Wild at heart Relaxed-style planting in a Long Island garden with painterly colour that challenges established ideas of plant hardiness
This Long Island garden in New York State, with its mix of wild and precise planting, challenges established ideas about plant hardiness
Although it may be considered an oversimplification by some, I find that gardens generally fit one of two moulds. There are those that have been designed to be admired from their perimeter, as if peering into a diorama. And there are those, more satisfying in my mind, that are meant to be experienced from within. One, the sterile reception room with furniture not intended for sitting and the other, the cosy den with overstuffed chairs and a friendly inventory of oft-used artefacts.
The complex and elaborately planted garden of Dennis Schrader and Bill Smith fits within the parameters of the latter. Found within 17 acres of the fertile northeastern shore of New York’s Long Island. It is a precise and painterly garden, where a romantic wash of Monet collides with an exotic Gauguin.
From the entrance to the three-acre garden, with its knot garden and terraces that present hundreds of containers, which can be replanted up to five times a year, the garden becomes more relaxed in style the further you venture from the house, until it blends seamlessly into the surrounding agricultural land. “My design intent changes with each specific area of the garden,” says Dennis. “Overall I like to have more manicured and heavily designed areas close to the house. Moving away from the house the garden is more relaxed and less specialised.”
Relatively close to the terraces, but mostly hidden by jungly mixed borders focusing on bold foliage evocative of the tropics – bananas, cannas, palms, colocasias, tetrapanax – is the garden’s social hub: the Tiki Hut. Many of the plants that surround this pavilion – indeed tender species throughout the garden – are relocated to heated quarters during the winter months when temperatures can plummet to -18ºC or below.
It is through this process of experimentation with tropicals and unusual annuals and perennials that the pair have illuminated the inherent hardiness of many plant species believed inappropriate for the region, especially if micro-sited. Eucomis species, for example, thrive in raised beds adjacent to the house, where they are given extra sharp drainage. The duo
Clockwise from top left A bench beneath a pair of Betula nigra, looks out on to soft autumn planting, including the plumes of Pennisetum villosum and bold, red flowers of Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’. Surrounded by drifts of grasses, including Sporobolus heterolepis and Stipa tenuissima, is Dennis and Bill’s latest installation – a sunken stone folly, with a roof tapestry of assorted sedum. The winding path to an Adirondack chair is lined by a rich mix of textures and colours from the light and airy Pennisetum villosum to the darker Juniperus communis and the erect lines of Juncus effusus. The diaphanous flowers of Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Skyracer’ rise above its foliage and the surrounding Echinacea seedheads.
remind us that paying no attention to conventional wisdom is no enemy to a creative garden.
From the Tiki Hut, you are led through a pensively planted double border of sublime colours and textures with a reliance on grasses, in particular Stipa tenuissima and Imperata cylindrica ‘Rubra’, to a series of areas hedged by clipped hornbeam that hold the spaces together throughout the seasons. Each is reconfigured on a yearly basis, and each ringing significantly different from the next.
Pools with interconnecting rills are the connective thread between two of the areas that are negative images of each other: in one burgundy Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Cloak’ and Catalpa x erubescens ‘Purpurea’ in the other golden Cotinus coggygria Golden Spirit (= ‘Ancot’) and Catalpa bignonioides ‘Aurea’, both accentuated with grasses, perennials and annuals that join the play of colour co-ordination.
Beyond the more rigidly designed gardens is a 12-acre managed meadow where the couple have erected a nesting platform that was readily accepted by a pair of ospreys. Now, on a yearly basis, they can witness the nest building and rearing of young, adding yet another layer of entertainment to a garden that already possesses a certain surfeit.
“We have different destinations within the garden and some of these areas are more intensely planted to provide a deeper, more enhanced experience of the space. The intent in these areas is to have a natural, relaxed, more fluid look,” says Dennis.
This deliberate transition from formal to wild may had been interrupted by their latest installation, a stone folly sunk into the ground like the foundations of ancient ruin. It’s surrounded by a slight rise possessing a congregate of grasses, hardy opuntias and self-seeding verbascums. There are only a handful of contemporary gardens in North America where craft and passion have collided with such force and precision as here, and I leave with inspiration heavily marbled in envy. USEFUL INFORMATION Find out more about Dennis and Bill’s wholesale nursery, Landcraft Environments, which specialises in tropicals, tender perennials and unusual annuals, at landcraftenvironment.com