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Designing with Perennial Geraniums

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Late spring… early summer… it’s flight time for the ‘cranesbills’ – all those lovely perennial geraniums that add that soft, billowy, romantic effect to perennial borders. Over the years, I’ve collected a series of combinations featuring many of these valuable perennials. Perhaps you might find some inspiration in those that follow – the bees will certainly appreciate it!

Our North American native spotted or wild geranium (Geranium maculatum) gets its name because of the spots on its leaves. Here it is with native golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea) at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Here is G. maculatum with Welsh poppy (Papaver cambricum) at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver.

In my own garden, below, I grew Geranium maculatum under Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum). I must check to see if it’s still there, or if it’s been swamped by the aggressive Solomon’s seals.

G. maculatum looked lovely amidst hostas at Chanticleer Garden outside Philadelphia.

I just saw this combination at the Toronto Botanical Garden a few weeks ago:  Spanish bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica ‘Excelsior’) with bigroot geranium (G. macrorrhizum ‘Czakor’).

Also at the TBG, here is the variegated form of bigroot geranium (G. macrorrhizum ‘Variegatum’) with catmint (Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’).

Bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum) is a popular, early-flowering cranesbill with magenta blossoms. Here it is with Phlox carolina at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

It makes an attractive, front-of-border mound, below, along with lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis).

This was an interesting monochromatic combination, of bloody cranesbill with Dianthus ‘Oakington Hybrid’.

I thought this was a pretty June border on a garden tour: bloody cranesbill with Siberian iris and bearded iris.

I believe the cranesbill below is Geranium sanguineum ‘Max Frei’, partnering with Veronica ‘Glory’ at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

There’s a pale-pink form of bloody cranesbill, G. sanguineum var. striatum (formerly G. lancastriense), that makes a very pretty partner to late forget-me-nots.

Peonies offer a vast palette of possibilities as cranesbill companions, including the spectacular Itoh Hybrid intersectional peonies (herbaceous-shrub crosses). Below is ‘Cora Louise’ with Geranium’ Brookside at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Here’s lovely ‘Brookside’ (G. clarkei x G.pratense) with Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum)….

….. and with Campanula ‘Sarastro’…..

….. and Veronica longifolia ‘Eveline’ and Achillea tomentosa ‘Moonlight’ at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Here is ‘Brookside’ clambering around the wine-red flowers of Knautia macedonica, also at the TBG.

Geranium Rozanne® (‘Gerwat’) is a similar-looking cranesbill, but a cross between G. himalayense x G. wallachinianum ‘Buxton’s Variety’. Very popular and long-flowering, it was the Perennial Plant Association’s 2008 Plant of the Year. Here it is with the yellow Itoh peony hybrid ‘Sequestered Sunshine’….

….. and billowing atop lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis).

Rozanne adds a little lavender ‘zing’ to this green vignette of Molinia caerulea ‘Variegata’ and the striped leaves of Iris pallida ‘Variegata’.

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Flowering shrubs such as hydrangea can be enhanced by an underplanting of many varieties of cranesbill, like the unidentified one below.

The pale-pink flowers of French cranesbill (Geranium endressii) add a delicate note to Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum var. pictum).

Magenta Armenian cranesbill (G. psilostemon) is rather fleeting in bloom, but looks lovely with Bowman’s root (Porteranthus trifoliatus, syn. Gillenia), below, at the TBG.

Just around the corner, it was used with tufted hair grass (Deschampsia cespitosa) in a lush design.

At wonderful Chanticleer Garden near Philadelphia (have you read my 2-part blog on this favourite garden?), I found G.psilostemon looking spectacular with chartreuse meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria ‘Aurea’).

Out at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Gardens one spring (another favourite garden I’ve blogged about), I was taken with this vignette featuring the hybrid Geranium ‘Brempat’ with Allium cristophii and dark Heuchera ‘Crimson Curls’.

Nearby at VanDusen was the dark-coloured mourning widow cranesbill Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’ emerging in a chartreuse sea of Bowles’ golden grass (Millium effusum ‘Aureum’).

The delicate-looking but vigorous mourning widow geranium has a white form (Geranium phaeum ‘Album’) that Piet Oudolf uses in his designs, including with Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’ in the entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden. (I’ve also written a 2-part blog about Piet’s design for this border.)

