features yellow flag iris (I. pseudacorus) backed by that beautiful wall….

…. in whose crevices and niches choice alpines thrive.

The brilliant hues of South African ice plants (Delosperma, formerly Mesymbranthemum) brighten up the rocks.

This is Delosperma Fire Spinner®, one of the best plants to come out of the Plant Select® program that Panayoti helped launch through Denver Botanic Gardens.

You can hear Panayoti talk about the ice plants in the Plant Select program here.

I loved the artful way the plants combined with each other in the garden…..

…. though clearly there was careful forethought even in the little informal vignette of Aethionema and Helianthemum nummularium, below, one of thousands and thousands here.

Even though much of Panayoti’s garden bakes in sunshine, there is a shady corner, too. Here there was goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus), heucheras and ferns…..

…. and a shimmering white martagon lily (L. martagon f. album).

Back in the sunshine, sage mixed with centaureas and Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) graced a pot. Unlike many ‘collector’s gardens’, Panayoti loves all plants, common and rare.

A dish of succulents rested in a bed of thyme…..

….. and a white umbellifer (I won’t try a name) consorted with an echium.

Digitalis thapsi looked demure in this setting.

Alas, it was time to return to our tour, and I found my way back to the cottage garden, where larkspur (Consolida ajacis) was in bloom.

Annual white lace flower (Orlaya grandiflora) made a pretty partner to herbaceous Clematis integrifolia.

White lace flower hails from the Mediterranean and is increasingly popular in North American gardens.

When I first started gardening seriously in the 1970s, I cut out photos of English cottage gardens with beautiful flowers falling over each other in an artful tumble.

I was reminded of those first inspirations on Panayoti’s sunny hillside, where cottage gardening mixes with decades of plant collecting and a fondness for containers.  That slender red-leaved plant contrasting so nicely with the horned poppies is red orach (Atriplex hortensis ‘Rubra’).

As PK wrote of it fondly in one of his blogs: “Perhaps that explains my love of marginal weeds, those I can more or less manage. Isn’t it better to have Atriplex hortensis in its furious red manifestation, or red amaranth or Clary sage rampaging on the fringes of your garden. or Verbascums of the bombyciferum persuasion. These suck up space, and self sow, but you can eliminate them. And they give the crabgrasses a run for their money.”

Then it was time to climb the path past the mulleins and head back to the bus. But first, a photo keepsake in front of that gloriously gaudy poppy-rose combination.

And a personal note of thanks to finish up. Thirteen years ago, I visited the Denver Botanic Gardens with my husband and innocently told the young lady at the front desk that I planned to photograph there. Before I could add that I was a garden writer and photographer, she said: “That will be $200 for the photography permit.” I sputtered a little and tried to correct the situation, adding I wasn’t a wedding photographer, but someone who planned to write about the plants and publicize the garden itself. When that didn’t work, I dredged up a name I’d heard or read about and asked: “Is Mr. Kelaidis here?” She phoned his extension and he appeared moments later, waved us in with a flourish, and gave us a private 90-minute walking tour, waxing poetic about the garden and its employees at each and every turn. What an introduction to DBG and its charms! Twelve years later, Panayoti was horticultural guide on an American Horticultural Society tour of New Zealand in which we participated. So I saw a lot of PK over those three weeks and enjoyed watching him thank all our garden hosts profusely, choosing just the right words each time to acknowledge the unique features of their gardens and make them feel special. For example, this was a little thank you he made to owners John and Jo Gow at Connells Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke Island, near Auckland. (I blogged about this amazing garden last year.)

I followed him with other intrepid botanizers (and my dear, patient husband) up Ben Lomond overlooking Queenstown, where he pointed out tiny dracophyllums and raoullias.

We posed in our life jackets together as we headed out in zodiacs onto tranquil Doubtful Sound.

So it was a distinct pleasure to greet Panayoti and Jan in this amazing garden, and to discover that, despite all those weeks of travel climbing mountains in Tibet, Turkey, South Africa, Kazakhstan, New Zealand and dozens of other plant-rich places in the world, there is still time for the gardener to be at home surrounded by the plants that give him and all of us such deep pleasure and pride.

A Garden Embroidered with Myriad Threads

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Most times when we tour gardens, we arrive en masse and then we “oooh” and “aaah” and marvel at all the beautifully-grown plants and cleverly-designed components. We might say hello to the gardener, if he or she is there. Sometimes we even delve a little into the shared passion for nature that has one person judging what the other person has taken many years to achieve. But rarely do we learn much about the gardener’s other life.  So it was with great interest that I read about Carol and Randall Shinn of Fort Collins, Colorado, whose beautiful garden I visited this month with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling. They met at the University of Colorado in Boulder, then enjoyed long careers in education, Carol in visual arts, and Randall in music composition. Their careers took them across the country, and finally to Tempe, Arizona for 28 years. When they moved to Colorado from the desert, it was because “water seemed more plentiful here than in any other city in the front range”.  This was my bus window view as we pulled up in front of their home.

Carol’s artistic career has involved observing nature, photographing scenes that move her, transferring the images to fabric, then machine-stitching them to enhance the details and intensify the colours. This embroidery is as intricate and unusual an art form as her garden, which stitches together various manifestations of her interests as they evolved since moving here in 2006. Walking up the driveway, on one side is a traditional June planting of peonies, sages and bearded irises at their peak….

…. while the other side features gritty soil and a spectacular mix of colourful Colorado native penstemons, erigerons, white Astragalus angustifolius and tall yellow prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata).

