A Texas Garden with English Roots

Posted on June 5, 2018 by Janet

When I was consumed with garden fever back in the early 1980s (and finally had my “we’re staying here” house), there was a book whose pages became dog-eared from the hundreds of times I flipped back and forth gazing at glossy photos of English cottage gardens. I dreamed that someday I’d have a garden crammed with flowers in artful combinations, yet seemingly tossed together with wild abandon. That vision informed the meadows I’d eventually have, both in Toronto and at our cottage north of the city. It was only appropriate therefore, that one of my very favourite gardens during my recent Garden Bloggers’ Fling in Austin, Texas was owned by a pair of British ex-pats and featured garden rooms full of Texas natives and self-seeding flowers that managed to give a nod simultaneously to the local vernacular and romantic English cottage garden style.

Jenny and David Stocker have gardened here at the edge of hill country in southwest Austin for 17 years since they moved into their new home, which was custom-designed by the late architect Dick Clark who’s considered to be the father of Austin contemporary style. He also designed the garden walls, which have been painted soft mocha tones that match the house. I wish I’d paid more attention to the house itself, since his intent was to align the various windows and views with the outdoor rooms. Let’s start under the trees outside at the street, with its lovely emphasis on drought-tolerant succulents. In this area, landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design arranged for the placement of the large ledgestones, but everything else here and throughout the gardens – including the dry streambed, below, that becomes a very wet stream during heavy Texas rains – was done by the Stockers.

But before I go any further, I want you to see what a blank slate looks like, and imagine the work that went into creating the garden I’m about to show you – given what the starting point looked like in the Stockers’ photos below.

Alright, let’s head into the garden. I loved these generous platform steps that will take us into the first garden room, the front courtyard. They also nicely accomplish a level change, and feature just a few of Jenny’s many containers.

In the front courtyard, we see the source of the dry streambed (what Jenny calls “the wet weather creek”) that empties outside. Many kinds of agaves are used, including the beautiful whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia) below.

The millstone-like water feature at left, below, was a chance find – the abandoned base of a basketball stand – in a back alley near the Stockers’ son’s house in Dallas. It took two people to load it onto their truck, it looks stunning here.

The courtyard features a rich profusion of plants that seem to thrive in the thin soil including many succulents and self-seeding flowers. Notice the gravel mulch and liberal use of stones (many were here before the garden was made).

The Stockers love eating and relaxing outdoors, so the garden features several places where they can do that, like the niche below.

Artichoke agave (A. parryi var. truncata) is one of my favourite succulents.

The garden walls are perfect for ornaments.

Containers – always pebble-mulched – are a mixture of succulents and English favourites like foxglove.

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to spend time under that perfumed brugmansia, perfectly placed for inhaling?

All the garden rooms feature their own collections of artful accessories. “You can’t just have plantings,” Jenny said to one interviewer.

I loved the face peering out of the hedge.

Though the rain that had fallen in torrents a few hours earlier at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center had now subsided, plants were still wet. This is lovely Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’.

If there’s a theme in the garden, besides amazing plants, it’s rock. As Jenny has said: “I love to work with rocks, of which we have plenty, and they form the backbone of the garden. My husband, David, is my rock man and has hunted out some amazing rocks and done some great rockwork. I was on site every day during construction, saving rocks suitable for making the drystone walls.”

So let’s go see the stone wall Jenny made in the next garden room, the English Garden. There it is in the background, Jenny’s dry-stacked wall made from flat rock gathered as the house was being constructed. This garden’s motif is circular, from the concentric edgings of brick encircling the birdbath garden…

…. to the circular flagstone-and-brick dining patio…..

…. to the circular paving stones and the spheres that sit in the gravel.

As in any good English cottage garden, there are lots of self-seeding flowers here, like biennial foxglove…..

….. and Texas natives such as blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum).

I’m sure that Jenny’s garden attracts a lot of birds. That’s Virginia creeper on the wall behind the sweet birdhouse.

The ornamented wall near the next room sets up a galactic theme……

…. which is expanded on in the saying above the arch. Live by the sun, love by the moon. Indeed! Notice the change in paver materials between garden rooms – all very subtle, but designed to enhance.

Let’s go down the stairs to yet another level, past another pretty collection of potted plants and an inviting teak bench…..

