Into the May Woods Once Again

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Janet

On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom. This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat. What a lifesaver that was!

As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.

Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.

Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.

I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.

Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).

Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..

…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).

I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!

Here’s a close-up look at the violet.

In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.

There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?

It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.

Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.

I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.

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The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….

….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.

In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.

Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.

I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.

And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).

The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.

There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.

Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south. Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat! Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew! Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.) The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.

When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.

Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..

….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!

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If you want to read about my meadow gardens in Muskoka, have a look at this blog from 2017, Muskoka Wild – Gardening in Cottage Country.

Into the May Woods on Lake Muskoka

Posted on May 16, 2021 by Janet

What a beautiful weekend I enjoyed recently. Not only was it Mother’s Day and I had my first-born, ‘two-days-before-Mother’s Day’ son nearby, but we enjoyed a walk up the dirt road behind neighbouring cottages on Lake Muskoka near Torrance, a few hours north of Toronto, and found a treasure trove of native spring wildflowers on both the lake side and the crown land side. The photo below is of the road from another May. This year, the sustained, cool weather meant leaves were just breaking on the trees and best of all the blackflies had not yet emerged!

Ecologically, the address of the dirt road near Bala marked with the red arrow, below, is (broadest to narrowest classification) Ontario Shield Ecozone, Georgian Bay Ecoregion 5E, Huntsville Ecodistrict 5E8. According to the provincial classification: “The Huntsville Ecodistrict is an undulating to rolling landscape underlain by Precambrian bedrock. The terrain, particularly in the west, has been heavily influenced by glacial Lake Algonquin that inundated the area about 11,000 years ago. As the land emerged from underneath the ice, morainal material was deposited. The area was then submerged under the glacial lake, which removed or reworked much of the material through wave action and fluctuating lake levels. The western portion of the ecodistrict is characterized by a mosaic of bedrock ridges with a discontinuous, shallow layer of morainal material, bare bedrock, and pockets of deeper glaciolacustrine sediment.” Most of our district is covered by deciduous and mixed forest, including northern red oak, red maple (sugar maples predominate in the east part of the ecodistrict), yellow birch, paper birch, American beech, basswood, eastern hophornbeam, eastern hemlock and eastern white pine.

Though we’ve had our cottage for two decades, it was precisely the right moment to enjoy a bounty of spring wildflowers I’d never seen flowering all together, most of them dependent on the dappled light under deciduous trees before the leaves emerge to cast heavier shade. Plants like round-lobed hepatica, Anemone americana, both the white and purple forms.

Many gardeners think they need to do a clean-up in autumn or spring, removing every leaf to expose bare soil; indeed, I heard a leaf-blower droning away on a cottage property nearby. But nature is under no such misapprehension; the spring understory here on Lake Muskoka is thick with successive years of red oak and beech leaves, all contributing to the health of the soil and the richness of the forest. Hepatica has no trouble emerging through them, pushing fresh new leaves and fuzzy flower stems up through last year’s bronzed foliage which then withers away.

Like many plants, DNA sequencing has resulted in hepaticas undergoing a scientific name change. They’re now placed in the Anemone genus.

Carolina springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana) was showing its mauve-striped face here and there too, the flowers so tiny they’re easy to overlook. It grows from a corm and is one of our spring ephemerals, plants that disappear and become dormant by summer.

I was struck by the proximity of the spring beauty and the decomposing stump bedecked by turkey tail fungus (Trametes versicolor)…..

….and another fungi-rich stump flanked by masses of red maple seedlings (Acer rubrum). The coming and the going, the cycle of decomposition and renewal in this mixed forest.

Birches (Betula spp.) are not long-lived compared to other deciduous trees, usually around 50-70 years in our northern climate. Sometimes decomposition begins when they’re still standing, like this trunk with tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) all the way up. It’s called tinder fungus because it can be used to make a fire; in fact the Tyrolean Ice Man Ötzi, whose 5000-year-old corpse was revealed by melting glaciers near Bolzano, Italy in 1991, had a piece on a cord around his neck.

When birches fall, it takes little time before moss spores find them and begin to spread their green tentacles. Before long, the birch becomes part of the forest floor.

Though rare, a lightning strike can also kill a birch. This one would have made a loud crack in one of our summer thunderstorms.

