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Garden Intelligence: Lectures, Workshops, Events
Garden View: Chive Talk
Liza Gyllenhaal is the author of the novels “Local Knowledge,” “So Near,” and the forthcoming “A Place for Us,” all set in the Rural Intelligence region. She and her husband divide their time between Manhattan and West Stockbridge, MA where she writes — and putters around in her garden. We’re pleased to share her periodic musings on gardening and other topics with RI readers.
A part of me is still bracing for the winter that never was. Can it really be over? It’s usually not until late April that one of the first signs of life declare themselves in our small, fenced-in vegetable garden: shiny shoots — fine as cat whiskers — sprouting up through the dried, snow-flattened mound of last year’s chive patch. This year, however, the chives began to push up through the earth in mid-March. Since then, they’ve thickened, lengthened, and spread. Like telemarketers, they’re invasive and indefatigable. They jump across the raised beds to wriggle in among the newly planted peas or slide under the bricks in the narrow garden pathways.
Now, a full month ahead of schedule, this smallest member of the onion family is in flower — just as their grown-up relations, the ornamental Globemaster Alliums, can be seen nodding their three-inch purple scepters above the bearded irises and hosta in the border garden that runs along the western side of our cottage. Chives are not only decorative — ours form a well-proportioned bouquet of tightly packed lavender flower-heads about the size of jaw-breakers — but their smell also helps ward off pests and insects such as aphids, Japanese beetles, and spider mites. Planted near roses, they can reduce the risk of “black spot.” As companions to carrots and tomatoes, they actually enrich the flavor of the vegetables.
Flowering chives reek of new life. Less is more with chives, but a chiffonade of these freshly snipped herbs on a bed of salad greens adds a burst of energy and flavor that excites the palate and lifts the spirit. The beautiful lavender chive flowers are edible, too, adding a spicy tang when the florets are separated and sprinkled over grilled fish and chicken.
Almost all of the things I like to cook with chives are simple, fast, and tasty. Perhaps my favorite, adapted from the Union Square Cookbook, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts, stuffed with chèvre cheese, chives, and any other herbs you might have on hand. Slit a pocket lengthwise in the breast and spoon in (I actually do this with my fingers) chèvre (if you’re feeling flush, spring for the heavenly Monterey Chèvre from Rawson Brook Farm) softened with some olive oil, and mixed with a handful of chives and herbs. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then saute until nicely browned in olive oil or butter. I usually put the stuffed breasts in the oven for 10 minutes or so at 375 degrees to make sure they’re cooked through and to let the chèvre/chive mixture infuse the breasts and melt a bit into the pan. Before serving, spoon the melted chèvre/chive sauce over the chicken. This dish is great with fresh asparagus and couscous.
I’m always looking for good salmon recipes, and I recently came across one that’s made more so by the addition of chives. Simply coat the salmon fillets with crème fraiche (I’ve also used the Fage brand of Greek Yoghurt), sprinkle with salt, pepper, and fresh herbs (I used all chives), and roast in the oven at 425 degrees for 12- 15 minutes.
One last suggestion: snip chives over fresh cherry tomatoes, halved, marinated in a light vinaigrette, and serve this on a bed of arugula alongside corn fritters. It’s one of the most delicious lunches you’ll have this summer. I adapted this from a recipe that ran in the late, dearly beloved Gourmet magazine, substituting chives for scallions, and I didn’t saute the tomatoes as suggested— because what can be better than raw cherry tomatoes right off the vine? But I’ll leave that question for another day.
End of May in the garden is one of the busiest times of the year. Among the many chores that I should be getting to right now:
• Staking the peonies and supporting the bearded irises.
• Cleaning out the last of the debris and re-edging the garden borders.
• Pulling out the faded tulips (and saving the strongest corms for replanting in the fall) and planting dahlias in the holes.
• Enriching the soil where needed with compost and fertilizer — and digging green sand into the rose bed.
• Planting sunflower seeds along the split rail fence of the vegetable garden and, in the beds themselves, tri-color green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, and parsley
• And (yes, already!) rooting out the wild violets and bishops weed that have slipped like uninvited guests into the garden party and are attempting to mingle with the A-list crowd. —Liza Gyllenhaal
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 05/19/12 at 06:07 PM • Permalink
Trade Secrets: A Lollapalooza of Antiques and Gardens
Once a year during Trade Secrets Weekend, the Litchfield Hills resemble the pages of an English gardening magazine, which is fitting since many of the pre-revolutionary towns (Cornwall, Kent, Salisbury) were settled by the British. The two-day Trade Secrets extravaganza—an antiques and rare-plant sale on Saturday, May 19, and garden tours on Sunday, May 20—is a gloriously genteel and good-hearted affair to benefit Women’s Support Services, a regional non-profit organization that offers free and confidential services to victims of domestic violence in northwest Connecticut as well as nearby Massachusetts and New York State.