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….. into the appropriately named sunken garden, aka the pool garden. This, for me, is the full embodiment of those glossy photos I loved in those books long ago. A true cottage garden filled with a mélange of romantic blossoms that will shift and alter their companions throughout the season. The iconic Texas bluebonnets are long-gone in this photo, but that’s how things start out here in April, which you can see in this photo by Jenny’s friend and our Austin Garden Bloggers Fling co-host Pam Penick’s post from April 2015.

Sometimes, in appreciating a grand design, I forget to notice the small details. Here’s the lovely native Texan golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha).

It was one of the cast of May characters in Jenny’s garden, along with annual love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), blue mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea), magenta-pink sage (Salvia sp.) As Jenny notes, “I rely heavily on self-seeding plants and am more than willing to let them grow where they plant themselves, as well as passalongs from garden friends. It’s not a low-maintenance garden.”

Most of the breadseed poppies (Papaver somniferum) had already formed their seedpods….

…. but corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were still announcing their brilliant presence. I loved the flowing urn feature here, which creates a bit of music with its splash.

What an inviting scene. Many gardens we saw in Texas were accompanied by a swimming pool, because as lovely as spring weather can be, summers are punishingly hot. And since there are no trees inside the garden walls and the rocks do reflect the sunshine, Jenny says the garden becomes very hot in midsummer. The walls here, by the way, are not just decorative, but meant to keep out varmints, including deer.

Here’s another look at the flowery poolside meadow. This area was originally laid with old granite flagstones, so the Stockers laid Arizona sandstone on top leaving 1-inch spaces for self-seeding plants.

You can see in the background against the wall one of the large, porous limestone boulders native to the property.

There are native cacti in the gardens, including the spineless prickly-pear (Opuntia cacanapa ‘Ellisiana’).

I found Jenny in the sunken garden, chatting with fellow bloggers (her own interesting blog is called Rock Rose) and looking mightily relieved that the morning’s rain had stopped in time for our visit.

I waited for my blogging pals to take their leave of this beautiful dining area near the swimming pool – one of six seating areas Jenny and David use, depending on the time of year and day – so I could make my photo. There’s a good reason for being the last one on the bus!

At the edge of the dining area was another grouping of containers, this one featuring the agave relative Manfreda undulata ‘Chocolate Chips’.

Manfreda flowers are so interesting, especially post-Texas-rain.

The herb garden is tucked into an alcove created by the house walls, and looks beautifully wild..

Nearby, behind the wall of the swimming pool garden, sits the potager: a series of raised beds containing…..

… leafy vegetables like curly kale……

….and squash vines starting out under protective wiring….

….and tomato cages.

A long raised bed nearby contains flowers for pollinators. In early May, it abounds with larkspur (Consolida ajacis) and Verbena bonariensis.

Perfumed star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) blankets one wall of a garden shed in this area. How nice it must be to harvest veggies with that scent wafting by!

A galvanized water tank is a great idea for a water garden: small, manageable maintenance, yet a nice spot for a bird to bathe or have a sip of water.

Nearby were little vignettes, like this…..

….. and this. For me in Toronto, Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is a textural annual, but here it’s perennial and adds a grace note to the garden.

As always on a garden tour, the bus was waiting to take us to our next stop, so off we went in our rain-soaked shoes down the pathway beside the spineless prickly-pears. But for me, the garden of Jenny and David Stocker had been a chance to satisfy a long-held desire to enjoy time in a cottage garden filled with masses of flowers arrayed with artful abandon.

Ohinetahi – An Architectural Garden Masterpiece

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Janet

It was Day 15 of our American Horticultural Society “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness” tour of New Zealand and we had a wonderful day of garden visits ahead of us. We left our hotel in Christchurch early and drove south. As we came to the Port Hills, the view of Lyttelton Harbour ahead was spectacular. It would not be until I returned home and did some research that I would learn that we were actually on the rim of the collapsed Lyttelton Volcano, one of two shield volcanoes that make up the Banks Peninsula, the other being Akaroa (both active 11-8 million years ago). If you’ve read my blog on Yellowstone Park, you know how much I love volcanos, and this would be my third visit to one (Ngorngoro in Kenya was my first). When Lyttelton’s southern volcanic rim eventually eroded, it was flooded by the sea, resulting in the pretty harbour we saw ahead of us.

