Formal Landscape

We had such a warm response to Michael Tortorellos article in The New York Times last week that Ive decided to share a few photos taken by DC-based photographer Darren Higgins that did not make the article. While I did my best to avoid coverage of the less-than-flattering aspects of the house and garden (they are legion), both Michael and  Darren Higgins thought the full context of the gardens relationship to three roads was worth revealing.  It was a horrifying thought to me. Even in my wild fantasies of glowing media coverage, the subject of my garden on the bus route was not quite the angle I imagined. So here is a last peek at the garden before I hide it for another four years.

On the day of the photo-shoot in late October, I gave Darren a 7 am tour of the garden. I showed Darren the two or three angles that it was perhaps possible to shoot the garden without getting a road, car, or our house in the background. He politely acknowledged my input and then went to work, generally ignoring my advice and seeking to tell the larger story: that this is a garden surrounded on all sides by roads. Darren placed a ladder out in the road and even climbed on our roof. Darren did a masterful job of not just getting interesting angles, but of telling the story of this garden, its context, and how we use it.

But after seeing his photos, I realize Darren was right. All gardens are a reaction to their contexts. Instead of being surrounded by forest, or the ocean, or a charming architectural backdrop, the context for our house is the street. The placement of the garden, the selection of species, and the character of the planting is all about buffering and even embracing its proximity to roads.

The photo above shows the "border" garden as it intersects our small front lawn. The border is composed of mostly perennials, but here in late October, it is the annuals that really pop. The first year this border was composed of large blocks of mostly native perennials, but to be honest, it was dull as hell. Very little bloomed for more than a few weeks, and the vast majority of summer it was a green blob. The problem was not the natives (its entirely possible to create a showy native border), but the concept of massed perennials in a small space. It was a landscape concept and this is a tiny garden space. So this year I played with the idea of a successional border. Succession planting (Great Dixter style, not ecological succession) plays with the idea of one wave of color or texture following the next from April to November. This means mixing annuals and tropicals into the perennial border and even planting three or four rotations of plants. All of the annuals here were grown from seed or bulb: Salvia leucantha, Marigold (Tagetes patula ??? I think a French or Himalayan; it was a seed I got from a friend), Pinca Zinnia, Arabian Night Dahlia, Agave parryi, Helenium autumale, Nasella tenuissima, and Canna Firecracker.

The proximity to the sidewalk and road defines the garden. The planting must screen, yet be friendly. A wall or fence would be inhospitable and out of context.

The house has great light and wonderful large windows that look out on the border. The clipped yew in the foreground was one of the few plants that came with the house, though it was almost twice its current size and V-shaped. I initially thought I would remove it, but now am rather fond of them. Ive also transplanted a pyracantha from the side yard and am espaliering it up the chimney.

The plantings in the border go from 18" tall in the front (where it borders the lawn) to seven to twelve feet tall on the back end (seen in the photo above). This angle was entirely different two months earlier, but the unusually wet early summer created fungal problems that wiped out a three large masses of Agastache Black Adder, Persicaria Firetail, and Helenium Rubinzwerg that had performed marvelously the year before. Our terrace was completely exposed, so knowing that perennials would not fill the gap in two months, I added the fast growing late season Canna and banana (Ensete maurellii). The large banana was two feet tall when planted in July. Ive always claimed that D.C. summers are subtropical . . . 

Here is a small terrace my brother-in-law dubbed the "duck blind." Its a 12x12 bluestone and gravel terrace carved into the tallest part of the border. It literally sits on the road and the driveway, but most of the year, the terrace is hidden from both. The planting between the driveway and terrace is six and a half feet wide, proving that its entirely possible to get layered screening in even narrow spaces.