I found this juxtaposition poignant: a young American beech sapling (Fagus grandifolia) growing against the decaying trunk of a beech killed by beech-bark disease, a terrible insect-fungus plague taking a toll on our central Ontario forests, especially those where beeches grow with hemlocks. The vector is a beech-scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga) which, like many killers of our native species (e.g. Dutch elm disease) is an invasive from Europe. It admits a canker fungus called Neonectria faginata.

Groundcedar or fan club-moss, Diphastriastum digitatum is a lycopod, a throwback to the Carboniferous era (360-300 million years ago) when spore-forming plants like these formed forests of giant trees. Their decomposition and burial over millions of years gave the world its coal deposits.

In low-lying areas, we found another spring ephemeral: dogtooth violet or trout lily Erythronium americanum which is not a violet but is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae. The “trout” part is because the mottled leaves resemble brook trout.

Although it looks like the flower has six yellow petals, in fact the reverse view shows the three brownish sepals.

The ecology of dogtooth violet is fascinating. In some parts of these woods, it made up almost the entire ground layer, but only a few plants bore flowers, the rest just had leaves. In fact, Erythronium americanum takes 4-7 years to flower, and researchers have calculated that in any given population only 0.5% will bear flowers.

There’s a little wetland along the road that drains the forest from the west. It’s where spring peepers sing in April and mosquitoes gather when the weather warms.

I went down onto the boggy mosses to get closer to the hummocks of cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) which had just emerged….

….. with their croziers wrapped in gauzy hairs. Cinnamon and royal fern (Osmunda regalis) are the principal wetland ferns here.

In springtime and after heavy summer rains, ground water moves through this wetland, passes under the dirt road in a culvert and wends its way as a creek through our friends’ property before splashing down into Lake Muskoka as a small waterfall. I made the video below to show it.

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We found coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) in flower at the edge of the road.

Native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, coltsfoot was used as a medicinal by early settlers – its name comes from the Latin “tussis” for cough and “ago”, meaning to act upon – and seed has made its way to throughout the region.

Ferns unfurled their croziers from the moss in the low spots.

We noticed that several of the hemlocks and pines along the road had an orange-red flush to their bark, but only on the side exposed to the light. Some research revealed that this is a fairly recent condition called Red Bark Phenomenon or RBP, having been discovered and named about 10 years ago in New England. It is caused by a filamentous green algae (Chlorophyta) tentatively identified as Trentophilia whose cytoplasm contains an orange-red pigment.

Patrick leaned into a little thicket of chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)….

….. not quite in flower. He detected a minty-basil fragrance, though the twigs are occasionally described as having an ‘almond’ aroma.

It was at this point that we left the road and walked towards a rocky outcrop about 30 feet away. Maintaining the overhead hydro line here requires tree and brush cutting that provides a little more light than normal……

……and this area was rich with loads of spring ephemeral Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)….

…. and the occasional common blue violet (Viola sororia).

I loved this exposed bit of rock, typical of the metamorphic banded gneiss on this part of the Canadian Shield, a remnant of the Grenville Orogeny and more than a billion years old. (If you want a lot more amateur geology, have a peek at my recent blog memoir, ‘My Jaded Past, My Rocky Present’).

I spotted an unfamiliar shrub on the lake side of the road and wandered in to check it out. It was American fly honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) with its paired, pendant, pale-yellow flowers.

The shrubs grew on top of the outcrop nearby – not showy, but an integral part of the ecosystem.

Finally, as we got close to the back of the East Bay Landing property, there were trilliums (T. grandiflorum). Not the vast colonies we would see on rises along Highway 38 and 400 later, just a few here and there with lots more getting set to bloom.

It was the perfect way to end our walk into the May woods on Lake Muskoka.

An Illinois Flower Garden

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Janet

One of the joys of participating in the annual symposium of the Garden Writers Association (GWA) is the opportunity to tour local gardens. It’s especially fun to visit private gardens where the owner is clearly a long-time, passionate gardener – and the garden is big enough to accommodate a few busloads of visitors at a time. That was the case in August when we visited Susan Beard’s wonderful 3-1/2 acre garden in Oak Brook, Illinois, in Chicago’s western suburbs. Though the Beards have lived on the property for 37 years, the frame house is one they built in 1996. And the welcome couldn’t have been more flowery!

Flanking the driveway was a sea of blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) – the old-fashioned biennials, not the fancy perennials.

The entrance to the back garden at the end of the driveway was announced by a bench, birdhouse and picket fence…..

