Friday, September 25, 2015

Perennial Plant Association: the garden tours (part 1)

Garden tour mob

 I would be terrified to let these people see my garden.

This horde was one of the tour groups for the Perennial Plant Association's national symposium in late July, a gathering of "green industry" professionals that included wholesale growers, garden center retailers, landscape architects, garden designers, garden writers, and garden bloggers like me.  The gardens below were part of Wednesday's design/landscape tour, featuring five different private gardens that differed greatly in size, character, and style.  The photos below represent only a small fraction of the several hundred I took; for the rest, check out my Perennial Plant Association album on Flickr.  I'll do a separate blog post about the Friday tours, which were great in an entirely different way.

Nell Strachan garden

Woodland garden
Cassian Schmidt (Hermannshof Gardens, Weinheim, Germany)

The first gardens we toured, just outside Baltimore, surrounded a house perched on the edge of a steep ravine.  The front gardens were in sun, with a path winding down from a patio at the top of the slope into a garden deeply shaded by large, mature trees.  We all took turns on the overlook, trying to figure out how to incorporate such a feature into our own gardens.  This garden interested me because my own garden is on a sloping property, albeit a much smaller one.  This garden had colonies of Begonia grandis bigger than my entire garden!

Lilies
Lilies

Woodland garden
Austin Eischeid (Austin Eischeid Garden Design), Barbara Katz (London Landscapes, LLC)
 
Begonia boliviensis
Begonia boliviensis

Container garden
Container garden of succulents

Overlook
The overlook

Woodland garden
I spied a colony of Aralia spinosa from the overlook, but never found it again 

Woodland garden
Descending into the garden: note the back of the house and its decks overlooking the steep slope

Woodland garden
Look down: contrasts in color and texture

Magnolia tripetala
Look up: Magnolia tripetala

Woodland garden
Down the slope

Hakonechloa
Hakonechloa macra

Woodland garden
Find the photographer
 
Begonia grandis
Large colonies of Begonia grandis suggest how it might grow in its native habitat (see Big Begonia grandis)

Woodland garden
And a fish.  Of course there's a fish.

Cunningham Manor

Daylilies
Hemerocallis cultivar

Our second stop was Cunningham Manor, where we stepped off the bus to find brilliant orange daylilies in front of an enormous (to my urban eyes) house.  The flower-filled perennial beds and a few small containers hinted at what we would find when we walked around to the back.  We were all surprised to discover that the house and its gardens were less than a decade old; it looked like it had been there forever.  Unlike many of the "McMansions" in the Washington, DC suburbs, where large, lavish (and often garish) houses are lined up next to each other on small lots and set back from the road a hundred yards at most, this grand house was on a correspondingly grand property, with 34 acres of gardens and no neighbors to be seen from anywhere on the property.

Cunningham Manor Estate
Front door

Cunningham Manor Estate
Container garden

Digitalis (Digiplexis)
Digitalis ("Digiplexis") hybrid

Cunningham Manor Estate
Hint of what's to come

I think many of us stifled gasps as we came around the back of the property.  There were acres of gardens, with greenhouses and a potting shed almost as big as my entire house.  We marveled at the 92 terracotta containers, overflowing with flowering annuals, with butterflies everywhere.  I can't imagine the work that went into this, not just to create it but to maintain it.  The containers were on an automatic watering system, but still need to be planted every spring, kept pruned and weeded, cleaned up every fall, and stored every winter so they don't freeze and crack.  Make no mistake, it takes money to create and maintain something like this; the owners employ two full-time gardeners in addition to numerous contractors.  But if I had that kind of money, this is how I would spend it. 

Cunningham Manor Estate
Back of house

Cunningham Manor Estate
Roof and chimney details

Cunningham Manor Estate
Containers

Lantana
Orange lantana, covered with butterflies

Aralia cordata
Aralia cordata 'Sun King'

Phlox
Phlox paniculata: so jealous!

Amsonia
Amsonia hubrichtii border

Angelonia
Angelonia cultivar

Cunningham Manor Estate
Helenium, Pennisetum

Cunningham Manor Estate
Carolyn Mullet (Carex Garden Design and Garden Tours) and Austin Eischeid discuss garden design

Hibiscus
Hardy Hibiscus cultivar

Hydrangea
Hydrangea macrophylla 'Lady in Red' would fit into a tropical theme

Potting shed
Potting shed

Cunningham Manor Estate
Potting shed plantings

Cunningham Manor Estate
Container gardens

Cunningham Manor Estate
Container garden

Cunningham Manor Estate
Surprise!

Cunningham Manor Estate
Elephant ear (Alocasia) and sweet potato (Ipomoea cultivar): I would have more like this!