I also loved the way he interplanted Paeonia ‘Bowl of Beauty‘ just coming into flower with the white-flowered mourning widow.

This delicate, monochromatic combination, also in the Oudolf–designed entry border at the TBG features Geranium x oxonianum ‘Rose Claire’ with Astrantia ‘Roma’.

Hostas and cranesbills always look good together, as demonstrated by Geranium x cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’, below.

Geranium clarkei ‘Kashmir Purple’ makes an interesting contrast to the tiny white flowers of flowring sea kale (Crambe cordifolia).

Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’ is an old-fashioned hybrid, a cross between G. himalayense and G. pratense. Doesn’t it look spectacular with the purple bellflowers (Campanula latifolia var. macrantha) and meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa) flanking the rose garden at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden below?

Purple always works with chartreuse, and G. Johnson’s Blue’ is the perfect companion to Heuchera ‘Lime Rickey’.

Toronto’s Spadina House is my favourite cottage garden in the world, with a mass of artful flowers tumbling around expansive vegetable gardens. Meadow cranesbill (Geranium pratense) is much-used in the garden, as with lanceleaf coreposis (C. lanceolata), below….

….. and foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea)….

….. and small yellow foxglove (D. lutea).

I also found it growing in the fabulous Denver garden of plantsman Panayoti Kelaidis and his partner Jan Fahs. This romantic planting of roses, gas plant (Dictamnus albus var. purpureus) and G. pratense is actually Jan’s domain! (And, of course, I wrote a blog about PK and Jan’s garden.)

When I was having dinner at the spectacular Deep Cove Chalet restaurant in Victoria, B.C. one spring, I was enchanted by this unusual and richly-coloured combination:  G. pratense with peach alstroemeria, yellow Phlomis russeliana and pink spirea.

Though most cranesbills flower from late spring into early-mid-summer, there are a few species that hit their stride in late summer and continue blooming well into fall. I saw one of them one August at the Piet Oudolf-designed Lurie Garden in Chicago (another fantastic garden from my blog). For my final homage to the versatile cranesbills, meet pink-flowered Japanese cranesbill (G. soboliferum) with lilac prairie petunia (Ruellia humilis).

Remembering Penny

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The end of the gardening season, the beginning of the festive season: this was always the time of year for the WWWG to get together for dinner. WWWG – the “Wonderful Women Who Garden”.  We addressed our emails that way, with great affection and without a trace of irony, honouring how we four had become friends through gardening. My earliest photo of us is from late August 2003, seven years after we collaborated on the series of garden books that had brought us together. We’re at my cottage on Lake Muskoka for a ‘slumber party’, the four musketeers: from left Liz Primeau, the founding editor of Canadian Gardening magazine; Wanda Nowakowska, then Associate Editorial Director at Toronto’s Madison Press; Penny Arthurs, garden designer and writer; and me. It was a rainy, stormy weekend but it didn’t matter at all; we cooked together, we drank wine, we sang songs from the 60s, we swam (well, Penny did) and we talked and talked and talked.

Penny was a woman of many talents. She designed gardens – classically beautiful, often formal gardens with the kind of lasting structure she believed every landscape needed. A 2012 article surveying top local designers in the Toronto Botanical Garden’s Trellis newsletter noted: “Many of her colleagues echoed the statement of Penny Arthurs (The Chelsea Gardener & Associates) that ‘good bones – quality paving, walls, fences, underpin plantings and endure through one’s worst gardening disasters’.”  Her friends knew her client list spanned the wealthy and politically powerful, but Penny never named names. She only wanted to give them beautiful gardens.  Speaking of “good bones” and the Trellis, the first time I saw Penny’s name in print was the 1992 cover, below, advertising her lecture on “The Garden in Winter”.  

She wrote regular design features for both of Canada’s main gardening magazines back then, including this Spring 1996 article in Gardening Life   ….

…. and Canadian Gardening, where the article below appeared. Liz Primeau has two memories of their relationship at the magazine when she was editor. “She’d used the phrase ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ in one of the design columns she wrote and I had changed it to ‘eat your cake and have it too,’ which seems far more logical and the right way to use the phrase. Penny phoned to ask why. A lively discussion ensued (Google it – we didn’t have that luxury then), and she let me have it my way. She won the other skirmish. She’d used ‘a myriad of…’ to describe something gardeny, and I edited it to’myriad’, having been corrected in my youth that the correct use of the word was as an adjective, not a noun.   We consulted various dictionaries and a thesaurus and I had to concede the word could be used either way.”