Since its founding in 2001 at Bunny Williams’ estate in Falls Village, CT, Trade Secrets has been written up in countless magazines, and gardening aficionados and shopping fanatics from across the country make the pilgrimage to Passports owner Elaine La Roche’s Lion Rock Farm in Sharon, CT, where 54 vendors, who’ve been coming year after year, set up booths under a variety of small and large tents. “There’s been a waiting list to become a vendor, and this year Elaine gave us more space so we could add ten more booths,” says Hunter Bee owner Kent Hunter, the co-chair of the vendor committee. “It’s always been a selective and curated group of plant and antiques dealers, so we really tried to add a new dimension to the mix. We’re really excited about the Italian Terrace Collection out of the U.K., which does beautiful, massive terra cotta jars up to eight feet tall. There’s BeaconWorks from Warren, NY, that does these wonderful stained-glass and iron structures that look like pagodas. And Vieuxtemps Porcelain is a Charleston-based company that makes the most exquisite and delicate flower specimens. We warned them about the wind at Lion Rock Farm but they don’t seem to be worried.”
The garden tour is a mix of the fresh and familiar, too. “We have Bunny’s garden, as always, which people never get tired of visiting,” says Christopher Baetz, the garden tour co-chair. “And we have Jack Highland and Larry Wente’s garden, including their house because they consider it a part of the garden. It’s a modern green house on the road between Millerton and Sharon with spectacular 360 degree views.” Interior designer Debra Blair’s Linden Hill Farm on the top of Wells Hill Road in Lakeville has breathtaking views, too, along with an enviable allee of Linden trees that defines the driveway. “The garden was originally designed by Clive Lodge [who has worked for Oscar de la Renta in Kent] and it’s quite formal. And for the first time we also have Hawk Hill Farm, which is near Lion Rock. It’s a modern vernacular farmhouse set in a valley with unusual views of Mudge Pond.”
If you’re a serious shopper and want the best selection of plants, you’ll want to buy the $100 early buyer’s ticket (which includes continental breakfast) so you can rub elbows with Trade Secrets stalwarts such as Martha Stewart, Carolyne Roehm, Anne Bass and Matthew Patrick Smyth as they do the rounds. And even if you’re not that into gardening or antiques, Trade Secrets is an aesthetic feast offering unparalleled people-watching opportunities, which raises funds for a vital cause.
Trade Secrets at Lion Rock Farm - May 19
Early Buying: 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. - Admission: $100
Regular Buying 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. - Admission: $35
Trade Secrets Garden Tours - May 20
Admission: $70
You can pick up a Garden Tour Map at the information booth on Sunday, May 15, 2011 at LionRock Farm, Route 41 and Hosier Road, Sharon, CT. The booth will open at 9 A.M. Tickets can be purchased at any of the gardens and provide admission to all four gardens.
Nearby restaurants for lunch:
Country Bistro Salisbury
Falls Village Inn Falls Village
Harney Tea Salon Millerton
Oakhurst Diner, Millerton
Toymakers Cafe Falls Village
Woodland Lakeville
Related posts:
The Sun Shined for Trade Secrets’ 10th Anniversary, May 15, 2010
Trade Secrets: The Ultimate Outdoor Shopping Party, May 16, 2009
Trade Secrets: Martha Stewart Makes the Scene, May 17, 2008
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/15/12 at 08:06 PM • Permalink
Garden View: Are Green Thumbs Inherited?
Liza Gyllenhaal is the author of the novels “Local Knowledge,” “So Near,” and the forthcoming “A Place for Us,” all set in the Rural Intelligence region. She and her husband divide their time between Manhattan and West Stockbridge, MA where she writes — and putters around in her garden. We’re pleased to share her periodic musings on gardening and other topics with RI readers.
I think there must be a gardening gene, yet to be discovered in some secret strand of our DNA. My paternal grandmother created one of the most beautiful and extensive rose gardens I’ve ever seen (and I’m a devoted rosarian) in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up. In the midst of the Depression, newly widowed and with six children to raise, she began what was to become a horticultural heaven on earth that remains to this day — in the hands of a first cousin — a lovely, edenic refuge.