Though the Māori have been in this area for hundreds of years, it was first seen by Europeans when Captain James Cook sailed past on February 17, 1770, giving the name Banks Island (for onboard botanist Joseph Banks, who featured in my Doubtful Sound blog) to the land along the curved shore, which appeared to his eyes separate from the mainland behind. It would later be renamed Banks Peninsula. We would be visiting three gardens today, each occupying a scenic spot on the peninsula. Looking at the satellite map below (you can click to make it bigger), you’ll see that I’ve marked them as 1 (this garden), 2 and 3. You’ll also see my two earthquake notations (unrelated to the peninsula’s volcanic past). The one in the upper left shows the rough location of the Greendale-Rolleston Fault, a previously unknown slip-fault which caused the destructive September 3, 2010 earthquake. That 7.1 magnitude quake, the strongest recorded in New Zealand was followed 5 months later by the deadlier 6.3 aftershock centred just west of Lyttelton, which killed 185 and injured more than 6,000 people in greater Christchurch. Both would have a direct impact on our first garden today and an indirect impact on our third garden in Akaroa.

We circled Lyttelton Harbour to our destination overlooking Governors Bay. It was the Māori Ngāi Tahu chief Manuhiri who called his pā (fortified village) overlooking this bay “Ōhinetahi” – The Place of One Daughter – in honour of his solitary daughter in a family of sons. And that became the name of this garden, now arguably Christchurch’s finest private garden.

We were met at the entrance by Ohinetahi’s principal gardener, Ross Booker, shown below at left, chatting with our tour guide, New Zealand born, Pennsylvania-based landscape architect Richard Lyon.

We walked through the gates and down the drive.

Perhaps if I’d seen this plan of the garden on our arrival, I would have had a better sense of how to approach exploring it in the short time we had. But I hadn’t yet grasped the formal, linear arrangement of the garden rooms on three levels….

….. nor paid attention to the intersecting axes I glimpsed soon after we entered. This was the peony garden, which of course was out of bloom in mid-summer. But what was the enticing glimpse of garden below this? In fact, that is the north-south axis that cuts through the various east-west garden rooms and leads directly to a suspension bridge over the creek to arrive at a shady bush walk filled with New Zealand natives. But we’ll get there later.

At the bottom of the drive, we turned left to find ourselves gazing at a lovely house, below, whose walls were crafted of soft-peach sandstone block.This is where Sir Miles Warren lives, having retired in 1995 from a long architecture career that began in 1955 when he founded his own practice with the radical Dorset Street Flats, expanded it in 1958 with the formation of Warren and Mahoney with Maurice Mahoney, then spent almost four decades creating hundreds of buildings, including some of New Zealand’s most iconic, modernist structures. Those include College House – University of Canterbury (1966), the Christchurch Town Hall (1972), the New Zealand Embassy in Washington DC (1975), the Christchurch Central Library, the Hotel Grand Chancellor (1986) and Clarendon Tower (1986) not to mention housing complexes, apartments and government buildings and airports in Wellington, Auckland and elsewhere. The firm became renowned for its concrete-based “Christhchurch School” style, combining Brutalism with contemporary Scandinavian and Japanese design principles. Sadly, several of those buildings were no match for the earthquakes that would devastate Christchurch in 2010-11, with many sustaining enough structural damage that they were ordered demolished.

Today, Warren and Mahoney Architecture is a 300-employee practice but its original co-founder – retired since 1995 – lives here in this Victorian house. It was built by British-born naturalist-botanist-entomologist Thomas Potts between 1863-67 and looked like this on New Year’s Eve 1867, in a photo by Daniel Mundy. below. That’s native “cabbage tree” (Cordyline australis) in the foreground.

Potts would go on to plant a number of trees which still stand at Ohinetahi, but the extensive gardens he designed and maintained with the help of six gardeners were completely overgrown in 1977 when Miles Warren, his artist sister Pauline Trengrove and her husband, the late architect John Trengrove, found the property. It consisted of a ramshackle house with a leaking roof (they nicknamed the place Miss Haversham from Great Expectations), a lawn and the small orchard that is still on the site. But they knew in ten minutes that they would buy it and hired two carpenters who worked for 18 months repairing it, while they came out on weekends to do the “donkey work”. The garden would take a decade to shape, with Pauline the expert gardener and her brother and husband the designers. As Sir Miles said in one interview, “We were amateurs practising an art rather than having to be professional architects. We could do what we damn well liked and make our own mistakes.” The garden became a place to escape their desks. In another interview, he recalled, “That period, we were both very busy professionally, so it was great relief, moving bricks and removing trees, fighting our way through the jungle and so on. It was an ideal contrast to the working week.” When Pauline and John moved away in the late 1980s to make another garden, he was left as Ohinetahi’s sole owner and resident designer.