In front of the garage is a shrub we would see a lot of in the Denver area, native Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).

A sumptuous ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ peony flanks the walk to the front door…..

….. where a comfy wicker chair rests near the roses.

Bearded irises perform well in Carol’s garden, here with Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus)…..

…. and peonies are the essence of June.  Note the compact conifers, which lend winter interest to gardens where snow can appear even in late spring, as it did this year in the front range.

A dry stream bed meanders past a lupine and presumably diverts rain water in wet weather.

The most striking feature is the crevice garden, a haven for alpine collectables and a nod to the sandstone and basalt of the hulking Rocky Mountains nearby.  I loved how it was artfully integrated into the more traditional plantings…..

…. and sections stitched together with thymes and other groundcovers.

Vertical crevice gardens are increasingly popular with alpine enthusiasts, patterned after the first iterations of this style as created by Czech rock gardeners like Zdenek Zvolánek, Ota Vlasak, Josef Halda and Vojtech Holubec, as Denver rock garden czar Panayoti Kelaidis relates in this blog. (As an aside, I have written about and photographed the massive crevice garden designed by Zvolánek for Montreal Botanical Garden’s Alpine Garden.)  Some of Carol’s crevice gardens were designed by Kenton Seth.

Carol Shinn, left, explains the process to Garden Design owner Jim Peterson and his wife Valerie.


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Look at all those tiny treasures, each in its own space, protected against incursion of other plants by mighty rock walls.

The path to the back garden leads under an arched gate…..

…. behind which is wreathed a tangle of clematis.

Roses and irises continue the June show here, along with chives…..

….. and I do love bronze bearded irises.

In a far corner is the vegetable garden and….

…. beyond that, a series of no-nonsense compost bins.

And surprise, surprise! more rock garden in the back, this time horizontal crevices with the sweetest hens-and-chicks (Sempervivum).

There is water back here, too. This bird-friendly waterfall and pond makes a lovely splash near the house….

….. and mounted on the fence is this very cool Corten and concrete wall fountain.

The iconic bluestem joint fir (Ephedra equestina) looks happy in front of a colour-coordinated wall in a well-contained niche to prevent it from colonizing….

… while a striped amaryllis lights up the dappled shade under a conifer.

What a diverse, beautiful garden – all “embroidered” together with skill and love.

A South Island Farewell at Upton Oaks

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Having travelled through the gardens of New Zealand’s North Island for 6 days, followed by 11 days on the South Island, we were about to visit our last South Island garden before taking the inter-island ferry from Picton to Wellington for our final 3 days. After the morning spent at Marlborough’s Barewood Garden followed by Paripuma on the shores of Cook Strait, we pulled up to a welcoming sign that gave a hint at the formal bones of this garden in the village of Rapaura just northwest of Blenheim……

….. and peeked over the fence at a charming 1911 house framed by foliage.

Owner Sue Monahan was waiting to greet us all and explain a little about her garden, which she has designed as a series of hedge-enclosed ‘rooms’,…..

….. then we were free to wander. I walked in front of the house, with its ‘Burgundy Iceberg’ roses and Auratum lilies wafting perfume….

…..near the welcoming front veranda.

Nearby was the first section of Sue’s formal garden where we walked among four hedged parterres…..

…… each segmented into either square or diamond patterns. (As with all our Marlborough gardens on this day, the bright sun created too much contrast for good photography, but I tried my best.)

Sue had organized the sections loosely by colour, including reds….

….. and whites. I like this mid-summer (January in New Zealand) combination of dahlia and phlox.

Sue used loads of dahlias in lovely colours in these beds….

…. and the singles were attracting bees.

Dahlias are such good workhorses when they’re grown well, and Sue had paired this luscious deep-pink…..

….. with thalictrum, one of the best see-through plants.

Adding its own purple punch was cardoon (Cynara cardunculus).

The adjacent garden room featured lawn and four flower beds with a central formal pool.  The shade beds contained hydrangeas and agapanthus….

…. and the circular pool featured water lilies and a fountain.

I loved this impressive spiral topiary.


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It was a hot afternoon, and Sue had set chairs out in the shade.

I could only imagine how welcoming this swimming pool would be in New Zealand’s warm summers…..

….. or the hammocks hanging in the leafy shade of the olive grove.

There was even a dovecote with a flock of white pigeons!

At the back of the property was a lovely little garden…..

….. that belonged to Upton Oak’s guest cottage……

…….named Laurella, after the Monahans’ daughters. There is a wonderful story about how this cottage, which can be rented as a Bed-and-Breakfast with a minimum 2-night stay, came to be moved to Upton Oaks, where Dave Monahan, a well-known woodworker, refurbished it.

This is the wedding gazebo in front of Laurella….

…. and when we were there, Dave was building a new cottage on the site….

…. which will complement Laurella.

On the way to the dining terrace for lunch, I walked through a little orchard and passed a brick wall espaliered with fruit trees.

Nearby was a potager bursting with edibles.

Before sitting down to lunch, I visited the washroom, where Sue had made a lovely bouquet of flowers from her abundant garden.

Then it was time to find a seat on the terrace…..

….. and enjoy our catered lunch. It reminded me that we had been so privileged to dine al fresco in some of the most outstanding gardens in New Zealand during our tour thus far – a great testament to our NZ-born, Pennsylvania-based tour leader Richard Lyon’s expansive network of gardeners.

We bade farewell to Sue and Dave Monahan…….

……then proceeded towards the little town of Picton and the Interislander ferry terminal for our afternoon sail to Wellington and the North Island.