I first heard the call — and it really did feel like an almost audible cry from somewhere outside — at a place we were renting in the Berkshires over 20 years ago. It was a somewhat ramshackle, brown shingled Cape that had once been surrounded by traditional perennial beds. After several decades of neglect, however, the gardens had become grassy and weed-choked. On weekends when I’d planned to relax and recoup from a hectic life in the city, I found myself on my hands and knees, pulling up bishops weeds, digging out a border, and plugging the holes with begonias, geraniums, impatiens — all the usual, generic suspects from the local garden center. At that point I didn’t know the difference between an annual and a perennial — or that there even was one. I just felt the thrill of a new infatuation — the yearning to know more and go deeper. I couldn’t wait to get up to the house on Friday nights — jumping out of the car as soon we arrived to check on my plants, often in the dark, by flashlight.
What I came to realize that summer was that — unrealized for many years and quite unexpectedly — I’d found a calling. I was in my mid-thirties, a late bloomer, but I felt a kinship with my grandmother that I never had as a child. That reserved, proper matron and I shared a wild and unquenchable love. We were both gardeners.
I’ve learned a lot since then. Though the observation is hardly original, I’ve come to understand firsthand that, at its heart, gardening is the urge to add order and context to the landscape, to somehow harness and humanize the wild. In that sense, mother nature herself is the wisest and most patient of teachers. Now remember, dear, you can almost hear her say as you take in the sad little heap of shriveled stems and leaves, never plant your basil before Memorial Day. I’ve also come to believe that being out in nature and learning how to listen to its secret harmonies is one of the great joys and privileges life has on offer.
I hope you enjoy these photos of my gardens which, as all gardeners will understand, remain a work in progress. Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd — master gardeners and authors of some of the most delightful books on gardening I’ve ever read — have written that you know you’re a true gardener when, in the midst of weeding or planting, you’ll look across your flower beds and say, “Next year, I’m going to prune back the spirea.” Or, “Next summer, I’m going to plant some dahlias.”
In other words, gardening is a life-long passion. One that you’re never too old to discover for yourself.
This month you might want to:
• Visit the Berkshire Botanical Garden on Friday, May 11 and Saturday, May 12 for the 35th Annual Plant Sale. I’ve found some of the most interesting and successful plants there over the years — and I always pick up my annual herbs at the Monkshead Nursery booth. They have the best cherry tomato selection in the area!
• Plant early vegetable seeds. Ward’s Nursery & Garden Center carries Renee’s seeds, which always do very well for me, as does everything from The Cook’s Garden. I have raised beds in a fenced-in area (we’re in ground hog territory) and have already put in radicchio, escarole, arugula, rainbow chard, cut and come again mesclun, and oak leaf lettuces. Memorial Day weekend, if the warm weather continues to hold, I’ll put in seeds for tri-colored green beans, cucumbers (for pickling in August), nasturiums, zinnias and cosmos — and plant the cherry tomatoes and annual herbs (see above).
• Sign up for lectures and workshops at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Or take a one-day seminar on container gardening with Bob Hyland, owner of the late (and lamented) Loomis Creek Nursery, and local author and gardener extraordinaire Margaret Roach in Copake Falls, NY.
• Mark your calendar for the wonderful Open Days sponsored by the Garden Conservancy and visit some of the most exclusive and amazing private gardens in your area. This weekend, on Saturday, May 12th, you can visit Margaret Roach’s fabulous garden in Copake Falls as well as Mead Farm House Garden and Maxine Paetro’s Broccoli Hall, both in Amenia, NY. —Liza Gyllenhaal
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 05/07/12 at 12:29 PM • Permalink
The Hooper Garden: A Passion That’s Bigger than Both of Them
Sophisticated gardeners tend to agree that turning the land surrounding a house into a series of garden “rooms” is a great way to bring nature to heel. This handy design device transforms negative space (ill-defined areas you may gaze across or wander through on occasion) into positive ones (places to actually dwell).
True to good form, the garden of Madeline and Ian Hooper in Canaan, New York has its fair share of lovely garden rooms—a lavender garden surrounded by a hornbeam hedge; a serene water garden, a vast vegetable garden—all close to the house. But their broader landscape—eight acres actively gardened within a total of 180, as well as seemingly infinite acreage “borrowed” from the distant views, defy such domestication. After all, when you’ve got a 450-foot long, 35-foot high,100-foot wide blindingly white rock heaving out of the ground in your front yard, it’s a little difficult to tame it into a cozy spot for taking tea.