…. and a planting of ‘Queen Lime’ and pink zinnias and butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii).

I loved this chartreuse and magenta combination! And this was just the first of scores of birdhouses in Susan’s garden.

Inside the fence, the garden dips steeply to one side via flagstone steps. On the stairs, ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) was deployed as a brilliant edging.

Down below I could see a lime-green Tiger Eye sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) and a bridge over a damp part of the garden.

Here’s a closer look at the bridge.

There is dampness here…..

….. and Susan takes advantage of the moist soil with swamp hibiscus (H. moscheutos) doing its beautiful, late summer thing in shades of white….

….. and cranberry-red.

Back up near the house, zinnias are such cheerful flowers and Susan used them throughout the garden, including here as an edging.

The honey bees approved!

Around the corner flanking the house was another visually stunning edging of Japanese hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’) – another one of Susan’s mainstays. And I liked the way the flagstone pavers are set flush into the soft lawn, rather than forming just another hard surface.

Ahead was Susan’s swimming pool, set on an interesting angle and framed by a stone sitting wall and a split-rail fence with the main garden behind. Long ago, the pool was bright blue, but she had it painted it black so it wouldn’t be an eyesore.

There’s a good patch of lawn here, but the main show is from flowers grown in a lovely, informal, cottage garden style.

The view looking into the back garden was an August tapestry of hydrangeas, summer phlox and blackeyed susans……

……… with the occasional obelisk bearing purple clematis.

This was the swimming pool view towards the house.

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We were welcomed into her kitchen with homemadc cakes and cookies!

But there was still much to see and I returned to the garden. I passed another birdhouse and more waterfall-like hakonechloa. Although flowers create colour throughout the growing season, Susan has included lots of conifers in the borders for bird habitat and visual interest and structure throughout Chicago’s long winter.

A birdbath sits amidst blackeyed susans.

Then it was into the woods: a mature forest containing oak, shagbark hickory, ash and hawthorn……

….. and some lovely pieces of metal sculpture.

Susan has cleared away some of the understory here to create a beautiful shade garden.

There are lots of native ferns and buckeyes…..

…… and piles of firewood left in place (which attract fireflies).

Another lovely fish sculpture graces the forest garden.

When Susan’s six grandchildren were young, they played hide-and-seek on the paths through the forest and gardens. And I’ll bet they loved this garden house.

With so much shade here, hostas are used extensively (300 varieties!), along with native plants like Solomon’s seal.

The compost heaps and nursery plant area even have their own gated section!

New plantings here are carefully mulched…..

…. with the abundant leaves shed each year.

Though the woodland is predominantly green, garden art supplies a little brilliant colour.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, the forest garden owes much to Susan’s late father, a retired U.S. Air Force general from Santa Barbara who needed a project when he visited long ago, so used a chainsaw to begin the process of clearing the edges of the woodland. And it was from her father’s garden that Susan brought back the naked ladies or surprise lilies (Lycoris squamigera) that were just moving past their prime in the photo below.

Soon we were out of the forest and back into the garden via another stone path edged with invaluable hakone grass…..

….. and found our way to the comfy teak tables beside the pool where we relaxed until the call to load up the buses that would take us to the next stop on our tour of Chicago’s beautiful western suburbs.

Ohinetahi – An Architectural Garden Masterpiece

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Janet

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

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

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

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

We walked through the gates and down the drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GARDENS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I walked to the Suspension Bridge over the creek….

…. with its artfully-adorned bridgehouse.

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

…. including lacy tree ferns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

…… including many destroyed by the earthquakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Large-scale modern art commands the hillside……

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peg Bier’s Leafy Virginia Oasis

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Janet

I first met Peg Bier this June at the opening party of our Garden Bloggers’ Fling at Willowsford Farm in Ashburn, Virginia. She looked lovely! It was fun to think we were going to be seeing Peg’s garden a few days later – the Fling write-up called her a “local gardening legend”.

Later in the tour, I spotted her chatting animatedly with another Fling attendee, Gryphon Corpus, soaking up the garden vibes at Meadowlark Botanical Garden in Vienna, VA.

But the best sighting of Peg Bier was in the driveway of her own home in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, where her large, 2.5 acre woodland garden appeared a leafy oasis in a neighbourhood of neat and tidy lawns.

Even in the driveway, there were clues that this was not just the domain of a gardener, but a collector and artist as well.

