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The Wonders of Windcliff

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Two of the major reasons I wanted to participate in this year’s Garden Fling in Washington State’s Puget Sound region – to leave behind the July meadows at my cottage on Ontario’s Lake Muskoka when the wild beebalm is coming into bloom – were, quite simply, Heronswood and Windcliff.  All of the gardens we visited held their share of magic and heaps of horticultural expertise, but the chance to visit these two related Kitsap Peninsula garden meccas made the decision for me.

In 2000, when Dan and Robert were still at Heronswood, they found this property on a small lane in the village of Indianola, as Dan said in a speech at the New York Botanical Garden some years ago.  It was 6-1/2 acres on a 200-foot bluff above Puget Sound and “the complete opposite of what I was gardening with at Heronswood.” Windcliff had been given its name by its then-owners, Peg and Mary, who had been raising German shepherds here while regularly mowing acres of summer-browned lawn. As Dan says, this part of the Pacific Northwest averages just 28 inches of rain per year with little measurable rain between spring and fall. So for him, a lawn was out of the question. “I’m not a friend of this whole concept of throwing water and fertilizer on something to make it grow, so we can then cut it on a weekly basis. What an amazing waste of energy.” 

I wrote about Heronswood in my last blog – now let’s head down the long driveway toward the house at Windcliff.

There are 4 acres of treasures on this side of the house under the big forest trees, including an arboretum of rare trees and shrubs with a rich ground layer of unusual plants, many also sold in the on-site nursery.  Be sure to check out the colourful bamboos, including Fargesia robusta ‘Campbell’, an eye-catching clumping species with its white sheaths.

There are bamboo tunnels, too.

At Heronswood, I saw a single plant of Alstroemeria isabellana; here it grows in a generous drift.

Nearby is Alstroemeria ‘Indian Summer’, a hardy, clumping form of Peruvian lily with purplish foliage that tops out at 3-feet (1 m) in height.

Flame nasturtium (Tropaeolum speciosum) clambers through shrubs and trees, already forming its beautiful, dangling fruit.

I snap photos as I walk and recognize this small, elegant tree as a podocarp. But its identity is confirmed when I find John Grimshaw’s erudite page on Podocarpus salignus, including his photo of this very tree at Windcliff.

Japanese clethra (C. barbinervis) is showing off its scented, spiky, white flowers above a trunk with handsome, exfoliating bark.

At the bottom of the driveway we arrive at the house: a low-slung, Asian-inspired building in three connected pavilions designed and built by Robert and clad in aubergine-purple shakes. (Even the chimney stones are colour-coordinated!) Stretching across the front is an architectural assemblage of fibre-clay pots. Wreathed around the front door is a perfumed, narrow-leafed sausage vine (Holboellia angustifolia) grown from seed Dan collected on one of his twenty exploring trips to the north part of Vietnam.  That particular collection took the form of Dan’s guide eating the sweet fruit, then spitting the dark seeds into a zip-lock bag. Like all seeds he collects, permits must be issued by the host country, then the seeds are sent for inspection directly to the USDA office in Seattle which is now very familiar with his work.

“We wanted to plant woodland treasures outside the front door at ground level,” said Dan, “but it was impossible with our dogs, all those things I wanted to baby along. So we decided to do a pot wall to lift all those treasures off the ground. Robert took this project on. We found some inexpensive fibre pots, knocked the bottoms out, stained them, then erected about a 25-foot-wide wall.”   A cluster of brown toothed lancewood trees (Pseudopanax ferox) from New Zealand grow here in their Dr. Seuss juvenile form.

I love the way this cubist container garden fits together, unifying the habitat for the plant treasures.

Dan meets us in the front, giving us an overall description of Windcliff and relating how the January 2024 freeze devastated parts of the garden, causing the loss of countless plants and necessitating the current replanting of certain areas.

Moving west around the house I pass a bamboo-fenced, shady alcove garden with windows into the dining room and beyond that, windows facing south to Puget Sound.  As Dan has acknowledged, it was a rare opportunity to design both a garden and house at the same time. The light fixture visible through the window was inspired by the long tentacles of the giant Pacific octopus, the largest octopus species on the planet with a 20-foot arm-span, a creature that lives in the waters just off the bluff. To see a photo of the fixture from the inside, have a peek at Andrew Ritchie’s review of Dan’s book ‘Windcliff’.

This area features a stand of hardy shade ginger (Cautleya spicata), a Himalayan native. Several cultivars have been introduced, including a selection called ‘Arun Flame’, which Dan and Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones of Crug Farms in Wales discovered in eastern Nepal on a collecting trip with the American novelist Jamaica Kincaid. She wrote a 2005 memoir called “Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya” of that taxing expedition.

A small gravel garden partly enclosed by bedrock sits outside the passage to the master bedroom at right.

I turn the corner of the house and walk along flagstones towards the bluff gardens on the south side. It’s a challenge to identify plants at Windcliff but I might venture a guess that the variegated shrub above my head is Stachyurus praecox ‘Oriental Sun’.