This Sunday, July 24, the extraordinary grounds at the Hoopers’ Rockland Farm will be open as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program to benefit not only the Conservancy but the Berkshire Botanical Garden, on whose board the couple sits. Visitors may take self-guided tours, climb the stairs of the aforementioned geological phenomenon (a gigantic chunk of Stockbridge limestone left behind by a glacier that the Hoopers have seamlessly retrofitted with a stone staircase), and, once aloft, wander along the thyme path that wends through the “silver garden” 35 feet in the air. And on and on….
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Neither Madeline nor Ian Hooper had gardened before they bought their property in Canaan 31 years ago, but Madeline believes that Ian being British gave them a leg up on their future avocation. On annual visits to his parents, the couple was exposed to the glories of the English garden. Even so, they resisted taking spade in hand for years, until installation day of a perennial and shrub garden they still refer to as “Fred.”
While Fred Callander of Callander’s Nursery in Chatham was planting “Fred,” he said to the Hoopers, who were hovering nearby, “You know, you’re allowed to pitch in.”
Fateful words. “He did things that would never have occurred to us,” says Madeline, who remembers being amazed by the way Callander turned every natural contour and rock outcropping to advantage. “I suppose that’s when it all began.”
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The couple were soon taking classes at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, to learn which of the many ideas they’d picked up from books would work in this region and which they ought to forget. This summer is their seventh since they retired as co-heads of DeVries Public Relations, a top New York firm. Both now view gardening as a full-time, seasonal job. That they were once co-workers may explain their business-like approach. “Every morning we meet with the garden team in the vegetable garden barn—command central—to figure out what needs to be done that day.”
Mark Whiteman came into their lives more than a decade ago, when he was 20, and has worked with the couple ever since—no doubt part of the reason they never shrink from a new challenge. “We never had a master plan,” says Madeline. Then, with nary a trace of real regret in her voice, she adds, “That was a mistake. You don’t know how many things we got wrong and had to move four times.”
The enormous flat disc-like stones that form a landing at the base of this woodland staircase were excavated on the property in the process of digging garden beds and contouring the land.
A local carpenter designed and assembled the over-scaled garden bench and chairs, using mortise-and-tenon joinery.
The Hoopers described to Mark Whiteman a natural log “bench” they had seen in their travels, and he promptly whipped one up for them, using a stately pine that had recently fallen on his own property. It has proved to be an ideal perch for taking in the view of the lake and the distant hills beyond.
When they bought the property, The Rock was covered with junk trees and weeds, which took years to clear. Though they’ve since planted the side facing the road with perennials and trees, they’ve left this side, facing their “big sky country” view, completely unadorned.
Garden Conservancy Open Day at Rockland Farm
180 Stony Kill Road, Canaan, NY
Sunday, July 24, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Admission/$5
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/18/11 at 11:52 AM • Permalink
Gardens: A Gertrude Jekyll Legacy
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by Betsy Miller
Glebe House is an historic landmark in Woodbury, CT, “birthplace” of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Meticulously restored to its 1750 heyday, it is also one of the first historic houses ever opened to the public as a museum. But, for gardeners, all that pales compared to what’s going on in its backyard, where the only extant Gertrude Jekyll (1843 - 1932) garden in the U.S. is blooming its way through the summer of 2011.
On Sunday, June 26, Connecticut celebrates its 8th annual statewide Historic Garden Day, with fourteen historic gardens across the state open for touring. The Litchfield Hills area has four: Bellamy-Ferriday House and Garden, Bethlehem; Osborne Homestead Museum and Kellogg Environmental Center, Derby; The Beatrix Farrand Garden at Three Rivers Farm, Bridgewater, and, of course, Glebe House Museum and The Gertrude Jekyll Garden in Woodbury.
Legendary garden designer Gertrude Jekyll (pronounced GEE-kal; Robert Louis Stevenson, a family friend, borrowed the name for his novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is generally credited as being the reason bourgeois backyards are not filled with sculpted boxwood, mazes, and knot gardens. She’s the one who introduced undulating drifts of color, punctuated with spiky delphiniums and hollyhocks (formerly considered too homely for a proper garden), and loose presentations of bright shades merging into pastels. In short, Jekyll steered upper-class taste away from the formal and toward the informal garden.
Her extensive writing and collaborations with one of the most famous architects of their day, Sir Edwin Luytens, brought Jekyll world-wide acclaim. On a trip to Great Britain in 1926, philanthropist Annie Burr Jennings sought her out, convincing Jekyll to put together a site plan for Glebe House—sight unseen. Jennings came somewhat prepared, able to describe the compass points, tree lines and fence posts. With that scant information, Jekyll plotted her design and made a list of recommended plantings.