Peg has lived in this pretty house for 58 years, raising four children with her late architect husband Richard and teaching her twelve grandchildren the fine art of gardening.

As for that “local gardening legend” billing, for 25 years (1990-2015) Peggy had been a television personality on the show Merrifield’s Gardening Advisor produced by Merrifield’s Garden Center, (which we visited on the Fling, below), where she continues to work part-time as a garden specialist. Imagine having this as your plant source…….

…. and this as your outdoor furnishings resource! (I could have spent a lot of $$ here, but contented myself with a sweet purple birdhouse and some windchimes.)

P.S. – A big thank you to Merrifield Garden Centers for hosting the garden bloggers.

Here’s a little taste of Peg on the show, chatting with host Debbie Warhurst Capp about shade plants inspired by her own garden, which she calls a ‘nature preserve’ with its foxes and opossums.

Back to our tour. As we moved into the back garden, I gazed up and saw a canopy of mature oak trees….

….and some tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) as well. Keep in mind that this miniature forest is a literal ‘island of wild’ in a ‘desert of tame’. Residential development swallowed the land surrounding the Bier home, but Peg held on under her big trees.

Immediately behind the house is a roomy deck with a table big enough to seat a lot of family. And I loved the deck boards placed on the diagonal.

And a comfy chaise for reading and relaxing.

If you took some time to watch the video above, you’ll know that Peg has hewn lots of paths out of the shade-dappled understory. This is her favourite path material: crushed ‘red stone” on top of landscape fabric. And look at that textural shade planting!

But it’s not all about the plants. Over the years, Peg has created little sitting areas out of the woodland. This is one I loved, atop a flagstone patio.

Much of her seasonal colour comes courtesy of inspired container combinations. Look at these cobalt-blue accents – and of course, the perfect complementary colour contrast in the orange Bolivian and Rieger begonias!

And I loved this little vignette, with French bistro table and chairs painted aquamarine. What a lovely place to have lunch!

With such a large property to tend, I wonder if Peg ever has time to sit in one of these lovely Adirondack chairs?

Another sitting area featured bricks laid around a mature tree. The understory in the woodland includes natives like redbud (Cercis canadensis), fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) and dogwood (Cornus florida), as well as shrubs and small trees Peg has planted including aucuba, mahonia, camellia, nandina, sweet box (Sarcococca), Japanese maples (many grown by Peg from seed), hydrangea and boxwood everywhere.
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Everywhere there were containers of tropicals mixed with luscious shade plants. And more of those lovely orbs!

And loads of grasses! Variegated Japanese sedge (Carex morrowii ‘Ice Dance’) is a particular favourite of Peg’s.

Speaking of grasses, she loves dwarf mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus), too – and what a spectacular use of it, below.

At the far end of the property, in the sunniest spot, there was a deer-proof enclosed garden filled with sun-loving perennials, vegetables and herbs, all mulched with pine needles.

Tomatoes are grown in containers here.

And there’s even the odd rooster.

I wanted to walk every path, but time was running out! How beautiful is this? Imagine those hellebores in early spring.

I found a bathtub with a spouting frog….

…. and a few fairies. (Peg loves fairy gardens.)

This pretty path was near the front of the property…..

…. where I found concrete stepping stones embossed with the handprints of all Peg’s grandchildren. Isn’t that lovely?

At the very front where the neighbours can see them was a glorious profusion of sun-loving perennials…..

…. as if celebrating colour and fragrance on the edge of this shady forest…..

…..and the grace of bees.

The bus was loading and I made my way along a split-rail fence, sniffing this luscious trumpet lily as I took a last look at Peg’s garden.

But as I was climbing up the bus steps, I heard her cry, “Oh, no. I forgot to show everyone my special garden.” I wondered where that could be, since every part of this big garden had seemed “special” to me. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to run back for two minutes, so I followed her back into the woodland. And there it was, her beautiful little memorial garden to her late husband.

Having spent time with Peg, talking with her and learning a little about her, I thought how special that marriage must have been, and how his presence must still be so strong in this lovely garden where family is cherished above all.

And then it really was time to go.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: woodland

Into the May Woods Once Again

Into the May Woods on Lake Muskoka

An Illinois Flower Garden

Ohinetahi – An Architectural Garden Masterpiece

Peg Bier’s Leafy Virginia Oasis

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