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’).

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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

In the Garden with Barbara & Howard Katz

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Janet

Barbara Katz and I became Facebook friends a few years back, drawn to each other by our mutual love of colour combinations in plant design and also our great admiration for Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. In fact, it was on Barbara’s recommendation and with her introduction that Piet was commissioned to design a meadow garden for Delaware Botanic Gardens, being planted this fall. So it was with great anticipation that I made plans to attend the 2017 Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the Washington DC Capitol Region, a 3-day event that included a tour of Barbara & Howard Katz’s Bethesda, Maryland garden. We even decided to have dinner in a Washington restaurant before the tour, meeting face to face for the first time. (Our husbands got along famously too!) And when our bus pulled up on Barbara’s street a few days later, it was easy to see which house was theirs for Barbara and Howard, an architect, were there waiting to welcome us.

But even if they hadn’t been out front, we would have known the house. Their luscious front garden (below) presented a welcome right at the street with a generous bed of summer perennials, carex grasses and succulents arrayed around an old ‘Halka’ honeylocust tree. Barbara, who has 30 years experience in garden design with her company London Lanscapes LLC, said that this bed, installed in mid-April while creating a new flagstone path, gave the front a needed facelift and some interest and pleasure for passersby. It was also a way to reduce the amount of front lawn and provide a buffer against dogs and snow. But most important, as a plantswoman: “I needed MORE space to play with plants.” Not surprisingly for a designer who knows how to use colour, there is a clever and subtle use of red flowers in this garden – the gaillardia at front and the echinacea in the rear – that carries the eye up and back toward the red chairs on the porch, the oxblood-red door, the red window shutters and even the Japanese maple.

Barbara worked the soil in the street garden to make it free-draining. “It gets baked in the afternoon,” she said, “So now I can use plants I hadn’t been able to before” (like the yuccas, below).

I adored the beautiful iron scroll edging – staking out the property line with airy elegance. Barbara found it online at Wayfair

The ‘Blue Boa’ anise hyssop (Agastache hybrid) was attracting lots of bumble bees.

The veranda, below, is everything a good front porch should be: an attractive welcome for visitors, a well-appointed anteroom to the house itself and a place to relax comfortably with a view of the garden and street. Too often we restrict our seating areas to the privacy of a back yard where none of the neighbours can spot us reading a newspaper or sipping a glass of wine. But why? A covered veranda is a sanctuary in the rain and obviously has a completely different outlook on life (and the neighbourhood) than the sitting areas we create out of view. Let’s tote up the good things about Howard’s and Barbara’s version. But first of all, a little background. When Barbara first saw this house, it was as a designer for the owner, who would have her redo the entire garden, including the complex topographical challenge at the back (more on that later). The year was 1995; the garden was installed in 1996. Fast forward six years and the house was for sale and Barbara and Howard bought it, including the garden she’d designed, worked with over the years, and come to love. As for the veranda, it was bigger then, with small wooden posts and railing, and a concrete bases and steps. Howard needed an office, so they took half the veranda and incorporated it into the house; removed the railing; used Azek (a plastic-wood product) to make the posts chunkier; rebuilt the steps to give them generous 18-inch treads with stone risers; then refaced everything with stone veneer. Add some Arts & Crafts lights, pots of easy-care succulents (can we get a cheer for iron plant stands?), a few handsome pieces of sculpture; and comfy chairs and it’s one of the prettiest makeovers ever.

All the succulent containers, by the way, are Howard’s creations. He was born in South Africa where many succulents are native; they add their own textural note to Barbara’s herbaceous side of the ledger.

Wouldn’t you like to fall asleep in one of these Adirondack rockers? And another little colour tip, courtesy of the glazed green pots (as devotees of the artist’s colour wheel know): red and green are complementary contrasts and they always combine nicely with each other. I can only imagine how beautiful this foundation planting must look as the Japanese maples turn colour in autumn!

Let’s head around to the back, passing a little treasure trove of Howard’s succulents as we go.

The back garden is where the challenge lay for Barbara when she first saw it more than two decades ago. With a 12-foot elevation change from the back door up to the property line, it called for creative terracing. In the photo below, (when I got home, I realized I didn’t have a workable shot of the slope and asked Barbara to take a photo, which shows one side), you can see how beautifully the rich tapestry of perennials and low evergreens creates a frame for the cascading water feature.

In my experience, a designer who loves plants and knows how to combine them while also mastering the art of hardscaping is a rare individual. Barbara is skilled at both. Plants with purple, white and orange flowers and leaves are on one side….

…including this butterscotch combination of carex and heuchera with peach echinacea and anise hyssop….

….while blues, yellows, pinks and maroons (below) are on the other side….

…. along with a cool-green pairing of heuchera and euphorbia….

But it’s the stone workmanship on the hillside that really impresses me. Let’s climb up the stairs, which have an excellent tread:riser ratio that makes navigating the slope easy…

We’ll pass some more of Howard’s delectable succulent confections on the way, like this one…

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….and this one….