Gardens have always been important to Sir Miles Warren, a passion not always shared by members of the profession. I love this photo of him, below, taken mid-career at his then-Christchurch house by Matt Arnold. That long pool is the epitome of modernism, softened with lots of lovely water plants.

As we set out, I spied the owner, now 89, walking across the lawn. “May I take your photo?” I asked. “Oh, I break cameras,” he replied with a chuckle, but gamely posed for me.

He was very lucky to be standing on his lawn, for his close escape from the 2010 earthquake came in the pre-dawn darkness of September 3rd when the four stone gables toppled onto the tin roofs, the rock falling through into the library where books and grandfather clock crashed to the floor. As he came down from his bedroom searching for a flashlight, he had no idea of the damage around him. Friends, family and former tradespeople helped empty the house and begin repairs, removing the stone third storey. stabilizing the walls with concrete and steel bracing and helping the house survive the much closer, more violent February 2011 aftershock. Sir Miles designed further changes to reinforce and strengthen the house. Today Ohinetahi remains a Category 1-listed heritage house – and, personally, I think the scale is much better without all that top-heavy stone.

All that toppled stone would be put to creative use, as with this reinforced folly and observation tower leading to a new waterfront “park” that I’ll show you later.

THE GARDENS

When Sir Miles, Pauline and John Trengrove began planning the garden at Ohinetahi, they did what many serious designers do: they visited famous gardens. Thus the Red Border of Hidcote Manor Gardens in England’s Cotswolds became inspiration for the lovely Red Garden here. But I think this one is even better (having seen Lawrence Johnston’s version some 25 years ago….) because of its intimacy,……

…… formality and smaller scale, which helps visitors understand how to accomplish a “colour garden” themselves. That centrepiece, below, is a deconsecrated stone baptismal font. The red parterre hedge is barberry; the green is boxwood. And the silver pear (Pyrus salicifolia) adds just the right touch at right.

Plus…. if you know that my great passion is colour in garden design, you’ll know that I think complementary contrasting red-and-green is one of the best ways to bring the drama of that brilliant colour to a garden.

Four Burbank plum trees planted by a previous owner are still producing fruit, and act as the forecourt to Ohinetahi’s spectacular Herbaceous Border.

I loved that someone had placed this fallen plum on the statuary leading into the border.

Isn’t this border enchanting? Sir Miles designed the airy, octagonal gazebo with its ogee roof and curved arches to match the Victorian trim on the house.

The summer combinations were stunning, like this sundrops (Oenothera fruticosa) and Verbena bonariensis….

…. and this dark Teucrium hircanicum with a cranesbill (Geranium) and Japanese hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’).

…. and magenta summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) with agapanthus.

Bumble bees were happy foraging on the single red dahlias in the herbaceous border.

This is what the border looked like facing back to the house.

I went down into the Woodland Garden that runs along the edge of the property beneath mature trees, including oaks that are some 150 years old.. Here were native cabbage trees and tree ferns and a sculpture by Mark Whyte…..

….. and selections of New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax)….

…. and traditional shade garden ornamentals such as hosta, hellebore and astrantia….

Climbing back up, I walked past a wall inscribed in Latin by Mark Whyte, Conditor horti felicitatis auctor: “Whoever plants a garden, plants happiness”.

At this end of the garden was a suspended metal globe by Neil Dawson titled Ferns. His large works also adorn downtown Christchurch.

Here’s a closer look at Ferns. Neil Dawson’s work was also featured in the blog I wrote about the Connells Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke Island near Auckland.

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And I found one of the old trees planted by Thomas Potts, a hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii).

It was comforting to see a handsome, well-used compost bin behind one of the hedges. (Ross Booker: “Four months turnaround from hoe-to-go“.) Maintenance is crucial here; the hedges alone take three months to trim. At the moment, all the work is done by Ross and one other full-time gardener.