I’m moving so quickly that I capture the delicate shadow play near my feet but neglect to look up to see what is making these patterns – likely Schefflera taiwaniana.  Schefflera is one of Dan’s favourite genera – growing up in northern Michigan, he had a schefflera as a houseplant – and this species is one of the hardiest for a shady spot. (You can hear him talk about it in this Fine Gardening video.)

Coming into the sunshine, I glimpse the bluff and the water beyond through the upswept, coppery limbs of an iconic plant for gardeners in the west, a handsome manzanita (Arctostaphylos). That pretty table was created some 25 years ago for Dan by Bainbridge Island artists George Little and David Lewis.

Nearby is a bog garden with different pitcher plant species (Sarracenia spp.)

Note that lovely Yucca rostrata behind the kniphofia in the background.

A drift of Ammi visnaga near the house reminds me of the Conservatory Garden at New York’s Central Park, where I last photographed this species. It was originally designed by Lynden Miller, one of Dan’s horticultural heroes. (This is my 2016 blog on that amazing garden.)

Standing now on the ‘bluff side’, I look back at the house through a planting of red-flowered Mexican bush lobelia (Lobelia laxiflora).  I think the big, lush leaves are from Eucomis pallidiflora subsp. pole-evansii, a very tall pineapple lily species which seeds around this garden.

Dan is nearby so I tell him the story of asking to photograph him at Heronswood back in September 2005, when all he really wanted to do was get to his waiting birthday cake.  He graces me with a big smile, but I’m also distracted by….

…. the giant hog fennel (Peucedanum verticillare) behind him! 

As a lover of colour in the garden, I’m drawn towards the lower bluff where brilliant red and scarlet crocosmias are partnered with agapanthus and rich blue Salvia patens. If you squint, you can see the skyscrapers of Seattle in the distance. And on a clear day, the view of Mount Rainier is spectacular.

The vignette is enhanced by the eucomis foliage, which will mature to yield a pineapple lily that reaches 5-6 feet in height. When the previous owners were here, they had an expansive view of Puget Sound over their summer-brown lawn. In planning his own garden, Dan wanted the view not to be an open book dominated by sky and water, but to be glimpsed through an interesting array of plants of various sizes, habits, colours and textures. 

As I stand quietly in this area, a female rufous hummingbird becomes brave enough to forage in the crocosmia flowers.

See how her head feathers are brushed with the golden pollen on the anthers, which she’ll carry with her as she flits from plant to plant, ensuring that seed forms in the beautiful fruits of crocosmia? 

I see splashes of orange behind the agapanthus in this section, the spikes of red-hot poker (Kniphofia) and drifts of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica).

The sweet perfume of Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) is in the air here. It’s a little dèja vu moment for me because when we were in Tuscany visiting our youngest son and daughter-in-law in late May, this Mediterranean shrub, which they call “ginestre”, was in bloom throughout the hills. In fact there was a festival of flowers in Lucignano, the village where we stayed, called “Maggiolata” which uses the yellow blossoms of the shrub as its floral motif. At the edge of the bluff on the right, you can see the native madrona tree (Arbutus menziesii) whose shimmering, copper-bronze trunk and branches inspired the colour scheme of the house and its furnishings.

Close to the bluff edge is a circular stone fire pit called the council ring. Created by Portland mosaic artist Jeffrey Bale, it features an inset stone face by sculptor Marcia Donohue.

Walking back towards the house, I see purple Jerusalem sage (Phlomis purpurea), one of many Phlomis species here.  (If I am wrong, I hope to be corrected in comments.)

Then a few plants I like to call “scrim plants”. Dan has said: “I was a dinosaur when it came to the use of grasses. I was the last person in North America to appreciate grasses, but Heronswood was not a grass sort of garden. That diaphanous quality and the movement they provide to the garden is so incredibly important.” Here he uses giant feather grass (Stipa gigantea/Celtica), one of the very best grasses to use as a screen through which to glimpse other plants, like the agapanthus.

Angel’s fishing rod (Dierama pulcherrimum) creates the same screen effect in front of white-flowered Olearia cheesmanii, a New Zealand bush daisy.

A lovely, single, orange dahlia pops up throughout the bluff garden.

There are a few gravel-mulched terraces leading up to the house level here. (And can I just say I LOVE airy bamboo fences…)

This one features Salvia ‘Amistad’ with a small kniphofia.

Steps up to the house are flanked by Yucca gloriosa with soft silver sage (Salvia argentea) and a white-flowered salvia (likely S. greggii) at the base.

The terraces include a large pond and waterfall. The pond once held a collection of koi, but the local river otter put an end to the fish.

Large stepping-stones cross the pond beside a waterlily.

On the other side of the steps, the pond continues below a deck with a little viewing overlook to gaze out on the garden.

One of the family dogs (Babu?) meets me near the deck but refuses to pose.  He says he’s tired of paparazzi.  Fine.

A line of clay-fibre planters sits facing south, all the better for the succulents, cacti and other sun-lovers planted in them.

When I reach the deck, Dan is there, gazing out at his garden.  Beyond is a grove of Dustin Gimbel’s ‘Phlomis’ ceramic sculptures.