Penny and I saw each other periodically in the 1990s at the Toronto Botanical Garden (then called The Civic Garden Centre), particularly at the weekend-long Great Gardening Conferences held biennially between 1985 and 1997. In fact, we were both on the planning committee for the seventh and last one titled ‘Connectedness from the Ground Up’ at which she was also Master of Ceremony. I photographed her own garden that autumn, a lovely, leafy sanctuary, below, that expressed many of the design principles she had honed in a career that took root in The English Gardening School at London’s Chelsea Physic Garden (thus her company name), was polished at the School of Landscape Architecture at Ryerson University, and practised over the decades in her design studio at home.

But it was with the Canadian Gardening book series published that same year that our friendship and that of Wanda Nowakowska and Liz Primeau, blossomed.  My title was Water in the Garden; Penny’s was Small Space Gardens, below, and it was filled with her design wisdom.

Penny floated effortlessly between the rarified world of landscape design and the quaint world of garden writing. In 2009, she beamed at a party with (from left), former Globe & Mail gardening columnist Marjorie Harris, garden writer Stephen Westcott-Gratton, former Toronto Star gardening columnist Sonia Day, Penny, landscape architect Martin Wade and me. Behind, left to right, were garden writer Lorraine Hunter, designer Sara Katz and horticulturist Paul Zammit.

In 2011, I hosted some of my garden-writing cohorts for a June weekend at the cottage. Though I made Penny pose for a portrait, as I did with all my friends …..

….. she was much happier at my barbecue, below. And what a great cook she was!  Liz Primeau recalls Penny’s offering that day: “How I remember her barbecued beef filet rolled in coriander seeds and served with roasted beets and homemade horseradish crème fraiche.”

Aldona Satterthwaite, former editor of Canadian Gardening magazine and former Executive Director of the Toronto Botanical Garden, was there that Muskoka weekend, too. She and Penny, below, had known each other for more than two decades. As she recalls: “She was one of the rare people in my life with whom I felt an immediate connection, as though I’d known her forever. In the 1980s, we both studied landscape architecture at Ryerson—she was a class or two ahead of me and wildly talented (I realized early on that as a landscape designer, I was a decent writer). We both attended a multi-day workshop given by John Brookes at the TBG. And yet, I believe I knew her professional work as the Chelsea Gardener— elegant, well proportioned, unfussy—before I really got to know her.  Over time, as our paths continued to cross, we discovered that we had a great deal in common–including living in swinging London in the 1960s and being born in the same month of the same year–and became good friends. Penny was witty, warm-hearted, irreverent, pragmatic, smart as hell, fiercely stylish, and great fun.” 

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Marjorie Harris, below, was there that June weekend on Lake Muskoka.  She remembers Penny as “a wonderful garden designer who was inspiring to me when I was first starting out as a garden writer in the 1980s.  We used to go together to every garden tour we could find in the city and analyze them to a fare-thee-well.  She showed me that you can love garden design deeply and still be critical of it.  She had a sharp tongue and a wit to go with it.  I have missed her rare and fascinating temperament in recent years and probably always will.  She was unique.” 

Besides her close family and her garden friends, Penny was part of many social circles (dance, theatre and her husband Harry Arthurs’ career in academe, especially his tenure in the 80s and 90s as president of York University), but she always made us feel that she was our close ‘girlfriend’. When the WWWG got together for our annual dinner, we shared the latest about our own families; our children and their doings; later on, their partners and spouses; and finally, grandchildren, of whom Penny was always so proud, digging out her cell phone to show us the latest pictures.  This was us, below, in 2015 at the bistro at the Art Gallery of Ontario then called FRANK, after the architect Frank Gehry who designed the AGO’s extension. Wanda had spent eight years at the AGO, six of them editing the magazine Art Matters, and the bistro staff knew her well. It became our regular place to meet. If conversation lapsed, which it rarely did, I’d ask Penny to share again the story of how she was set up with the bachelor Canadian law professor Harry Arthurs all those years ago in England. “Oh Gawd!” she’d answer in her wonderful dulcet tones, rolling her eyes. Then she’d proceed to captivate us all once again with that romantic tale.