But for unknown reasons, the design was never implemented. It lay dormant until 1978 when the landscape designer and preservationist Susan Schnare discovered it among Jeykll’s papers at the University of California at Berkeley while doing research for her master’s thesis. A quick phone call to Woodbury confirmed that the design had never been executed and instantly triggered a call to action (and mild panic) in the tiny western Connecticut town.
The directors of Glebe House quickly learned that 52 years can make a big difference in the natural world. Trees that had cast only negligible shadows when Jekyll sharpened her pencil were now towering oaks. The strain of lupine that had been considered best in the Roaring Twenties had long since been overshadowed by newer, stronger, taller varieties. In short, the estimable garden designer had created a master plan that was now half a century out-of-date.
So the directors consulted Litchfield landscape designer Barbara Damrosch and George E. Schoellkopf, creator of the famed garden at Hollister House, in Washington, CT, and, at the time, gardening columnist fore The Newtown Bee, to help interpret Jekyll’s design. And everyone who sees it has been marveling over the results ever since.
More than three decades later, with the help of the historic house staff and lots of green-thumbed volunteers (a groups that calls themselves JAWS for Jekyll Association of Weeders) perennials and flowering shrubs (including weigela, spirea and roses) are surrounded by an evergreen hedge of yew, holly and cypress. An allee of roses and a classic “English-style” mixed border confines hot colors to one side, cool colors to the other. The garden moves—through the color wheel and through textural contrasts—in quintessential Jekyll style.
8th Annual Connecticut’s Historic Gardens Day
Sunday, June 26, noon – 4 p.m.
Glebe House
49 Hollow Road, Woodbury
1 – 4 p.m., Wednesday - Sunday
Self-guided garden tour/free; museum/$5
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/21/11 at 09:23 AM • Permalink
Trade Secrets: The Garden Season’s Big Kickoff May 14 & 15
One of the reasons why Trade Secrets, the massive rare plant and garden antiques sale on May 14, is such an enchanting event is its setting: Lion Rock Farm, a 600 acre property on the Salisbury/Sharon, CT, border with breathtaking views of rolling hills and the Taconic range. Owner Elaine La Roche, who cultivates 200 acres of corn, oats and soybeans, does not consider it a big deal to have 60 vendors under tents (and surrounding her indoor pool) nor clearing fields so that more than 1,000 shoppers have a convenient place to park. Indeed, she makes sure that Lion Rock Farm is meticulously groomed for the fundraiser that benefits Women’s Support Services, a regional non-profit organization that offers free and confidential services to victims of domestic violence in northwest Connecticut as well as nearby New York and Massachusetts.
“It’s important to give back to your community,” says La Roche (photo right, with friend Pete Hathaway), an investment banker who was the first CEO of the China International Capital Corporation when she lived in China as a Morgan Stanley partner. A weekend resident of Litchfield County since the 1980s, she became involved in Trade Secrets initially as a vendor, offering Chinese antiques from Passports, the store she opened in Salisbury in the late 1990s. “While I was in China, everyone was getting rid of their antiques and replacing them with furniture from Ikea,” she says, laughing. “I would go shopping and sent home a few containers and that is how Passports was born.” Over the years, Passports has expanded to included silk clothing, gifts and fresh water pearls. “Our pearls are really unique and affordable.” she says. “You can buy them at the store, online or at trunk shows.”
Book Signings
For the first time, there will be an authors table near the Johnnycake Books booth where you can buy books and have them signed by the authors.
Florence de Dampierre Wall: The Best of Decorative Treatments
Page Dickey Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden
Sidney Eddison Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older
Jane Garmey Private Gardens of Connecticut
Annie Kelly Litchfield Style: Classic Country Houses of Connecticut
Carolyne Roehm A Passion for Interiors and A Passion for Blue
Matthew Patrick Smyth Living Traditions: Interiors by Matthew Patrick Smyth
Bunny Williams An Affair with A House, Point of View and Bunny Williams’ Scrapbook for Living
Ask Margaret Roach
At the Hammertown Barn booth, garden blogger Margaret Roach will be answering garden questions and signing copies of her memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There.