2024 started as a difficult year for gardeners in the Pacific Northwest, who lived through several consecutive January nights of deep-freeze temperatures – as low as 15F (-10C) on Jan. 12-13 in the Seattle area.   That’s when many of those tender Mediterranean and South African plants curl up their toes and die. At Windcliff, much of the shrub framework was lost, including many plants that had never been affected by cold before.  When he returned home from warmer climes in February, Dan called the garden a “mass murder crime scene investigation” and laid the blame on the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. (As a Canadian, I accept the blame on behalf of the Polar Vortex, even though I think Alaska might have had a hand in the dirty work too.)  In late winter, he sowed a buckwheat cover crop to smother weeds and improve the soil’s tilth, then in late April he covered the entire space, 10,000 square feet, with a 10-mil sheet of white plastic to ‘solarize’ the seeds of weedy mulleins and exotic grasses. In late September when the autumn rains begin, he’ll plant bulbs along with native plants and grasses in a “low-mow meadow”.   As he said on his Facebook page with an indefatigable air of optimism: “I could not bring myself to paint between the lines of those few things that survived, so nearly 25 years later, we begin again. What an adventure!!”

Parts of the bluff-side garden have been newly planted and mulched in gravel.

I love this Chilean annual, Nolana reichei, aka “flower of seven colors”. (I counted, it’s true.)

Our stay is coming to an end but I haven’t yet seen the vegetable garden or nursery, so I head off up the east side of the house towards the greenhouse. Fragrant lilies grow here, along with phlomis.

Robert Jones is manning the sales booth and my fellow travellers are in seventh heaven selecting rare plants….

…. of all kinds. Fortunately, our bus has capacious storage space below. (Windcliff does not do mail order, but plants are available for purchase on open days, and Monrovia has a Dan Hinkley Plant Collection too.)

As a Canadian, I’m not permitted to bring plants across the border without a phytosanitary certificate, so I content myself with window shopping.

Then I head to the agapanthus beds where I see some familiar names on the plant labels, like Portland gardener Nancy Goldman….

…. and my dear Seattle friend, Sue Nevler.  Said Dan of a happy day now a decade ago: “Robert and I had at last the opportunity to become married and we had a lovely party of friends coming in from all parts of the country and Europe, and we gave all the women a label and they got to go out and celebrate their favourite agapanthus seedling, and then we’ve named it for them.   So there will be a lot of feminine-sounding agapanthus being introduced into cultivation in the near future.” 

The perfume of sweet peas is in the air here, and I’m charmed that this sophisticated garden has devoted so much space to growing this old-fashioned annual.

Who can resist burying their nose in fragrant sweet peas?

Nearby is the vegetable garden.  Said Dan in his talk at New York Botanical Garden: “It was vegetable gardening that brought me into this whole world I feel so privileged to be a part of. As a young kid, I had the family vegetable garden responsibilities and it is still now the place you’re going to find me most often, in the potager that we put in at Windcliff….something we eat from every single day of the year. That is our reason for the garden, when it comes right down to it – this opportunity to have fresh vegetables that we know precisely where they came from, how they were treated, how they were loved.”

A clay pot is overflowing with spinach.

The greenhouse offers extra heat for tomatoes, which grow side-by-side with sarracenias.

While apples ripen on a tree nearby.

It’s time for us to head to Dan & Robert’s next-door neighbours, the Brindleys, for a group portrait, an annual event at the Fling.  I have just enough time as I bid farewell to snap a photo of a Mark Bulwinkle rusty iron screen.

I thought it was appropriate to include this photo in the lovely Brindley garden overlooking Puget Sound, courtesy of Becca Mathias.  I am slouched in the front row, second from left. If I look happy as a clam, it’s because I’ve just spent a few hours in what passes in gardening for heaven.  Thanks, Dan and Robert!

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Are you tired of looking at garden photos yet? No?  Well, I have been fortunate to visit and blog about a few other personal gardens designed by eminent plantsmen, including:

In Camille Paulsen’s Puyallup Garden

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In the past decade, I’ve had the great joy of travelling in the United States — along with dozens of other garden writers and photographers from far and wide — to participate in an event called the Garden Fling. It’s allowed me to see the finest private and public gardens in Washington DC, Austin, Denver and Philadelphia. This year the Fling was centred in Washington State’s Puget Sound region, and was organized by Camille Paulsen, with help from a fine team of volunteers from Tacoma and Seattle and her own husband Dirk. So my first blog honours the gorgeous Paulsen garden in Puyallup, Washington overlooking the Orting Valley and lofty Mount Tahoma/Rainier. Let’s begin at the handsome entrance to the front door……

…… where you can already see Camille’s penchant for textural plant combinations, especially in shade.

The front garden also features a waterfall and tiny stream….

…. leading to a large, naturalistic pond stocked with koi. Dirk Paulsen, an airline captain, has done much of the hardscaping and woodworking in the garden.

Start walking the path through the side-yard to the right of the house and you come to a large, gnarled log that Camille found in her travels nearby and had delivered to the garden. (She uses driftwood, too.) In its hollow end is western maidenhair fern (Adiantum aleuticum).