In September 2018, the WWWG convened to celebrate the opening of my autumn-themed photography show on Harbord Street.

As the years went on, we decided we needed to meet more than once a year, so we set up a spring lunch too. On June 6, 2019, it was Liz’s turn and we arrived in her beautiful garden to find bees buzzing on the alliums and cornflowers.

Nourished by a delicious lunch and conversation about spring plants and gardens, we posed for a happy group selfie, below. It was another visit long before that Liz recalled recently: “We were strolling through my intensely planted but rather muddled back garden and Penny gestured toward a sprawling bed of pink and purple bee balm, coneflower and blazing star left over from my try at a prairie garden. ‘That bed is working nicely, isn’t it?’ said Penny, and I glowed inside. Penny wasn’t one to lavish praise, and a word of it was precious.”

 One of the advantages of archiving emails for two decades (okay, not throwing out emails) is that I can track our back-and-forth through decades of restaurant get-togethers, theatre plays and garden events. But it was Penny’s email of August 21, 2019 that shook our little group to the core, the one with the subject line “Penny’s Not So Great News”. In it she shared that she had been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, relating the strange way it had been discovered, which seemed almost as noteworthy to her as the grim diagnosis. We were devastated.  Over the next five months as she underwent chemo and radiation, we showered poor Harry with emails, sending our wishes to Penny and asking to see her.  He was gracious in his responses; along with Aldona, we were christened Penny’s ‘Sisters of the Soil’.

Fortune smiled on us one last time on February 5th, when we toasted our dear Penny with glasses of prosecco in our favourite bistro. She was sanguine about the cards that fate had cruelly dealt. “I’ve had a good life. I have no regrets.”  In retrospect, we felt so lucky to have had this last evening with our dear friend, given the way the entire world changed just weeks later. And we mused that perhaps that sense of feeling ourselves so much a part of nature’s cycles – as gardeners, as true sisters of the soil – gave us a more balanced view of our own place on the planet. 

Liz Primeau summed up Penny and their 30-year relationship perfectly. “Penny was a class act: fair, level-headed and down-to-earth; she was stylish, too. Her clothes and the way she put them together were unique. I never saw her in anything but sensible shoes, but she made them look like they belonged on a runway in Paris. Her house might have been featured in a Homes magazine. Penny, for (a) myriad (of) reasons we shall never forget you.”

Wanda Nowakowska said: “I’ve walked the streets and parks and ravines of the city for many years now, always with a quiet nod of thanks to Penny for teaching me to notice the “architecture” of nature — the shape of trees, even in winter; the play of light, shadow and colour in plantings; the texture of stone in walls and fountains.  She’ll be with me, in spirit and in gratitude, for many walks to come.”

As for me, I think of one line in Penny’s beautiful obituary, following her death on August 28th. “Born in Sheffield, and herself an only child without so much as a single cousin, Penny built her own family in Canada.”   I like to think we were her family, too…. her Wonderful Women Who Garden, her Sisters of the Soil. We will miss you so, dear Penny.

******

If you would like to leave your own memory of Penny Arthurs, please feel free to do so in the comments section.

In Katerina Georgi’s Garden

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When I went ‘botanizing’ in Greece this autumn with the North American Rock Garden Society and guide Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis), I was delighted to be invited into a garden that evokes both the local agricultural vernacular and a romantic, rugged sense of place.  Surrounded by olive-studded hillsides with the long-spined Mount Taygetus at its back and the sparkling Messenian Gulf at its feet, it represents that hard-to-achieve marriage of clean lines and pure poetry. Let’s walk down the narrow lane towards designer Katerina Georgi’s place in the Aghia Sophia area near Kardamyli.

Her home is surrounded by drystone walls which, in the Peloponnese, are a pervasive part of the landscape, defining ancient wheat terraces and stepped olive groves and marking age-old perimeters of family properties. There is just so much rock here and no need for mortar in constructing these walls, a technique called “en xiro”. Natal plum (Carissa macrocarpa) and jasmine soften the edges and perfume the air.

Come closer and you see that the drystone walls create the perfect enclosure for a raised gravel parking pad and a sexy little red car.  Even here, you can see that the property – at 200 metres (656 feet) above sea level – is a series of elevation changes following the hillside from the mountain down to the seashore.

