‘This is all the garden I need’
Gardening is all about adapting. If one plant doesn’t work in a certain place, we can always find another that does.
We may be gardening mostly in the sun until our baby trees grow up and give us shade. We’re thankful for the reprieve from the heat but know some of our plants crave a day of bright light.
About three years ago, Kathy and Bill Grewe moved from a suburban property in DeSoto County with lots of space to indulge her plant-loving desires to a zero-lot-line house in Collierville with just a little space.
Instead of mourning for what she left behind, she is celebrating her liberation from the demands of a large garden.
“This is all the garden I need,” Kathy said as she entered the cozy courtyard behind her home. “It’s enough for me to play in.”
She recently invited fellow members of the Melody Lane Garden Club to see her Collierville home and garden. The group, originally formed in 1964 by women living in the East Memphis neighborhood near Yates and Suggs, now has members living in diverse areas.
Many of the plants for Kathy’s new garden were culled from the abundant selection at her former residence.
“You couldn’t even tell any were missing,” she said. Several statues and urns were rescued as well.
“I brought my favorite plants — a mix of evergreens and perennials,” she said. She added a few annuals to give the garden consistent colorful flowers throughout the summer.
She kept her focus on plants that would not require a lot of pruning to remain in scale with the new garden as well as those that attract hummingbirds and butterflies, such as salvias and lantanas.
The courtyard was a blank slate when the couple began installing the plants and laying the stepping stones themselves. They consulted with Anne Riordan, a founding member of the Mid-South Hydrangea Society, for garden design advice.
Hydrangeas, one of Kathy’s favorite groups of plants, are prominent, including the diminutive Little Geisha and the larger Mars, whose charming pink and white florets form big mopheads.
Two panicle types, probably Limelights, have been pruned into small trees. Their elongated lime flowers bloom in midsummer and then turn pink and even red as they mature.
Vertical gardening is important in small enclosed gardens like the Grewes’, where several kinds of clematis and a Carolina jasmine climb the walls and fences.
When a neighbor’s English ivy crept through the slim spaces of a wood fence, Kathy trained it to wind around a decorative piece of iron hanging on her side.
“I just decided to work with it,” Kathy said.
“Princess Diana,” a clematis with outward-facing deep pink tulip-shaped flowers on maroon stems, is wrapping itself around a birdhouse on a wood fence. It’s already reblooming after its first flush of flowers.
Diana is one of several clematis with bell-shaped flowers that can be trained up trellises in the traditional mode or allowed to get their support from shrubs.
Mid-South gardeners are increasingly using others in that group, including the free-blooming blue rooguchi that happily wanders through shrubs; Betty Corning with its petite lightly scented lavender blue flowers, and the difficult-to-find Bill MacKenizie, whose yellow flowers resemble parachutes when they open.
A clematis with the familiar flat, open pink flowers softens the shoulders and head of a statue of St. Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners.
Between the paving stones on the patio, the Grewes planted sprigs of dwarf mondo grass, a tedious but rewarding job that yields a high-impact visual delight and low maintenance once it’s established.
The mondo grass replaced mazus, another other low creeper, because it grew so vigorously she had to get down on her hands and knees and clip it with scissors to keep it from engulfing the entire surface of the stones.
Patient gardeners have also used dwarf mondo grass for lawns in shady places where other grasses can’t survive. It takes three to five years for the sprigs to grow tightly together and lots of hand-weeding. But once established, the lawn will never need mowing.
It cannot, however, be used in areas with high When English ivy from a neighbor’s yard crept in, Kathy Grewe trained it around a piece of ornamental iron. foot traffic.
At the end of the narrow path in the small garden is a round café table topped with a collection of containers filled with sedums.
The couple recently hung four shutter panels painted in blue and green hues to break on the expanse of the white garage wall that flanks one side of the path.
The shutters and some other decorative touches were chosen to enhance the architecture of the house.
“This is the cottage style house I’ve always wanted,” Kathy said.
What’s a cottage without window boxes? Kathy’s are filled with a mix of yellow and white marigolds and calibrachoas that makes them stand out among the evergreen shrubs in the front of the house.
“The previous owners had them on the attic windows, and you couldn’t even see them unless you were across the street,” Kathy said. “We brought them down to street level so everyone can enjoy them.”
One of Kathy’s favorite places for enjoying the sights and sounds of her garden is a covered veranda right outside her kitchen door and a few steps up from the garden.
Near the comfortable sofa placed under a ceiling fan is a plaque that perfectly sums up Kathy’s relationship to her garden:
“This is my happy place.”