(Photo courtesy of Barbara Katz)

Millbourne Estate

Milbourne Estate

Our third stop was an even larger property, the Millbourne Estate, sprawling across 50 acres near York, Pennsylvania.  We had lunch there, on a vast lawn next to an inviting pool, with a view of the house at the top of the hill.  By now we were all hot and tired, and showed great restraint by not jumping into the pool!  It was probably smart to distract us with lunch first.  We were each handed a carefully labeled map of the property and then set loose to wander at our leisure.  I saw "secret garden" and knew where I had to go.

Lunch
Lunch

Pool house
Pool house

Something different unfolded at the end of every path and around every corner.  Benches and other seating areas invited visitors to linger, and we did.  Unlike Cunningham Manor, this was a genuinely old property, with the original house over a century old.  Newer additions include a private chapel (with guest quarters upstairs) with a distant "tower ruin" visible from its windows.  Damn, I want a tower ruin in my garden, and a dozen intervening acres to view it across.

Milbourne Estate
Relaxing

Chapel
Private chapel with guest quarters upstairs

Milbourne Estate
Guest quarters

Milbourne Estate
View of the "ruin" from the guest quarters windows

Milbourne Estate
PPA members outside the chapel

Milbourne Estate

Milbourne Estate
Relaxing in the shade

Squirrel
Monster squirrel

Azalea
Azaleas

Lycoris squamigera
"Naked ladies", Lycoris squamigera

Waterfall
Waterfall

Milbourne Estate
Sentinel

Secret garden
Entrance to the secret garden

Milbourne Estate
Perennial beds (click here for zoomable panoramic view)

Milbourne Estate
Antique car collection (I somehow missed the antique garden tools collection!)

Milbourne Estate
Pond

Milbourne Estate
Another view of the "ruin"

Ruin
Yes, I took a lot of photos of the ruin.  I want one.

Two private gardens

As we headed back towards Baltimore, we made two more stops at small private gardens.  It was a bit unfair to come to them after such large, grand estates.  At the first I took only a few photos, primarily of plants that interested me.  At the second, I'm ashamed to admit I took none, except for some photos of massive specimens of Nyssa sylvatica along the road as we headed back down to the bus.  What can I say?  It was a hot and humid day, and we were all pretty pooped at this point.  So below are my last garden tour photos of the day; after the last tour the bus took us to Cylburn Arboretum, where all the bus groups (and there were several non-overlapping tours) gathered for a wonderful tent party where we all discovered that, somehow, we weren't completely exhausted yet.  Go back to my first blog post about the symposium, Five days of plant geek pleasure, to read about it and see the photos.

Dragonwing begonia
Dragonwing begonia

Hydrangea
Hydrangeas were loaded with butterflies

Abies
Dwarf Abies

Celosia
Celosia

Garden bench
Bench

Nyssa sylvatica
Nyssa sylvatica

Nyssa sylvatica
Tony Spencer (The New Perennialist), Barbara Katz, and Cassian Schmidt with Nyssa sylvatica

It was a pleasure to re-live these tours by going through my photos from that day.  How Janet and her team got access to some of these amazing places, I have no idea.  This wasn't just a matter of getting a small local garden club in to ooh and ah over the gardens: this was getting admittance for several hundred fanatical (but knowledgeable) professionals to admire, scrutinize and potentially critique every square inch of a stranger's gardens.  The thought of some of these people seeing my own garden makes me queasy.  I'm not a garden designer, I'm not a horticultural professional of any kind.  I'm a hobbyist gardener and amateur plant breeder, and write this little garden blog about my tiny garden in my spare time.  So who am I to critique any of these gardens?  I was just happy (and sometimes awed) to see them.

But the day wasn't only about the gardens; I can only echo Susan Harris's comments for Garden Rant, Plant Fanatics Party in Baltimore, and in my own previous blog post, Five days of plant geek pleasure, that much of the pleasure came from the people I was touring with—many of whom I had just met.  Between the seminars, the tours, the trade show, the reception, the tent party at Cylburn Arboretum, the after-hour dinners, and still more tours, by the end of that 5 days I felt like I'd known all of these people forever... including the ones I would be afraid to let into my garden.

4 comments :

  1. What great pictures you took! I looked at all of them on Flickr. I love large naturalistic plantings and lush containers especially. Big garden or small garden, there is always something interesting and new to see. I respect those people who open their gardens for strangers. Gardens are made to be seen and shared. Love your commentary, and smiled seeing people having fun. Thank you SO much!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Tatyana, I'm glad you enjoyed my blog post and my photos. And yes, one point I should have made--which Janet Draper made a point of making to me--was the generosity of these homeowners to open their gardens to us.

      Delete
  2. I wasn't able to attend so I appreciate the armchair tour. Excellent photos. I look forward to the next chapter...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Sarah, sorry you couldn't make it. Now to get to work on those photos from the other day of tours...

      Delete