Moss grows in nooks and crannies along the log and beneath it is are ferns, hostas and other plants – demonstrating Camille’s deft touch with texture.

I love this hollowed-out, hanging birch log planted with orchids and a staghorn fern.

Hardy impatiens (I. omeiana) is one of countless plants chosen for season-long foliage interest, even when out of flower.

I believe this is lovely Japanese maple is A. palmatum ‘Butterfly’.

Further along, keeping company with a rhododendron and ferns, is a variegated dove tree (Davidia involucrata ‘Lady Sunshine’).

Camille has shared online that her garden contains approximately one hundred Japanese maples and an equal number of conifers. That’s serious ‘collector’ level!

This basalt rock fountain is one of many water features in the Paulsen garden.

Rodgersia was bearing rosy-red seedheads.

Another gnarled stump offers a niche for ferns and succulents.

Camille had lots of pressure with two buses full of garden tourists, four days of carefully orchestrated scheduling and her own garden to prepare, but she handled it with aplomb – and a beautiful smile.

Tahoma or Mount Rainier is an active 14,411-foot (4,392 metre) stratovolcano and the highest peak in Washington State. The view from the Paulsen garden is spectacular – especially when Camille captures it on a clear day. (My so-so view was on a very hot day when there was haze above the snowy peak and the nearby Orting Valley). Though its last volcanic activity was in the 19th century, it has been called a “Decade Volcano”, one of 16 worldwide so named because of its potential destructive eruption capacity and its proximity to densely-populated regions. In fact, many of the surrounding communities are built atop old “lahars” from Rainier, i.e. volcanic mudflows triggered by melting of the mountain’s glacial ice. The most famous was the Osceola Mudflow some 5,000 years ago.

The closer view at this point, glimpsed through drifts of Mexican feathergrass and an iron sculpture, is a lower level swimming pool below the ferny, wine-red foliage of Albizia ‘Summer Chocolate’ .

Colourful dahlias in a raised bed light up the area behind the house.

Corten planters behind Camille’s greenhouse hold a mix of culinary herbs and flowers.

More pots feature tropicals and succulents.

It’s not surprising that in the land of renowned, Tacoma-born glass artist Dale Chihuly, colourful blown-glass ornaments play a role in many Puget Sound gardens, including these pendants hanging from a ‘Twisty Baby’ black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).

Stone stairs lead to the swimming pool level – a journey past more maples, rhododendrons, ferns and shade plants.

I like the chunky bamboo railing leading to the lower level.

As I said, Camille’s garden is one of the finest examples I’ve seen of textural plant combinations, including white-flowered chameleon plant (Houttuynia cordata) and variegated Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’) with ferns, hostas and tiny succulents.

One of my favourite vignettes features foliage of a variegated ginkgo (G. biloba ‘Variegata’).

The lower level features a naturalistic pond edged with mossy flagstones, overhung by trees with moss-covered branches. Bamboo makes interesting reflections in the water. (Sadly for the photographers but happily for everyone else, the sun shone bright in a blue sky for much of our Puget Sound visit).

Camille has collected delightful windchimes.

With so much water in the garden, engineering the journey over it is important, and this handsome stone slab does a beautiful job of moving people through.

Tucked into a garden on the swimming pool level are touches of blue and purple, including Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ and big-leaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla).

Azure-blue pots and hedging surround the swimming pool….

…. and the iron fence is cleverly disguised by a weeping blue Atlantic cedar (Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’) trained along it.

Even the garden furniture fits a pretty colour palette.

Colocasia and canna bring the tropics poolside, along with a dark-leaved begonia.

Abyssinian banana (Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’) occupies another pot.

The pool fence has a raised planter shelf with pots of succulents.

On the other side of the house, geometric stone flags set into a corten-edged grit path create a sinuous walkway past still more shade-loving plants.

A luminous golden fullmoon maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) lights up the shadows here.

The stone flags give a Mondrian feeling to this path.

A stone face sculpture is nestled between a Fatsia japonica and a dark-leaved persicaria.

Coming back to the front garden, I sit and chat in a pergola with a friend from Maine, but my eye catches another of Camille’s sweet windchimes. It’s a garden I would dearly love to have spent many hours chronicling (without having to dodge a hundred fellow enthusiasts while shooting), but it has been a great delight to be here. Thank you, Camille and Dirk, for sharing it with us.

Follow Camille Paulsen on Instagram @tahomaflora.

The Gate, the Grate, the Path

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We’ve now lived in our 1916 Toronto house for more than 40 years, making us one of the old-timers on the block. When we moved in back in 1983, there was a long driveway leading to a ramshackle garage which was too small for modern cars but just right for a family of raccoons who did not take kindly to being evicted. In fact, most of the driveway was too narrow for a car so we decided to create a side garden halfway down it in place of the last 40 feet of asphalt, bisected by a winding path behind a pretty arched gate. That was 1988. At the time, the publisher of Canadian Gardening magazine lived in the house behind me and thought my gate would make a good cover for the very first issue of the magazine, launched in 1990 and published for 25 years, finally closing down in 2015. Apart from writing stories for three of its editors in that quarter-century, they also became very good friends. And as you see, back in 1988 I was growing impatiens in the shade, as were most gardeners.