The pleached Hornbeam Walk is also modelled on England’s Hidcote; at its cross-axis is a copy of the urn designed for Alexander Pope’s garden at Twickenham.

I walked back towards the Lawn which is all that remains of Thomas Potts’s original garden. Looking to my right I saw the pretty pool house and the pool wall hidden by a pyracantha hedge.

But when I climbed up to the pool level, I could look back at the lawn and the perfectly balanced scene opposite….

….of two chartreuse ‘Frisia’ locusts (Robinia pseudoacacia) and a Luytens bench flanked by two shiny granite columns. Behind were precisely-clipped macrocarpa hedges (Cupressus macrocarpa).

I walked to the Suspension Bridge over the creek….

…. with its artfully-adorned bridgehouse.

Here I could see the stream below wending its way south to the ocean through New Zealand “bush”…..

…. including lacy tree ferns.

Suspended elegantly in the lush native bush under Thomas Potts’s five old oaks was a stainless steel sculpture by Auckland artist Virginia King titled “Heart of Oak”, below. Commissioned by Sir Miles in 2014, the artist – who saw the garden in winter – describes it on her website. “The circular mandala form alludes to the longevity of trees, to changing seasons and the cycle of life and to ancient mythologies about Oak trees in Roman, Greek, Celtic, and Teutonic cultures.”

The cycle of life was certainly evoked naturally in this lichen-covered tree trunk.

I loved that the blue base of this woodland sculpture emerged from a clump of New Zealand blueberry or turutu (Dianella nigra) with fruit exactly the same azure hue.

Approaching the outlook to Governors Bay, there was another evocative sculpture, this one by Andrew Drummond.

With our departure time approaching, I made a quick stop in Ohinetahi’s little art gallery, featuring works by renowned New Zealand artists.

Adjacent is a newer gallery containing 3D models and photographs of Warren & Mahoney projects….

…… including many destroyed by the earthquakes.

Back at house level, the Rose Garden beckoned, with its 12 rectangular, boxwood-edged beds marked by topiary spirals and boxwood chess pieces…..

……and filled with white, yellow and apricot roses to match the house.

I loved the ebullient fuchsia at the house entrance, and was intrigued with the number woven into the trim. Thomas Potts’s sandstone walls were quarried at Charteris Bay across Lyttelton Harbour.

The rose garden’s central path was on an axis with the Reflecting Pool across the lawn, its edges adorned with eight Coade stone flowers.

Now there was just enough time to dash around the house and head up past the Doug Neil-carved Oamaru stones “Canyon Suite”…

….. and Andrew Drummond’s “Astrolabe”, below, to visit the newest addition to Ohinetahi, an adjacent .75-hectare (1.85 acres) property overlooking Governors Bay purchased in 2008 and christened “the park”.

There are masses of natives here, like leatherleaf sedge (Carex buchananii)…..

…..and Corokia cotoneaster sheared into wedges, below. Originally part of the Potts property, the park features the oaks he planted a century-and-a-half ago.

Large-scale modern art commands the hillside……

…… including pieces like ‘Phase’ by Graham Bennett.

And the new amphitheatre overlooking the water is a place where visitors can relax in a spectacular setting atop a turf bench supported by some of the 140 tonnes of sandstone block that fell from Sir Miles’s roof into his library, that terrible night in September 2010.

In 2012, after setting up the Ohinetahi Charitable Trust (the trustees include his sister Pauline and a niece) to oversee the necessary maintenance, insurance costs and continued development of the property, Sir Miles Warren donated it to New Zealand. As he said to a reporter at the time, “So many gardens are made in New Zealand and the owners become elderly and the grounds fall into disrepair. It would seem a pity to spend 35 years making something and then walking away and letting it fall apart.”

The bus was leaving and I had just enough time to make one last photograph. The bust, of course, was familiar, but I had to look up the inscription. Firmitas, Utilitas et Venustas. Coined by the Roman architect Vitruvius, it dates from the 1^st century B.C and means “Strength, Utility and Beauty.” It’s an age-old tenet of architecture but it seemed to me it described this garden, as well as the man who is now a tenant here.