La Roche takes farming very seriously, and she is especially proud that Lion Rock produces dry shelled corn that can be used for fuel instead of wood pellets. “It burns cleaner and hotter than wood and leaves no ash,” she says. “McEnroe’s uses it to heat its greenhouses.” LaRoche is famous locally for putting her money where her mouth is, buying up local independent pharmacies that were in danger of being bought out by CVS or Rite Aide. “At one time I owned five, and now I just have two—the Canaan Apothecary and the Salisbury Pharmacy.” She allows that she subsidizes these businesses because she believes that they are vital to small town life. “I wish more people would invest locally, especially part-time residents,” she says. “It doesn’t take zillions to have a big impact in our towns.”
And while she is the putative host of Trade Secrets, she says it’s the all-volunteer effort that makes it such a profitable fundraiser and effective community-building event. Of course, she will be pitching in at the Passports booth as she has for the past eleven years. Doesn’t she mind the wear and tear that her property takes from all the trucks and visitors? “This is a farm,” she says bluntly. “It’s actually great incentive every year for us to have everything looking its best by Trade Secrets weekend.”
Trade Secrets at Lion Rock Farm - May 14
Early Buying: 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. - Admission: $100
Regular Buying 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. - Admission: $35
Trade Secrets Garden Tours - May 15
Admission: $70
You can pick up a Garden Tour Map at our information booth on Sunday, May 15, 2011 at LionRock Farm, Route 41 and Hosier Road, Sharon, CT. The booth will open at 9am on Sunday. All gardens are self-guided tours. One ticket entitles you to tour all 5 gardens on the tour. Tickets can be purchased at any of the gardens:
Cobble Pond Farm - Sharon, CT
The Hodgson Garden - Holabird House ~ Falls Village, CT
The Miller Garden - Sharon, CT
Old Farm Nursery - Lakeville, CT
Bunny Williams - Falls Village, CT
Nearby restaurants for lunch:
Country Bistro Salisbury
Falls Village Inn Falls Village
Harney Tea Salon Millerton
Oakhurst Diner, Millerton
Toymakers Cafe Falls Village
Woodland Lakeville
Related posts:
The Sun Shined for Trade Secrets’ 10th Anniversary, May 15, 2010
Trade Secrets: The Ultimate Outdoor Shopping Party, May 16, 2009
Trade Secrets: Martha Stewart Makes the Scene, May 17, 2008
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/10/11 at 10:27 AM • Permalink
Out on a Limb: Architects Take a Bough
According to Vitruvius, the Roman scholar who authored De architectura, architecture is man’s imitation of the nests, lairs, and hives animals build for themselves. He also famously observed that architecture must have commodity, firmness, and delight.
One wonders where he would have stood on treehouses. These improvised structures whose very foundations—tree limbs—are precarious, nearly always deliver on delight, but usually fall woefully short on firmness and commodity. Which is why it is so interesting that Berkshire Botanical Garden board members Matt Larkin and Elizabeth Hamilton chose architects, among other design professionals, to create treehouses. Even more interesting: the architects accepted an assignment further complicated by a serious caveat—for preservation and safety’s sake, their structures could not actually be up in the branches of any of the garden’s precious trees. Nonetheless, the six “treehouses” that are on display now and throughout the season (after which they will go to the highest bidder) offer enough delight to more than compensate for anything shortcomings they may suffer in their resemblance to, well, treehouses.
The Keep
Architects Gray Davis and Will Meyer of Meyers Davis Studio, New York City, built a two-level structure resembling a fortified tower with a bird-viewing platform, a play on a medieval fortress.
Robyn’s Nest
Architect Robyn Sandberg’s tree house is about 1/70,000th the size of her most recent project, a 1,200 foot tall, 2.5 million square foot skyscraper in Manhattan. Inspired by the mockingbird who built a nest of interwoven sticks on her 17th-floor terrace, Sandberg contends that her version of a nest, made of bamboo, rope, plywood, and steel, could safely be suspended from tree branches.
A Seasoned Craftsman Plays by Memory
Designer and builder James Odegaard, Odegaard Woodwork in Ashley Falls, created a structure that is the most tree house-like of the lot. Based on his memories of his boyhood father/son building projects, Odegaard improvised, blending traditional woodworking techniques with found materials. The results look persuasively treehouse-like yet manages to provide shelter and a sense of safety.
A New Perspective on Water Towers
Brothers Mark Smith and Tim Smith of 9 Partners Design, Lenox, inspired by the water towers they knew from city rooftops in their youth, built a circular structure enclosing a group of quaking aspen. A low doorway, reminiscent of the entrance to a Japanese teahouse, leads the visitor inside a column of salvaged hemlock and cedar. Only the interior surface has been planed, so it forms a fragrant enclosure in which to contemplate the “art” of the trees trunks and the “ceiling” of green leaves above.
