Chanticleer Garden and its persisting, pleasure in bloom
A decade ago, I started work on a book about Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and with photographer Rob Cardillo produced what I hoped would be not just another fleeting coffee table book but an ode to one of America’s horticultural gems.
What makes Chanticleer so special is the underlying ethos established, among others, by its first director, Chris Woods, who held that the primary purpose of a garden is to give us pleasure. This is not as simple or obvious an idea as it might seem, because pleasure must be crafted and staged. This is achieved not just with flowers, but with leaf colors, patterns and textures within artful compositions. On a larger canvas, the plant artist plays with spaces to create moods, from the exuberance of a summer cutting garden, full of sunflowers, dahlias and rudbeckias, to the cool calm of a ferny woodland. Sometimes the ingenuity lies in knowing what to leave out and when to stop.
In an age when gardens are burdened with so many roles, I thought a return visit to Chanticleer would remind me why this essential horticulture is so instructive and compelling, not to mention pleasurable.
The garden, less than 30 years old, was created around the old estate of a Main Line industrialist, Adolph Rosengarten Jr. (1905-1990), who handed it to a foundation at his death. Great shade trees give the place its sense of age, and provide the sheltering framework for the richly varied gardens cultivated by a team of skilled gardeners, now under executive director Bill Thomas.
Thomas heads a creatively restless team, and not surprisingly, things have not stood still. Among the garden features added over the past decade, the most interesting is an elevated walkway that snakes its way down a hill behind the main house and its garden. It is just a few feet off the ground but high enough to give the sensation that you are floating through plantings that include groves of aspen trees, an unusual sight in the East. Away from the dry brilliance of the Rockies, the whitestemmed aspens drop their leaves early and forsake their fall display, but they are still captivating for their rarity.
Even more interesting perhaps is the garden of perennials and grasses rising from the slope. When I first saw the walkway under construction, I thought this was going to be a place of low ground covers incidental to the experience of moving to lower ground. Instead it is a captivating vertical jungle of perennials rising to greet the wayfarers. One shares the walk with dragonflies and hummingbirds. The fare includes red-flowering crocosmias and lobelias, the tall yellow daisies of silphiums and giant coneflowers, and a pink-flowered beebalm named Monarda bradburiana.
Some things, though, haven’t changed, including a couple of guiding principles in Chanticleer’s plant artistry.
The first is there are no barriers between plant types. Annuals, perennials, hardy and tender shrubs, tropicals, herbs, and more are all thrown into a grab bag. In the border above the swimming pool terrace, the fleshy, wavy leaves of sea kale, a leafy vegetable, function as a foil against a specimen succulent agave and, farther along, the fine textures of an ornamental black-leaved elderberry. It’s odd but highly effective.
In another area named the Kitchen Courtyard, container plantings feature a baby upright birch paired with varieties of marigold. On paper, the combination seems outlandish, absurd even, but here it is, and it looks good.
The marigolds get to the second idea, which is that in haute horticulture, common plants are fine if you use them uncommonly. In water-filled ceramic pots, plucked nasturtium leaves and tiger lilies are presented as floating elements in a way that elevates them both. (Thomas and his team wrote a book in 2015, “The Art of Gardening,” that examines their creative techniques).
In the Tennis Court Garden, with its generous four-square beds, the extraordinary use of ordinary plants continues. The towering, giant-leafed plant is a paulownia tree that has been chopped to the ground or coppiced to produce gigantic heart-shaped juvenile foliage. Once an exotic beauty, the paulownia is now considered a weed. Here, it grows close to an orange-flowering amaranth named Chinese Giant Orange and a brash, almost contorted tropical tree named Cecropia. The weed theme is continued with eruptions of variegated varieties of the towering marsh reed named Arundo donax. In sum, the Tennis Court Garden is beautifully, defiantly vulgar.
I can’t end without mentioning another relatively new feature that is so perverse that it caused me to laugh out loud. This is the former panel of turf close to the main residence, Chanticleer House, which has been fashioned into a “flowery lawn.” At a time when meadows are trendy, either as earnest reproductions of native habitats or as extravagant massings of perennials and grasses, the Chanticleer mead refuses to take itself too seriously. From an appealing matrix of something called no-mow fine fescues, the gardener has positioned sparse plantings of quite ordinary things that are growing up in relative isolation. These include pentas, asclepias and more marigolds. In its naivete, we are liberated from the orthodoxies of contemporary meadow-making.
No one expects to visit Chanticleer to leave transformed into a superstar gardener. If you want, you can learn new plants and inventive ways of using old ones. Or you could just go for the fun and delight. You will still come away sensing that this is what gardening is all about.
Chanticleer Garden, at 786 Church Road in Wayne, about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is open Wednesdays-Sundays until Nov. 4.