We were heading south on the Banks Peninsula to see two other gardens made by brilliant, obsessive gardeners. It would be a garden touring day like no other (and I’ve been on many tours). But as to this part of Canterbury, I will let Sir Miles Warren have the last word. Filmed in 2016, it relates to the city he loves, a city whose architectural heritage owes much to the work of Warren and Mahoney Architects, a city working to recover. Be sure to watch until the end, when he asks the question I would also put to you. And the answer: “If you haven’t yet, why not?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh8YF5XluCw

Festival Theatre Garden – Stratford

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Janet

For the first time in more than 20 years, I spent a few days this month at Ontario’s venerable Stratford Festival. (For the record, we saw Guys & Dolls – highly recommended; HMS Pinafore – fun Gilbert & Sullivan; and The Changeling – read a story précis before seeing!). We walked along the Avon River on our way to the first play, and I thought for the thousandth time how lovely our native wildflowers look in early autumn. This is heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides) with lots of bees!

The entire countryside around Stratford is gorgeous in September, with rows of tall corn and nearly-ripe pumpkins filling the fields near Highway 7 as you drive in. In fact, it’s one of the beautiful farms in the area that renowned singer Loreena McKennitt calls home. I interviewed her in Stratford for a story I proposed and wrote for Chatelaine Gardens! magazine some 21 years ago.

A few summers later, I visited Stratford to photograph the new garden at the Festival Theatre for a story I proposed and wrote for Landscape Trades Magazine. Having opened in 1997, it was under the expert care of Stratford Festival head gardener Harry Jongerden, who is now Executive Director of the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Returning to Stratford this month, I was excited to see how the garden had weathered over the past few decades and, especially, to see what was in bloom in the first week of autumn. Since my magazine story was published such a long time ago, I’ll take the liberty of quoting it from time to time here, as we tour the plants – like this lovely Japanese anemone (Anemone x hybrida ‘Whirlwind’).

***********

Two hours west of Toronto, on a hill overlooking the Avon River, sits the Festival Theatre, main stage and head office for Canada’s renowned Stratford Festival. Since its first production in 1953, a play directed by Tyrone Guthrie, starting Alec Guinness and mounted under a canvas tent, the Festival has enjoyed wide critical acclaim, and Stratford has become a mecca for theatre lovers — and garden lovers. Isn’t this swamp hibiscus (H. moscheutos) spectacular?

In 1997, the Festival Theatre (one of three in Stratford used by the festival) underwent a major renewal under the direction of Toronto architect Thomas Payne, then of KPMB Architects, now with Thomas Payne Architect. Trained at Yale and Princeton and one-time protégé of Barton Myers, Payne’s work includes the ethereal Fields Institute for Mathematics at the University of Toronto, a new home for the National Ballet of Canada, the much celebrated Tanenbaum Sculpture Gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the restoration of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Young Theatre for the Performing Arts (Soulpepper). His work at Stratford involved indoor renovations such as changing the rake of the theatre floor to create more spacious seating; adding technical gutters and an acoustical canopy; and renovating the lobby. And with the collaboration of Toronto landscape designer Neil Turnbull, Payne created The Arthur Meighen Gardens, named for Canada’s ninth prime minister and funded, in large part, by the Meighen family foundation. It was a new garden that was as rich in theatrical allusion as it was in stone and plants.

A horseshoe-shaped entrance driveway lined with concrete arbor columns, each one draped with a clematis in early summer – or morning glories in late summer — encircles the garden. “At night,” Payne told me then, they look like Noguchi lamps.”

The columns, each dedicated to a local benefactor, are clothed in a sock of inexpensive, water-repellent canvas symbolizing the canvas roof of the first performance tent.

The garden is a fragrant, romantic tumble of perennials, designed to be in bloom as the curtain rises in mid-April, and still have something in flower for October’s final curtain call. In late September, ligularia and blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’) are still providing colour as the ornamental grasses begin to flower.

Of the garden’s hard structure, Thom Payne said: “We wanted a great stone wall with greenery growing on it. The concept is quite mathematical. It’s a cribbage – a series of limestone terraces – that fall away on a grid toward the lowest point.” Typical of Mr. Payne’s tendency to use the landscape to hint at what can be found indoors, the main path travels through the garden and over the bridge above the formal lily pond – all on the axis of Aisle 2 Entrance Lobby. “It plays a prominent role in delivering people to the front door.”