A few years later, I wrote a story on the gate and garden for Fine Gardening magazine, title page below. In the article, I tallied up the costs: $960 US for the gate and fence panels (the gate incorporated a “see-through” made from an old brass heating grate we found while renovating the house); $500 for the path, including breaking up and removing the asphalt as far as the driveway’s original limestone grit and laying down concrete pavers; and a load of topsoil and plants to bring the total to about $2,000. I cannot imagine doing this today for less than $10,000, likely more. Only 9-1/2 feet separated our house from the neighbour’s fence, so the path took up 3-1/2 feet with 3 feet of garden on either side. To complicate matters, a black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) that had likely been small when our house was built during the First World War was now a hulking 70-footer, its big trunk straddling the property line, the allelopathic juglone secreted by its leaves and roots toxic to certain plants growing underneath it.

As the years passed, the walnut tree needed periodic pruning and cabling. On one occasion, an arborist working in the branches above dropped a heavy branch onto the gate and broke the arch.  But even without it, the gate added a certain flair to the house – I even gave it a big Christmas wreath for several years. I had planted the two half-whiskey-barrels flanking the gate with ‘Green Velvet’ boxwood shrubs (a Canadian introduction) around 1990, though I was warned they wouldn’t survive the first winter. Not only did they survive that winter, they lived in the barrels with no care except an occasional summer watering and shearing for more than 30 years! And in the photo below you can see the first tendrils of a bird-seeded Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) beginning to climb the fence panel at right.

In 2010, I designed and had built a screen to hide the recycling and trash containers, staining it to match the gate and house.  (You can see the long crack forming in our old driveway here.)

I had designed a driveway utilities screen for a gardening client in the 1990s, so while I had contractors at the house rebuilding our sundeck, I thought it was a good chance to utilize the design myself. Because as much as I approve of recycling, I can’t stand the look of plastic bins.

Meanwhile, the little sideyard garden grew and I learned which plants can tolerate living under a black walnut. Dry shade was a more important consideration, since the area is rarely watered except by rain and the tree sucks up much ground moisture. The shiny groundcover leaves are European ginger (Asarum europaeum); uber-invasive lily-of-the-valley, front right, makes its home there; and native Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), front left, does very well, too.  The tall shrub at left is alternate-leaf dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), my favourite native shrub and a seedling of one I planted in the back garden in the 1990s.  The boughs of white cedar (Thuja arborvitae) come from my neighbour’s tree over the fence.

Here is the alternate-leaf dogwood in flower on May 22, 2012.

Move a little further along the path in this 2013 photo and you can see the double iron arch I installed atop 4×4 posts, over which I grew what I purchased as a native bittersweet vine but turned out to be the invasive Asian counterpart. The paver path circles around our lower deck to become a patio adjoining a lily pond in the back garden.

I planted a few bulbs of Corydalis solida in 2011 and they now carpet the sunniest part of the path garden in spring, but die away quickly as the Solomon’s seals send their green spears up.

There are native spring ephemerals in the path too, like mayapple and Hepatica acutiloba, below.

Lily-of-the-valley grows here, often in carpets – as it does in the rest of my garden. It’s always strange for me to see garden centres selling a few pips in a pot for $. I could be a millionaire, I think! Then I remember I’d have to dig them out, which is much easier said than done. But they are lovely in a little vase and they do make a very fun and fragrant garden party hat, as I’ve blogged before.

Here, looking towards the gate from the deck are the Solomon seals in a photo from May 24, 2016. Note the thick trunks of the bittersweet vine coiling up the posts.

Just a little bit on Boston ivy, shown climbing onto the gate in July 2015. Because it adheres via adhesive sticker aerial roots, I’m never keen to let this invasive climb our house and attach to the old mortar. But I thought it might add some interest to the gate, so I’ve let it grow while keeping it trimmed.

Inserting the see-through grate into the gate wasn’t an original idea; I’d seen various versions on garden tours. But knowing it had come from this house made it special – and I liked the fact that it lost its shininess and took on a rusty patina.  It framed the garden beyond like a peek into a colourful jewel box.

As the Boston ivy continued its journey across the gate on Oct. 16, 2019, I let its tendrils feel their way. In autumn it turned crimson, trailing across the view through the grate of orange sumac and azure blue monkshood and sumac at the back of the garden.

Here is the long view on that day, showing the path littered with yellow autumn leaves from the black walnut and the garden beyond.

Notice how the juvenile probing leaves of Boston ivy are shaped very differently from the leaves on the older wood in the next photos. They’re almost heart-shaped….

…. compared with the three-lobed (tricuspid) foliage emerging from the older wood in 2020.

Boston ivy is one of the best species to show the effect of summer sunshine on the pigments of the autumn leaves. Where one leaf shades another, the shaded section does not turn red in fall, but reveals the accessory yellow photosynthetic pigments.

