America’s most romantic garden

Chanticleer Garden all about the smallest details

Chanticleer Garden, dubbed a pleasure garden, is also known as the most romantic garden in America.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to make bi-annual pilgrimages to the town of Wayne, Pa., (near Philadelphia) to attend photography workshops and just soak up the beauty of this spectacular garden. (www.chanticleergarden.org)

You might think that a garden like Chanticleer is too grand to teach home gardeners, but the opposite is true.

Chanticleer serves as a living textbook filled with ideas we can apply to our home gardens: How to make the most of shade by combining plants with handsome foliage, how to artfully grow vegetables, how to plant a gorgeous planter, how to landscape around a pond, how to grow beautiful cut flowers and even how to espalier many kinds of trees.

The list of lessons is only limited by our power of observation and how open we are to new ideas. The gardeners at Chanticleer are dedicated to detail.

Garden elements are well planned and professionally executed — including with its bamboo railings in the Asian garden, twig-covered urns on the main terrace and floral arrangements in the restrooms.

It’s the little details that make it such a pleasure to explore this garden with camera in hand.

Please sit back and enjoy this week’s armchair tour of Chanticleer Garden, you may just pick up a few ideas that will work in your home garden.

THERESA FORTE SPECIAL TO THE ST. CATHARINES STANDARD Stone walls and succulent-lined shelf of the Ruin Garden are reflected in the dark mirror-like water table. Note the espaliered Acer davidii with the pale bark trained on the wall behind the water table. The hardscaping is softened with lush ferns,...

Neatly tucked in the back of the garden at the end of a bamboo-lined walkway, the Asian Woods Restrooms take their design cue from a Japanese teahouse with strong roof lines, screen-like walls, opaque windows edged in natural wood and bamboo fencing....

Foliage plants with interesting texture, form and colour are the key to gardening in the shade. The Ruin Garden offers an exotic looking blend of ferns and other shade tolerant plants.

A human-like form seems to lumber across a gentle meadow of prairie dropseed grass (Sporobolus heterolepsis) below the Ruin Garden. Norway spruce (Picea abies ‘Pendula’) has been trained to resemble a tall, mystical figure. The grass is maintained with...

An early morning visit finds Chanticleer’s Garden dressed in a veil of dreamy mist. Naysayers might object to the dampness, but this is my favourite time (and weather) to visit this romantic garden. The generous central path offers a walk 36.5 metres...