In creating the cribbing for the terraces, Payne was mindful of his budget but still wanted the natural appearance of stone. He used pigmented, specially-finished, architectural concrete as an inexpensive foundation for the walls. He then capped it with 6-inch split-faced Eramosa limestone from local quarries. “There are a lot of things,” he says, “that are extremely cost-effective, yet I think the overall effect is one of richness, theatricality and permanence.” Below is a sturdy, gold yarrow (Achillea filipendulina) with a deep red swamp hibiscus.

When it came time to plan the 32 terrace beds, Neil Turnbull drew on a long career as one of the country’s most inspired plantsmen and landscape designers. In seeking a theme, he hit upon another powerful symbol of early Shakespeare theatre, its festival banners and ribbons. “I decided to create three ribbons of thyme that flow like curving rivers through the beds,” he explained. (The thyme is evident in the magazine cover above but I suspect other perennials have overwhelmed it somewhat over the years.) Below is Japanese anemone with blue leadwort (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides).

Known for solving geometry on the drafting table but aesthetics on-site, Turnbull reasoned that the garden’s strength would be in the sheer massiveness of its plantings. He had 21,000 plants expressly grown, and then placed them in recurring combinations throughout the beds. In late summer, some of our wonderful natives provide spectacular colour, like goldenrod (Solidago sp.) and magenta-purple New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) below.

Lots of fall asters have been used at the theatre, like ‘Andenken an Alma Pötschke’, below, with a honey bee nectaring….
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…. and a dwarf lavender-purple aster paired with ‘Rosy Jane’ gaura (Oenothera lindheimerii), below.

This summer has seen an extraordinary amount of rain and below-average temperatures until September, when we had a heat wave. So some plants had already begun to undergo a foliage change, like spring-flowering Euphorbia griffithi ‘Fireglow’, below.

As visitors reach the top of the planting beds on their way into the theatre, they cross a bridge over a formal rectangular pool…

…..featuring the splash of a steel fountain.

The pool spans nearly the width of the garden….

….and features aquatic plants like canna lily…..

……water lilies,….

…. and unusual aquatics like rain lily (Zephyranthes candida).

As I left the garden, I noted all kind of pollinators flitting about. I saw bumble bees foraging deep in the yellow wax bells (Kirengeshoma palmata)…..

….a carpenter bee nectar-robbing on obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana)….

….and a hover-fly getting lost in the throat of a morning glory (Ipomoea tricolor).

Almost twenty years after my first visit, it was good to see the garden still looking gorgeous and being enjoyed by thousands of theatre-goers annually — plus untold numbers of tiny buzzing and fluttering visitors, too.

The Festival Theatre gardens are located at 55 Queen Street, Stratford, Ontario. The Festival is open from mid-April to the end of October; for more information visit the Stratford Festival website.

Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

A Johannesburg Eden on Four Levels

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Janet

Standing in Minky Lidchi’s delightful garden in the Houghton neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, and gazing at her beautiful home with its terraced beds and intriguing front pergola with its classic columns, it’s difficult to imagine how it must have looked in 1976, when Minky, then a first year Architecture student at Wits University (the University of the Witwatersrand ), acquired the property.

“The house was really an ugly duckling,” she recalls, “and the garden was totally nondescript, except for three jacaranda trees on the eastern side.” The land, which measures 90 metres in length by 46 metres in width, sloped upwards with a 5 metre (16 feet) increase in elevation from front to back. In time, Minky would formalize five broad terraces from the incline on the slope of the site — but when she took possession, the house sat comfortably on what would be the third terrace and a tennis court occupied the fifth terrace at the rear of the property.

After renting the house out for two years, Minky then began to improve the property. “With a very limited budget I did a simple renovation to the small house, creating vistas through and across the site from the public and private spaces inside the house.” A garage and staff building were transformed into a cottage and smaller staff quarters “creating the spaces between the buildings for courtyards and pond areas.” Today, these skilfully-crafted spaces not only separate the buildings but create small journeys – like the kitchen courtyard below– that Minky has made more interesting by filling with potted plants and treasures from her travels, including the marble bath at the far end.

The koi pond, below, is flanked by an ivy-clad wall backed by a tall topiary hedge and even has a little “island” with table and chairs. Atop the pillars are sandstone carvings, some of the many works of art that grace the garden today.

Recalls Minky: “The side pond began as a space to tie the house and cottage together, but both spaces needed a focus, yet privacy. I decided a pond would be ideal as one could view it from both builidings.”