As the alien bittersweet vine grew across the iron arches, it framed the view to the garden in an intriguing way, but it also latched on to everything nearby, including the dogwood shrub and the house’s downpipes.  I had to use a stepladder to try to thin it out and prune it away from both.

But I did love walking down the shady path in June to see my neighbour’s beauty bush (Linnea amabilis, formerly Kolkwitzia) in full flower over the fence.

Alas, all that weight on the arches and the four old posts holding them up finally took its toll. The vine collapsed onto the path in summer 2021 and everything had to be chopped up, dug up and removed.  (And this man was not too thrilled to be doing it.) But bittersweet doesn’t give up easily; every year it sends up shoots (some through the deck boards) from bits of root left behind, reminding us that it would like to return.

And that crack in the driveway? Eventually it opened, cracked more and formed more openings that turned into ankle-turning crevices. So the driveway had to be replaced in 2022.   And with the old asphalt went the 1990 half-whiskey-barrels and the 30-year-old boxwoods, since it was impossible to work around them and the barrels had started to fall apart.            

Surface roots from the black walnut had been lifting the path’s concrete pavers for years until they became unsafe and I had to warn visitors to watch their step coming into the back garden. I knew the time had come to fix the path.

Black walnut is a tap-rooted tree, so the surface roots can take some cutting back before much damage is done to the canopy…

…. but the Toronto company I hired called “Leveled Ground” said they would not cut surface roots bigger than a “toonie”, about 1-1/2 inches in diameter. This offending root got cut.

In July 2023, a team of guys arrived to lift up all the pavers….

…. stacking them carefully in the new driveway.

With all the pavers removed, they laid down a new layer of limestone grit, atop the layer put down under the old path in 1988, atop the layer from the original First World War driveway.

Now the right side of the garden under the black walnut is a few inches higher than the newly leveled path.  After all the grit was laid down, they used a mechanical compactor to compress it, then put the old pavers back, adding sand between the cracks and using the compactor to compress the entire path again before sweeping it clean.

This is what the path looked like 2 weeks after Leveled Ground departed. Sturdy, flat and safe.

I’m not sure how long the old black walnut will last. For that matter, I’m not sure how long we’ll last in the house – many of our friends have opted to move into condominiums as they’ve aged. But I cannot imagine life without a garden, watching birds drinking in the pond, bees nectaring on flowers, leaves changing colour in autumn – and that old gate leading down the curving path to the joys beyond.   

A Visit to Andrew Bunting’s Belvidere

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During my September Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the Philadelphia area, my favourite small garden was Andrew Bunting’s delightful property in Swarthmore. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that the owner is the Vice-President of Horticulture with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Founded in 1827, the PHS is the oldest horticultural society in the U.S., responsible for the annual Philadelphia Flower Show as well as a host of endeavors including 120 community gardens; maintenance of public landscapes in the city and suburbs including museums, the art gallery and public squares; street tree programs; the 28-acre estate garden at Meadowbrook Farm; Landcare, in which vacant city lots are turned from blighted properties to neighbourhood parks; pop-up ephemeral gardens; and a program to train former convicts to be gardeners.

Since buying the house on its one-third acre in 1999, this garden is where Andrew has experimented with an eclectic roster of plants and an evolving approach to design – in fact, five redesigns in his time there. I especially loved seeing his home through the tall, wispy wands of ‘Skyracer’ purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea), a grass that shines in my own garden in autumn. Beyond is a gravel garden bisected by a broad flagstone walk with a small patch of lawn that creates a nice balance of negative space, as well as lavenders and verbascums and other drought-tolerant plants, many native. A stone trough acts as a birdbath and a terracotta urn features a chartreuse explosion of colocasia (likely ‘Maui Gold’).

Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) with its needle-like leaves is prominent in the front garden; its blue flowers are attractive in spring but its brilliant gold fall color gives it long-season appeal. Barely visible in the foliage is a wooden chair.  Originally white, the front door and window shutters were painted gray, picking up the colors of the flagstone.

Behind the amsonia is Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ and, at left, willow-leaf spicebush (Lindera glauca var. salicifolia), which also has good autumn colour.

The vine around the door and on the house’s front wall is self-clinging Chinese silver-vein creeper (Parthenocissus henryana).  I love the mailbox and house numbers.

My colour-tuned eye picked up the echo between the red glasses indoors and the big caladium and chartreuse-and-red coleus in Andrew’s windowbox.

Our time was limited and there was so much to see, but I could have spent hours studying the gravel garden, including many native plants like giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), below. Andrew’s influences around gravel include Beth Chatto’s garden in England, the Gravel Garden designed by Lisa Roper at Chanticleer (see my latest blog here) and Jeff Epping’s work at Olbrich Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. The gravel is 1/2 inch granite but Andrew says it’s more like 1/4 inch.

Here is native wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium).

And American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) with its vibrant violet fruit.

Andrew removed much of the original driveway beside the house which was too narrow for cars and turned it into a shady sideyard garden with a path leading to the old garage – which became a charming summerhouse. Those little purple flowers are Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Butterfly’, a good fall bloomer and, incidentally, a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 2023 Gold Medal Plant Winner!