Let’s go through the lovely tile-roofed gate that frames the stepping-stone axis leading to the stone stairs of the house. The gate’s teal-blue wash is in keeping with much of the quiet blue-purple-gray-green palette in this garden, which depends more on foliage and form than flowers and colour. Nevertheless, reflecting the blues of the Ionian sea nearby, I found….

….. Ceratostigma plumbaginoides and Plumbago capensis in flower this early November day. (And when we meet her, it’s easy to see she does love blue.)

I’m quite sure most of us would take pains to line up each rectangular paver perfectly to match the next one – but how much more interesting a journey when they’re staggered ever so gently! We’ll go up the stairs to the terrace in a moment, but let’s meet Katerina Georgi first.

Born in London, she trained and worked as an interior designer for various practices before setting up her own consultancy there. After studying and working with the renowned John Brookes (1933-2018), she expanded into garden design. Since moving to Greece 26 years ago, her focus has been on the design and renovation of old, stone houses like her own and the creation of drought-tolerant Mediterranean gardens. Not surprisingly, she has played an active role in the Peloponnese Branch of the Mediterranean Garden Society here, along with her friend and our guide Liberto.

Let’s listen to him introduce Katerina and find out more from her about the garden.

As Katerina said, when she bought this house in 2009 it had no running water, sanitation or electricity. Its previous owner was a single man who lived a Spartan, solitary life: keeping goats, gathering water from a spring below the house, cooking his meals in an open fireplace and often carrying a shotgun (which did not endear him to the community). The good news? The goats had left a valuable supply of well-rotted manure which Katerina laboriously relocated to keep it from being contaminated during the building process. When I visit the guest room – the former goat shed – to have a glass of water, I am surprised to find his photo in a wall niche. Says Katerina: “I like the idea of continuity, so his photo is a link with the history of the house.”

Katerina began renovation work in the spring of 2010, excavating out the lower level of the house and using the sandstone spoil as the base for planting beds nearby and as a granular additive to poured cement to bring the paving colour and consistency closer to the stone house. You can see this treatment in the pavers of the raised terrace on the right as you enter the garden, with its small fig tree, a splash of bougainvillea……

….. and potato bush (Solanum rantonnetii).

There are carefully-chosen plants everywhere, including these grasses softening the house wall.

To the left of the gate as you enter, down a few steps and hidden behind a bower of rosemary buzzing with honey bees…..

…… and myrtle-leaved milkwort or September bush (Polygala myrtifolia)……

…… is a sheltered sitting area under a pergola with comfy teak furniture – and those stunning rock walls. Serenity is clearly the mood here.  For me, the various seating areas – and there are quite a few in this garden – bring to mind Katerina’s mentor John Brookes, who himself espoused the philosophy of California landscape architect Thomas Church. “Gardens are for people.”   This garden is most definitely for people, and the plants play a useful but secondary role.

It’s difficult to decide whether to climb up the house steps or head down into the garden but let’s go upstairs to the terrace around the house and get our bearings. Here we look back at the gate and driveway.  I love the lushness just a few containers bring to a setting like this.

Now look south. Though I can’t make out details, I can tell you that there are a lot of olive trees on that hillside, for Kardamyli is very close to Kalamata – and if it weren’t for this region, Greek salads the world over would be very sad indeed.

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Let’s walk along the terrace to the dining table. Here’s the view down the hill out over the little church of Aghia Sophia west to the sea. The church gives its name to this small village.

Summer temperatures here on the Mani Peninsula are hot so plants in pots need to be especially tough. These lovely succulents fit that bill. Gutters direct rainwater from the roof into an underground cistern; in hot periods, that water can be pumped into needy areas of the garden.

Looking down towards the garden, below, and what Katerina calls a “series of amphiteatrical steps” leading to a naturally-filtered swimming pool, we see Mediterranean plants she has selected for year-round interest and their ability to survive drought. The soil for the planting beds came largely from the level below near the old olive and fig trees. And we see how the various garden and sitting areas are informed by grid, another John Brookes tenet. As Robin Lane Fox wrote in his column eulogizing Brookes:  “His drawings applied a simple ‘grid system’ to each site, basing it on proportions he found in the house or the main rooms inside. He insisted that this grid unified a garden and helped its designs to flow.”

Going down the stairs, we see another criterion Katerina looks for in plants, “…growth habit – specifically the plants’ ability to spread and soften the edges of the hard landscaping.”