Out Building Mostly Made from Salvaged Materials
Designer Michael Trapp, whose eponymous West Cornwall, CT shop is mecca to design buffs from around the world, is renowned for his originality. More of a garden folly than a treehouse, his classical building has over-scale windows that look comfortable, yet though at odds, with the tent-like canvas walls.
A Glowing Japanese Lantern in the Garden
The treehouse designed by award-winning graphic designers Joseph Cho and Stefanie Lew of binocular design, ltd.., is inspired by a Japanese lantern. Two layers of marine plywood milled to evoke silhouettes of tree branches are sandwiched over screening to create a multi-layered effect. The house is furnished with tatami mats and is lit from within at night.
Berkshire Botanical Garden
Stockbridge, MA
9 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily
Now - Columbus Day
Members/free, adults/$12, seniors&students/$10, under 12/free
May 6 & 7 plant sale: admission free.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/01/11 at 11:39 AM • Permalink
Margaret Roach: Droppin’ Out is Hard To Do
In her memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road, Margaret Roach often quotes pithy pop song lyrics to bring home a point in her account of how, at the height of her powers, she walked away from money and prestige as a key player in the top management at Martha Stewart Living to live full-time in the Columbia County weekend retreat she’d spent twenty years perfecting in her always-too-scant “spare” time. This Saturday, February 19, Roach, whose blog, A Way to Garden.com has become indispensable to gardeners nationwide will speak about The 365-Day Garden at the Berkshire Botanical Garden‘s popular Winter Luncheon and Lecture. She also will introduce her book there and, in the weeks and months ahead, at other public appearances throughout the region and farther afield. (For an up-to-date schedule, visit her website.) Recently, Margaret Roach spoke to Rural Intelligence about, among other things, the difference between a loner and an introvert.
RI: Didn’t you start out at Martha Stewart Living as the gardening editor?
MR: I left my job as garden editor at Newsday, a newspaper that covers Long Island and the boroughs of NYC, to become garden editor of Martha Stewart Living, yes. That was 1995; two years earlier, I had started writing freelance garden stories for Living, and as they ramped up the frequency of the relatively new magazine, I was brought on board full time to start a whole department to cover the subject.
RI: Those stories you did for all those years must have required you to be constantly flying all over the country. How did you manage your paralyzing fear of flying?
MR: In those days, I could fly—though I hated it. The job prior to garden editor at Newsday newspaper had been fashion editor (nobody would believe that if they saw my outfits now!), and that was brutal: flying to the collections in three overseas cities four times a year. I had to put my fear into a state of suspended animation then, and again when I traveled on garden photo shoots for Martha around the U.S. After September 11, 2001, my ability to stuff down the fear really diminished sharply, and I have flown perhaps once since.
RI: You are a self-confessed loner—an introvert—who held a position that must have required lots of leadership ability; lots of mixing it up with both your co-workers and powerful people outside the company. If it is so alien to your nature, why did you rise to the top?
MR: I enjoy solitude very much, but I’m not an introvert—I’m very interested in the rest of the world and other people’s thoughts and experiences, and engaging with new ideas (not just mine, but external ones) every day. I am an extrovert living in semi-solitude. My nature is actually very expansive—writing probably five days a week to my garden audience on A Way to Garden, answering hundreds of their comments and questions and emails in a given week, going out to lecture to large audiences periodically, teaching workshops in the garden in season.
I succeeded because I have strong social and editorial skills, love and embrace technology, and am a high-energy problem-solver, a heat-seeking missile, really, whether in my old life or here today alone. I never stop, and I can find and execute a Plan B or C or D if A fails, until I get the job done. Relentless Margaret.
I think solitude is often confused with introversion or even hermit-like behavior. I just need a lot of alone time to be at my most creative. During my corporate years I came upstate and decompressed on weekends; rarely went out till it was time to drive back to the city. That was the balancing act. Eventually it wasn’t enough; I needed more solitude, more peace, to be able to accomplish my creative goals: writing, renovating and remaking the garden, connecting to nature more fully.
RI: I always found shoptalk to be so compelling. Do you agree? If so, don’t you miss it?
MR: I have made the most wonderful “team” of colleagues in my new life, thanks to my love of geeky tools, and our water-cooler conversations go on all day long on IM and Skype voice. An ex-Marine programmer, an ex-Time magazine art director, a couple of other authors, various blogging friends: We have made a virtual community and are never really far apart.