Turning the corner at the back of the house, I saw more evidence of a plantsman’s wonderland with assorted tropicals in pots and a potting bench topped by colourful annuals.

Andrew was holding court in the back garden, so I asked him to pose. His own history in horticulture is very deep. Even at a young age, he knew a career in gardening was in his future – and it relates to the name of his own garden. As he has written in an essay about becoming a gardener, “My grandfather farmed in southeastern Nebraska, just outside a little town called Belvidere. I loved those couple of weeks on the farm every summer. Something about that agrarian lifestyle resonated with me then, and still does today. I loved the crops in the field, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and the smell of hay.” He did internships at the Morton Arboretum, Fairchild Tropical Garden and the Scott Arboretum, where he worked in the late 1980s for three years.  In 1990 he visited more than a hundred gardens in England, meeting Rosemary Verey, Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd and working for a while at Penelope Hobhouse’s  Tintinhull. That autumn, he travelled to New Zealand and worked for a designer for 3 months. Returning to Pennsylvania, he got a part-time position at Chanticleer as it was becoming a public garden, working there for 18 months while starting his own landscape business on the side. In 1993, he became curator of the Scott arboretum at Swarthmore College and stayed there for 22 years, until becoming Assistant Director and Director of Plant Collections at Chicago Botanic Garden in 2015.  

I saw Andrew during a garden symposium in Chicago in 2018, below, when he spoke about how he directed the content and curation of CBG’s permanent plant collection. Next, a job offer at the Atlanta Botanic Garden arose and he became Vice-President of Horticulture and Plant Collections at Atlanta Botanic Garden, giving him the chance to grow broad-leaved plants. Then the opportunity at Pennsylvania Horticultural Society opened up and he returned to Swarthmore and the abundance of public gardens that make the Philadelphia area “America’s Garden Capital”.  

When Andrew bought the house in 1999 the back yard was filled with a jungle of pokeweed. With the help of his landscape crew and a bobcat, he installed a 35 x 12 foot patio spanning the back of the house.  It’s the perfect setting for a lush ‘garden room’ created with pots of banana, canna and palms.  These tropicals get carried down to the cool, damp, cellar-like basement for winter through the entrance partially shown at left.

There are potted plants everywhere, many on vintage tables…..

…. and étageres.

Textural foliage combinations caught my eye, like this chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) with Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ euphorbia and a fancy-leaved pelargonium.

There are bromeliads here too, like Portea petropolitana.

Most chairs in the garden were built by Chanticleer’s Dan Benarcik – and can actually be ordered custom online as kits or fully assembled! Note that the granite gravel has been used here, which Andrew says is a less expensive solution than flagstone paving. At right, you can see the entrance to the covered part of the summerhouse, aka the old garage.

So many artful touches here, combining with the rich plant palette to create a beautiful outdoor living space.

Let’s take a peek into the summerhouse, where a comfy leather sofa awaits.  As Andrew once said in an online Masterclass chat with Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle, many people in the Philadelphia area go to the New Jersey shore or the Poconos in summer, but he prefers his own garden – “less traffic and more access to gardening”.  And I can imagine sitting in here behind the screen doors during a summer thunderstorm, candles lit, perhaps with a little glass of something tasty.

The back of the summerhouse is more open to the elements and features the perfect stage set. I don’t know what the silvery Adonis mannequin was once wearing on his sculpted torso, but I’m willing to bet it was Ralph Lauren, now nicely accented with tillandsias and begonias.

Nearby are more colocasias and blue Salvia guaranitica.

I loved all the seating (still more Dan Benarcik chairs), this time on a shady patio with a dining table.

Sometimes the seating is more about atmosphere and lichen-rich patina than it is about an actual place to sit.

In a shady spot at the back of the garden is a naturalistic pond because… every garden needs a little water.

I was sad not to have time to take a peek behind the back fence into the neighbour’s yard, where there’s an Andrew-designed large, shared quadrangle vegetable garden, but it was late in the season for veggies anyway.  Mostly, I was happy that we were able to see this lovely garden in dry weather, since we were soon to find ourselves on the soaking end of Tropical Storm Ophelia.

Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth

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Having visited and often written about Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s garden on the High Line in many seasons – May, June, mid-summer and autumn; having blogged about his fabulous Lurie Garden in Chicago; but mostly having photographed and written about the seasons passing in the Oudolf-designed entry border at Toronto Botanical Garden, a few miles from my home, I was beyond excited to finally visit Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Gallery at Dunslade Farm in Somerset, near Bruton.  First we walked through the gallery, one of 21 galleries worldwide founded originally in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan and Manuela Wirth along with Manuela’s mother, art patron and collector Ursula Hauser. The Somerset gallery resulted from the renovation of a collection of old farm buildings and is located near the Wirths’ home.  Like all their galleries, it features high-profile modern artists such as Americans Richard Jackson, below…

… and Paul McCarthy, whose silicone White Snow Dwarves, below, from the Ursula Hauser collection was displayed near the exit to the garden.