To give cohesion and continuity to the design, she repeats key plants like lavender, teucrium, santolina and rosemary. Terracotta accents repeat as well.

A ‘Grassy Lassie’ aloe picks up the orange tones nicely.

Past the last cloud of blue plumbago, we’re almost down to the pool level.

I adore the hardscape treatments and the careful consideration of colour and the size of the aggregate between the pavers. They add so much to the landscape here.

Now we come to the enticing swimming pool, surrounded by figs and olive trees with the evocative Mani landscape in the background. Though it looks like a conventional pool, there is no chlorine treatment here. As Katerina says:  “The pool is filtered by a skimmer (complete with its own lizard ladder), a sand filter, which fixes the phosphates, and another bio-filter which traps particles in a series of mats.” Katerina believes this system is the first of its kind in Greece.

Just another perfect detail.

The lowest terrace hews closest to the property’s origins with an old stone aloni or grain-threshing floor as the centrepiece. Says Katerina: “Clearly many years had passed since it had been used to thresh wheat and, over time, a layer of soil containing assorted bulbs had built up, so that the rock was barely visible. This excess soil was stripped off to reveal the rock, and the bulbs replanted. Thyme is gradually being introduced and this will eventually spread and fill the fissures in the bedrock.”  Planting in the low part of the garden was begun in the autumn of 2014. The intention is to keep it looking natural so it blends with the landscape beyond and allows easy access for olive picking.

Viewed from the lower level, we see the aloni’s round contour mirrored in a new, curved, stone retaining wall, with new steps….

….. built on either side to connect the two levels.

And back towards the house, another perfect little seating area.

There are abundant wildflowers in spring on the lower level. When they’re in bloom, she cuts a path through them to allow circulation until they die down and the entire area can be cut back with a string-trimmer. Now, in November, cyclamen is in flower. I ask Katerina if she uses the fruit of the cactus pear tree or “fragosyka” (Opuntia ficus-indica) which we’ve seen growing wild troughout the Mani. “I don’t use the prickly pears,” she says “as I find the flavour very bland, and not worth effort of cleaning them, but one of the locals sometimes comes and picks them”. A final look around the old part of the garden with its rustic gate opening…

… and we head up the stairs. I spy a rough plank bench in a niche with French lavender nestled against it, and I think how lovely it would be to sit there on a summer’s day as the warmth of the Mani sun traps the fragrance. And I note the perfect cascading burro’s tail (Sedum morganianum) and the allium seedheads at a door, a memory from another season in a beautiful Greek garden that honours memory and celebrates place.

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.

We Sail to Wellington

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In my last few blogs on our 2018 American Horticultural Society tour of the beautiful designed landscapes and natural areas of New Zealand, I wrote about the gardens of the Marlborough region on the South Island.  With just a few days left on the tour, we were ready to sail back to the North Island where we had begun more than two weeks earlier. As we waited for the Interislander Ferry to load, we wandered around and window-shopped in the small, picturesque town of Picton. You can see the previous ferry heading out into the Marlborough Sounds.

On board, we sailed out through the tops of green hills which form the fingers of land and islands that are the Marlborough Sounds.  If you read my blog on our spectacular overnight stay in Doubtful Sound at the southeast tip of the South Island, you’ll see the difference between these hillsides, which are often cloaked in invasive conifers referred to as ‘wilding pines’, and those on Doubtful Sound, which were cloaked in a variety of native tree ferns and evergreen trees and shrubs.

The Marlborough Sounds are known in geology as drowned river valleys. Eighty-five million years ago, New Zealand broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana, which also included Africa, India, South America, Antarctica and Australia.  This drifting body of land about the size of half of Australia, called Zealandia, subsided almost entirely into the Pacific Ocean. Thirty-five million years ago, Zealandia was less than one-third the size of modern New Zealand and occurred as an archipelago of islands, then was uplifted by volcanic activity at the junction of the Pacific and Australian plates.  These collisions raised up the hills on the east side of the north island and the mountainous backbone of most of the south island, i.e. the Southern Alps including Mount Cook, which we had hiked under four days prior.  New Zealand’s oldest rocks, from Gondwana, are sedimentary in nature and dated at 510-360 million years old. Its Greenland Group rocks are similar to those found in eastern Australia and Antarctica.