…. as well as a more traditional container, below.

Halfway up, we’ll stop on the cool little grassed terrace, the only lawn in the back garden, with a sophisticated edging of boxwood and….. .

…shade-tolerant plants above and below the sinuous retaining wall that supports the top terrace. The wall is impressive, and features little plants tucked into the crevices.

Even Howard’s succulent container is green.

Reach the top, enter past the tall plume poppy (Macleaya cordata), and you’re rewarded with a cool rest in the gazebo with its green mosaic-tile-topped table, green mosaic candle-holder and green-cushioned chairs.

The woman knows colour!

I’m not sure how many people would take note of this small detail, but for me it stood out as a superb way of disguising the necessary nuts-and-bolts of slope retention. The concrete block wall between the Katz property and the one behind them has been stained dark green – and presto! it vanishes. Well, except for the sweet little plaque to pretty it up. That airy iron trellis above it is Howard Katz’s effort to keep leaf-munching deer from leaping from the neighbour’s garden into theirs.

There are lovely little touches of art in the garden, like this ‘bluebottle fly’….

And a wire grasshopper, among many other pieces.

But the big focal point in the back garden is the terraced water feature. From the stone patio behind the house, this is what it looks like gazing up the slope.

There are tropical waterlilies in the pool at the bottom, and goldfish.

Climb back up those stairs a little, and you see how it courses down the rocks, mimicking a natural waterfall….

…with a bubbling fountain in the very highest pool, below. Barbara wanted the effect of a series of birdbaths down the slope and it worked perfectly, since the Katz garden is now on the migration route of myriad birds, both spring and fall.

I would have loved to linger a little, perhaps in the comfy seating near the house. Doesn’t the soft kiwi green look gorgeous with the sage green of the wall?

But it was time to get on the bus and head to our next garden. Thank you Barbara and Howard, for your generosity and creativity. You are both inspiring!

Wonderful Wave Hill

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Janet

One of my ‘must-do’ gardens when I have a few days in New York (apart from New York Botanical and the Conservatory Garden at Central Park and the High Line) is fabulous Wave Hill, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. And so it was that in mid-August, I caught the Metro North ‘Hudson Line’ train at Grand Central Station and took my comfy window seat for the scenic ride along the Hudson River. (Excuse the dirty windows, please – not my fault!)

When you get off at Riverdale-Wave Hill, you really should wait for the shuttle, which meets northbound trains at 9:50am, 10:50am, 11:50am, 12:50pm, 1:50pm, 2:50pm and 3:50pm. (Return shuttles for southbound trains leave Wave Hill’s front gate at 20 minutes past the hour, from 12:20pm through 5:20pm). But I was feeling energetic – and had forgotten how steep the hill is and how long the walk from the station up towards the garden, set in a lovely, leafy Bronx neighbourhood. So I walked.

Wave Hill, overlooking the Hudson River and the towering Palisades on the New Jersey shore, was built by lawyer William Morris in 1843 to serve as his country home. It was enlarged by publishing scion William Appleton in the late 1800s, and played host to visiting notables such as Thomas Huxley. Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet in his teens when his parents rented the estate in the summers of 1870 and ’71, and likely helped to foster in him the love of nature that propelled him to protect America’s wild lands as national parks. Perhaps its most famous resident was Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who leased Wave Hill from 1901 to ’03, and entertained guests in a tree house on the back lawn. Later residents included conductor Arturo Toscanini (1942-45). In 1960, Wave Hill’s last private owners, the Perkins-Freeman family, deeded the estate to the city of New York and it was incorporated as a non-profit, one of 33 city-owned cultural institutions and specializing in programs of horticulture, environmental education, woodland management and presentations of the visual and performing arts. while seeking to “foster connections between people and nature”. (Sources: Wikipedia & Wave Hill) Wave Hill House underwent a two-year $9.8 million renovation and was reopened in 2013. When I visited the following June, I was impressed with the gleaming woodwork – not to mention the stunning bouquet of delphiniums in just the right shade of blue to enhance the walls.

As I headed into the garden this August, I was greeted by some lovely new touches to the Perennial Flower Garden, which I had last seen in 2014, including the beautiful, sky-blue tuteurs in each of the central four sections.

The flower garden, overseen by gardener Harneck Singh, consists of eight plots arranged in cruciform quadrants, each loosely colour-themed. And there’s always something big and beautiful from the greenhouses in the centre; this summer it was a luscious, variegated agave.

Those blue tuteurs add to the elegance quotient in the flower garden. Here’s how it looked in June 2014. below. Not nearly as dramatic.

There were a lot of silver-spotted skippers flying about, including this one on Clematis heracleifolia.

I enjoyed seeing Clematis crispa climbing the rose bower in the flower garden.

Speaking of rose bowers, I fondly recalled making former director of horticulture Marco Polo Stufano pose for me in one of the bowers, when I was there in 1994. Though it was terribly sunny and not great light for a portrait (especially with my limited photography skills more than 20 years ago), I do enjoy having this reminder of a very talented man who lent his expertise to the garden. Today, Louis Bauer is horticulture director and is putting his own creative mark on Wave Hill’s gardens.