Leaving the gallery which was designed by Argentine-born architect Luis Laplace, visitors pass through a cloister garden designed by Piet Oudolf and featuring the sculpture Lemur Heads by Franz West.  Unlike the meadow beyond, this space contains woodlanders and shade-tolerant species.  

The small trees in this garden are paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) with their fuzzy, globular female flowers.

Martagon lilies were just beginning to show colour.

We began with a talk from head gardener Mark Dumbelton, who spoke about the beginnings of the garden and expanded on some of its challenges, mainly around the soil. Indeed, when we visited England was on its way to enduring the hottest June on record since 1884, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, and watering was being done by hand.  Behind Mark, I noticed the white inflorescences of….

Ornithogalum ponticum ‘Sochi’, a Russian native bulb that contrasts well with emerging grasses and makes a good cut flower.

Near the gallery is a naturalistic pond surrounded by pink flowering rush (Butomnus umbellatus).

You can see the pond at the left, below, on Piet’s colourful 2012 plan for the wildflower meadow in the Hauser & Wirth catalogue.  Spread out over 1.5 acres are seventeen curved, informal planting beds separated by a central gravel path as well as lawn paths between the beds and surrounded by an existing hedge, beyond which Piet planted trees.

He explained his rationale for Oudolf Field in the video below.  

With Mark’s talk finished, we were set loose in the meadow. I viewed it through spires of peach foxtail lily (Eremurus), a lovely perennial for early summer whose….  

….. tall inflorescences never fail to attract the attention of visitors – and bees! This one looks like the Dutch cultivar Eremurus x isabellinus ‘Romance’.  

I was intrigued by the ten turf circles in the central path through the meadow.  The path lets visitors stroll from one end to the other, but the playful circles relieve the tedium of this long expanse of purposeful gravel.  

They are so unlike Piet’s characteristic naturalistic style, but in fact they point to his pragmatic design knowledge and site adaptability. (Yes, he designs woodlands and knows shrubs and trees as well as his favourite perennials!) 

I was reminded in studying these circles of my own visit to Piet and Anja’s garden in Hummelo, Netherlands in 1999 which was designed in part to reflect one of his early Dutch influences, the great designer Mien Ruys (1904-99), the so-called “mother of modernist gardens”.  Both his famous hedges and circle gardens, below, were his interpretation of what has been called “contemporary formalism” by his frequent literary collaborator Noel Kingsbury.

I feel very fortunate to have spoken with Piet then, at the beginning of his international fame. I made a photo of him at their outdoor table with spring-flowering shrubs in flower around us. Anja was in their nursery (gone now) with customers, and their little dog sat in a chair nearby.

Back to Oudolf Field, the overwhelming mood here on June 9th was of soft pastel mauves and blues amidst the emerging green of the grasses and summer perennials. Eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana) native to the American southeast was in full flower in front of the blue blossoms of narrowleaf bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii), a south-central American native that turns brilliant chartreuse-gold in autumn.   Emerging through the grasses were the big starry globes of star-of-Persia allium (A.cristophii).  

I had never seen Monarda bradburiana before spotting it in Piet’s design at the High Line years ago.  Like many of the plants he uses – and sometimes introduces to commerce – it has withstood his field testing at Hummelo. This compact species has the good characteristics of the beebalms, including pollinator appeal, without the negative drawbacks, such as powdery mildew.

I saw tall Carthusian pinks(Dianthus carthusianorum) in almost every garden I visited in June, including Sissinghurst and Hillside, the garden of Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan. 

Early June, following the explosion of spring bulbs and before the summer abundance of flowering perennials is sometimes considered an “in-between” time in the garden. That quiet interlude is helped immensely by the many ornamental onions, and Piet uses them to great advantage in all his gardens, both for their flowers and later seedheads.  Below, again, you see Allium cristophii along with the Corten steel edging used to delineate the beds.

After seeing Allium atropurpureum, below, amidst grasses, I came back to Canada and immediately ordered some for my own June garden.

Here is Allium atropurpureum with Amsonia hubrichtii.

… and with Oenothera lindheimeri, i.e. gaura.

Looking back to the gallery through the gardens, including dark-leaved penstemons.

Piet uses various low grasses as matrix plants, including Sporobolus heterolepis, below, and Sesleria autumnalis.

The weather was so warm the day we were there in this record-setting dry June, the assistant gardener was working full-time to water.

While the garden is situated within pre-existing hedges, Piet planted trees on the boundary to contain it further.

The Pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić and installed in March 2015, sits at the end of Oudolf Field and is intended to “create a dialogue between the gallery complex and pavilion and their relationship with the garden”. Radić says it is “part of a history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies.”  Built of white, translucent fibreglass with cedar flooring and set atop large quarry stones, visitors can view the garden from within the shell.     

Heading into the gallery for lunch, I passed the attractive bar — a work of art in itself.

It was a lunch I would have enjoyed much more if I hadn’t been feeling the beginnings of what turned out to be my first case of Covid in more than 3 years– and the unexpected and sudden end later that night of my wonderful English garden tour. But I was so delighted to have experienced yet another masterpiece in the always-varied oeuvre of Piet Oudolf.