In 1982, she embarked on a second renovation, this time cladding the house’s exterior in sandstone tiles reminiscent of the Westcliffe sandstone used in the architecture of older houses in the area. Her aim was to give it a rectangular box form with a simple, pitched roof “like a child’s drawing” of a house. “Here I started addressing the edges around the house and built the terrace with large columns and stairs and planters in front of the house.” A pair of white marble buddhas from Mandalay in Burma flank the front steps, below.

The front terrace has become a favourite place for Minky to enjoy the sounds and views of the garden. She loves collecting real objects that once had practical uses, such as the gypsy cooking pot on the table. At the centre is a Mexican “circle of friends” sculpture.

Gardening began in earnest then as well, and she drew upon the memories of the wonderful European and English gardens she had visited as a child with her mother, “an eccentric gardener”. She began to plant slowly, feeling her way by trial and error with the help of Lot, below, her long-time “left-hand person” in the garden and on the property.

Once again, the house was rented out, but Minky was now a qualified architect with a practice that allowed her to put more time and resources into the property. She began work on the bottom terrace at the front of the garden, adding the round pond visible from the front door of the house. “The idea in developing the site was to create vistas wherever possible, and I took my cue from the slope and the rectangular shape of the house.”

In 2002, after more than 25 years of renting the house out and being its absentee gardener, Minky finally moved in and began working on the upper terrace nearest the back of the property. “I took away the tennis court and created the grapefruit and lemon orchard, which now has cherry trees as well, adding to my own produce of existing vegetables and herbs.” The orchard consists of a formal, four-square garden carpeted with fragrant Spanish lavender, and the cherry trees have produced their very first bowl of cherries.

The Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas) attracts honey bees which in turn pollinate the citrus blossoms.

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And the small water feature in the path.

Here, at the very top of the garden, an arch inset with a millstone rests atop a carved screen from Jaipur, India.

“Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to travel,” says Minky. “The garden is filled with finds from distant lands. I sometimes brought entire containers – to sell some of the contents, and keep others. India was a treasure trove; the stone grilles in my garden walls were made there for me.”

Minky’s architectural background is evident on the swimming pool terrace, with its interior brick walls and those hand-crafted stone grilles. The arched Indian door leads to the garden’s working area, complete with a worm farm, compost, nurturing plant area and entrance to the cottage containing the pool pump and laundry area. Beyond is the rich borrowed landscape provided by her neighbour’s trees.

Another view of the swimming pool terrace, below. On the lawn is a sculpture titled ‘Desert Rose’ by the renowned Johannesburg artist Edoarda Villa. It is reminiscent of the crystal formations that occur under certain damp conditions in the desert in Namibia.

Heading back to the house from the pool terrace, the visitor walks down lushly-planted sandstone steps.

Fragrance is important to Minky – something she has called “the chaos of scent”. Her favourite perfumed plants include star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) and murraya (M. paniculata). She planted gardenias near the car arrival and peppermint underfoot in the driveway so when she drives in “the wheels break the leaves and you smell the peppermint”. The kitchen courtyard features neatly pruned shrubs of yesterday-today-and-tomorrow (Brunfelsia pauciflora) “so that you can smell their perfume at dusk in and around the house.”

And she loves her roses, from the shrubs lining the second terrace wall to those climbing the pillars by the pond.

“There is no greater pleasure for me than picking my own roses, herbs and vegetables,” she says “As it is summer now, I have fresh roses in my bathroom, bedroom and dining room constantly, and share these with any visitor.” Her favourites? ‘My Granny’ with its small pink buds; ‘Just Joey’ is “so rewarding”; ‘Duftwolke’ has “a wonderful colour and a deep scent”; and ‘L’aimant’ is so beautiful and soft.

As a first-time visitor to South Africa in this very first garden on our 2-week tour hosted by Donna Dawson, I was impressed with the incredible range of plants that could be grown here, from temperate roses and stone fruits to tropical palms, citrus trees and tender shrubs such as the lovely Queen’s wreath (Petrea volubilis ).

Later on our trip, we would feast our eyes on the indigenous plants of South Africa’s renowned fynbos ecosystem, but this garden exuded the gracious and friendly ambiance of a skillfully-designed landscape that embraces visitors with open arms. Thank you, Minky, for the warm introduction to a brand-new continent.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

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Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

A Johannesburg Eden on Four Levels

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Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

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