My 1994 visit was seven years after Marco Polo Stufano was featured on the cover of the November 1987 issue of Horticulture magazine. (Photo by Allen Rokach) And yes, I am a packrat, and I really should clean out the mags in my office!

The story inside the magazine was about the flower garden, as redesigned by then curator of gardens John Nally. His name is now memorialized in Wave Hill’s practice of hiring interns – called Nallies – to work in the garden. I had a little chat with one of Wave Hill’s 2016 Nallies, Gabe Santoriello, who was carefully deadheading flowers in the red garden. He made me chuckle when I called out ‘Gabe’, to ask him about a plant. “You know, I had my earphones in,” he said, “but you sounded just like my mom when you called me.” (I’ve had some family experience calling out to young men!)

Being late summer, grasses were good-looking, like this Calamagrostis acutiflora with Helenium autumnale.

I loved the duo below in the red garden, when I visited in June 2014: ‘Heart Attack’ sweet william (Dianthus barbatus) and the airy seedheads of Allum schubertii. Isn’t this cool?

Walking into the entrance to the tropical and desert greenhouses, I saw that Marco Polo Stufano has also been honoured with his name on the conservatory, a gift of Frank and Anne Cabot, who also founded The Garden Conservancy. .

Lovers of tropical plants should be prepared to spend a lot of time exploring the jewels in the tropical house.

What a fascinating plant: Strophanthus preussii. I had a discussion with plant nerd friends on Facebook about the evolutionary significance of the long, red corolla threads. We couldn’t come to an agreement about why nature gave this African liana such decorative accents (but nature rarely creates adaptations for the fun of it).

I loved seeing this little arrangement of air plants (Tilliandsia ionantha).

This is what greeted me in the tropical house in June 2014: can you say Indian clock vine (Thunbergia mysorensis)?

Crossing into the desert house, I paused to take in the stunning variety of small succulents and cacti.

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Walking back into the garden through the blue conservatory doors (matching those tuteurs), I was reminded how effective a little paint is at drawing landscape elements together – and how complex the textural plantings in those containers just outside the doors were!

I never visit Wave Hill without heading down to the long pergola overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades on the New Jersey shore. Apart from the stunning view, there are loads of wonderful plants displayed there!

Another section of the pergola.

And lookng towards Wave Hill House along the pergola.

That cascading, yellow-flowered vine intrigued me, but I had no idea what it was. So I cornered Wave Hill gardener Coralie Thomas who carefully dug out the label to show me: Petraeovitex bambusetorum, or Nong Noch vine, a Vietnam native. Thank you Coralie!

Then it was time to move on to some of the other wonderful gardens, but I stopped to take a quick shot of the happy confection of flowers (gomphrena ‘Fireworks’ & yellow strawflower) in the Paisley Garden across from the Visitor Centre.

Immediately behind the conservatory on a rise of land are two long gardens. The first is the Herb Garden…

…. with its late summer profusion of aromatic herbs.

The second is the Dry Garden.

There are always interesting surprises dotted about here and there, like this Boophane disticha on the steps. .

Behind these is a lovely display of bonsai plants.

Beyond is the Alpine House, which is not open to the public but easily observed through the glass.

Head back out to the path and circle around behind the Alpine House and you’ll come to the Wild Garden.

This is a tough theme to pull off without attracting loads of weeds, but the August display was beautiful – naturalistic, yet reasonably controlled.

I liked the contrast of the staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) with the bronze colour of the upright spurge (Euphorbia stricta).

One of my favourite spots to spend a little time sitting is the Aquatic Garden. I loved how it had filled out from June….

….to August, when the big lotuses (Nelumbo nucifera) are at their sumptuous best.

Adjacent is the Monocot Garden, with its luscious grasses, lilies and bromeliads, among many other plants.

With a date on Manhattan’s High Line in late afternoon, it was time for me to pick up a lunch at Wave Hill’s lovely restaurant and make my way to the shuttle for the drive to the Riverdale train station. As I looked around at all the spectacular but residential-scale gardens here (there are others besides those I’ve written about), I thought of a sentence from that Horticulture magazine story 29 years ago, Though it described the redesign of the Perennial Flower Garden, it could be applied to all the gardens at Wave Hill: “…its style would be in keeping with Wave Hill’s history as a private estate.” Indeed, this garden is sheer inspiration for those who create modest gardens around their own homes. It is truly a garden for people. But as I walked down the path beside a scrambling maypop vine (Passiflora incarnata) and watched the carpenter bees and honey bees nectaring madly on the August blossoms, I was reminded that it’s also a garden that nourishes and sustains nature’s myriad other creatures.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: water garden

Festival Theatre Garden – Stratford

Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

In the Garden with Barbara & Howard Katz

Wonderful Wave Hill

Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Landscape Trades magazine

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