Looking down from space over the Space Shuttle Challenger you can see the Marlborough Sounds and the cloud-shrouded Cook Strait, on the shores of which lay the wonderful Paripuma garden we’d visited hours earlier.  Cook Strait connects the Tasman Sea on the east in the upper left and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Our route this afternoon and early evening would take us down Queen Charlotte Sound and into Cook Strait…..

…..then into the protected harbour at the bottom of the North Island where the city of Wellington lies.

We passed a variety of holiday houses clinging to the slopes of Queen Charlotte Sound…..

…… and of course all the wilding pines.  I wrote about New Zealand’s effort to eradicate these trees in my earlier blog on Queenstown.

Courtesy of our knowledgeable, New Zealand-born tour host Richard Lyons, I enjoyed a Speight’s beer as the ferry sailed down the sound.  The wind was constant and in places buffeted so much that others went inside, but I decided it was too beautiful to leave.

I used my zoom lens to check out details on the shore of Queen Charlotte Sound, like these mussel lines.

The Picton-bound Interislander passed us on starboard.

As we passed Arapawa Island on our left, I could make out tiny sheep on the hills. In fact, Arapawa has a specific breed of sheep. Island ecology!

As Cook Strait came into view, the wind became relentless.

I photographed some of my tour pals being blown about as they compared images. Though Cook Strait is renowned for its rough waters…..

…… it was not terribly rough on this day, and before long we were sailing towards the sunset over the North Island.

Finally, the lights of Wellington came into view.

Not long after docking, we were comfortably ensconced in the Copthorne Hotel Oriental Bay, looking out over the boats moored in the harbour.

The next morning, the view across the bay was much brighter……

…. and we headed out for our Wellington tour. Our first stop was Government House, the home of New Zealand’s Governor-General.  Because of the nature of our tour, we were taken around the gardens, which have been named one of the Gardens of National Significance.

In 1990, they redesigned the grounds to focus on native plants like New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) and fierce lancewood (Pseudopanax ferox) with their Dr. Seuss-like shapes.

Borders featured native grasses like toetoe (Cortaderia richardsonii) mixed with ornamentals such as hydrangea….

….. and a reflecting pool created a beautiful focal point.

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At the rear was a vast lawn for use in official ceremonies. It had a colourful border where…..

…. monarch butterflies were foraging on single dahlias.  (New Zealand’s monarch butterfly population does not migrate.)

We walked down the hillside behind Government House where a magnificent collection of colourful conifers was arrayed like a tapestry.

Our tour continued inside the building where we heard the history of the British colonial role in New Zealand, which is an independent constitutional monarchy.

I loved these official dining chairs, which featured the crests – and often the plants – of the country’s various regions.

Then it was time to head to lunch at an appropriately-named restaurant on Lyall Bay.

Afterwards, I walked across the road to get a closer look at the brand-new Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club, which replaced the old 1950s club.

Then we were dropped off at the stunning Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand on the edge of Lambton Harbour, fairly close to our hotel.

Our first stop was a tour of the native garden behind the museum, where various nature programs occur.

I could have spent a long time photographing in this garden, but……

…… there was so much to see inside the museum!

I loved the ecology displays, naturally.

And I could have used this display in a lot of places in the previous few weeks.

If you read my post called Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora, you might remember the magnificent protected Kauri forest we visited. This is a piece of fossilized kauri gum (Agathis australis) with a trapped insect.

When we left to head back to our hotel, we walked between the museum and the harbour where there was a very cool native landscape…..

…. that was designed by the firm Boffa Miskell.

After walking along the ocean for a while, we came to a pretty view of Oriental Bay and our hotel at the base of the hill. At the top is St. Gerard’s Church and Monastery.

We finally arrived back at our hotel. On our last day, we’d have time to walk down Oriental Parade, the road flanking the bay. The beach here is extremely popular with fit, active Wellingtonians, including these participants in a swim race.

Putting our feet up at the hotel, we sampled a glass of the wine from the renowned vineyard that Doug did not get to visit in Marlborough…..

….. then headed out to Whitebait Restaurant on the pier across the road. It was exquisite.  This was just one dish: smoked Mount Cook alpine salmon cured in sauvignon blanc, dill and oyster cream with dilled carrots.

Then it was time to head to bed. Tomorrow we had three gardens to visit in Wellington!

*******

I will complete the last few entries in my NZ trip journal as soon as I return from Chile and Argentina in late March. Ciao!