Garden tour offers plenty of ideas to bring home
On a sunny, hot weekend in June, a friend and I drove to the charming town of Hudson in Columbia County, New York. This was to be our home base for two full days of self-guided garden touring as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program. Since 1995, a group of what now numbers almost 200 regional volunteers scout and recruit exceptional private gardens across the United States for public viewing. Many of these gardens are otherwise never open to you and I, so seeing them in this way allows a glimpse into a really extraordinary and, in many cases, exclusive world.
We visited three gardens in and around Hudson and then travelled south to North Salem in Westchester County, where we saw three more. Some were big, some smaller but all were a feast for the eye and soul. After coming home and letting it all germinate, I thought I’d list a few of the lessons to be learned from a garden tour like this.
The view from the Perrin’s courtyard in North Salem is that of a choreographed multi-season meadow, and other gardens on this tour had clearly relaxed their attitude toward fastidiousness. The lesson is to loosen up and think twice before pulling fleabane, wild aster and celadon poppy out of your beds. Leave a habitat for birds, bees and other creatures.
Clip those shrubs that will appreciate it (i.e. boxwood, barberry) but leave others essentially alone. The Keeler Hill Farm garden, like many others, incorporates tightly clipped boxwood, privet hedges as well as large, languorous flowering shrubs.
Consider both colour and contrast in your choices. Make sure those dark plants don’t disappear and allow those bright plants to shine. Margaret Roach painted her clapboard house dark so that fresh greens and golds show up against the walls.
Hide your outdoor workspaces or make them beautiful. You might not have a spectacular glass greenhouse like that of Peter Bevacqua and Stephen King in Claverack, N.Y., or Page Dickey in North Salem, but you can still create vignettes with pots and wheelbarrows or simply camouflage undesirable views (like compost heaps) with plants, hedging or bamboo screening, for example. Make clean up easy but also picturesque. Dickey relies on aptly placed and weather-worn bushel baskets in which to toss pulled weeds. She also puts attractive galvanized watering cans under hose bibs to catch drips so they’re almost always full.
Incorporate pots throughout the garden. Fill them with flowers, shrubs, trees or ground covers to provide all season colour and striking focal points in a garden where visual interest shifts monthly.
Embrace sculpture and archi- tecture in your garden. This is what helps to make it personal. The owners of Hudson Hood, a narrow shotgun garden in the town of the same name, have incorporated unusual sculpture, vintage chairs and thoughtful screens and gates in their uniquely original space.
Think about what material you use for pathways and make them sympathetic to the space. Consider wood chips for meandering woodland strolls and crushed gravel for sunny walks.
Include the calming effect of water — you don’t need a lap pool or a koi pond. Even a pot with water will do like those used by Margaret Roach in her Copake Falls home.