There is the wider circle on Twitter, too, for “crowdsourcing” answers to things, but I do miss a couple of particular senior colleagues whose “ear” for writing was so great, and on whom I relied when I wanted help fleshing out a story. I don’t miss all those meetings I had to go to all day, however: so antithetical to creative flow!
RI: You say toward the end of your book that one of the benefits of your new life is that you don’t suffer from Sunday night return-to-work jitters anymore. That Sunday night dread is so universal, the family of a friend used to call it The Ed Sullivans. Do you think that, as a child, you would have been better off or happier if you hadn’t had to go to school? Aren’t we stronger, more resilient for having duked it out with that big, often disappointing and/or threatening, world called Third Grade? And isn’t being mroach@marthastewart.com just Third Grade writ large?
MR: First I should say that I loathed school. I skipped Second Grade so Third was hell; I had no penmanship skills (missed that curriculum) and was always feeling conspicuous for not staying within the lines (tee hee). Junior high was worse; being younger, I was physically immature, and the object of much teasing by hormonal boys. I told my parents I would not go to high school unless it was girls only. And then I dropped out of college multiple times, never finishing. “Doesn’t work to her potential”—that was me in school.
On the other hand, I love to work. Love it. Started working fulltime (at The New York Times, as a copy girl) when I was a sophomore in college and never stopped. Right away, I was able to succeed in that environment: solve problems, get jobs done. It was practical, not theoretical like school had felt. I got esteem from career, rather than feeling awful about myself as I had at school.
Nowadays, I work more than ever—the lid is off; I have so many ideas to get onto paper!—but whether it is Tuesday or Saturday I have no idea. I just eat when I want, write when I want, go up to bed when I want (and watch five episodes of a BBC series in a row if I want, starting at noon or nine p.m., makes no difference). My rhythm is my own, changing with the seasons and with the kind of project I am working on. Delightful.
RI: In saying goodbye to all that, haven’t you also foregone the euphoria of escaping on Friday night?
MR: Every night is Friday now, because each morning (afternoon, evening) is my own to fill as I like. So long as I manage to earn enough money to stay here, between writing and web consulting and garden workshops or whatever else it takes, every night is the night before another day of my own design.
RI: We’ve all read a lot of books about people dropping out in one way or another, starting over in an alien environment. In all of them, there are parallel journeys (Peter Mayle fixes up a house and in so doing learns how to get along with the French, Elizabeth Gilbert travels, prays, eats, and finds love). The literal journey also provides a framework over which to drape the wisdom gained. In your case, by the time you’d dropped out, you’d already owned your house for two decades and it and its garden were sufficiently exceptional to have merited at least one story in a major national magazine. As the author of a memoir was that a disadvantage?
MR: My “journey,” if you will, was more about setting myself free and sitting still (at least comparatively so). I think the mature garden’s powerful visual invitation to come outside and play was an advantage to me and my writing, because (as gardening has always done) it brought me into the most intimate encounters I have ever had with its creatures, who turned out to be my very best tour guides these first years here. Remember I had never witnessed most of the events that go on in my garden, even though I’d visited it for 22 previous years. So it was all new, really, exhilaratingly so.
RI: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
MR: I hope they will find it funny, because I like to smile about what we go through—put ourselves through—in the process of growing up. I hope if they have a little voice in their heads saying “I don’t have time for xxxx,” they will find a few hours a week to test-drive the thing they’re putting off. I hope that they will consider the healing power of solitude—you know, we give our kids “quiet time” and “time outs,” but we rarely give it to our multitasking 24/7 selves. And most of all, I hope they will find in it a curiosity about maybe letting nature into their lives in a bigger way. I daresay we’d all be a lot happier if we just got a bigger dose of (as our parents used to say) fresh air.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/15/11 at 10:25 AM • Permalink
Book News: “The Gardens of the Hudson Valley”
In his foreword to the newly published Gardens of the Hudson Valley (The Moncaelli Press; $50), Gregory Long, the president of the New York Botanical Garden, reminds us that we should not take our geography for granted and that “the Hudson takes its place among the world’s most significant rivers—the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, the Thames.” He praises the book’s collaborators—photographers Steve Gross & Susan Daley and writers Susan Lowry & Nancy Berner—for assembling a monograph that depicts the Hudson River Valley as “a living museum of American domestic garden design . . . a fulsome survey of the styles that American landscape designers have created and promulgated from the early 1800s until today.”
While many of the iconic and historic gardens in the book are open to the public—including Clermont in Germantown, Beatrix Farrand’s Bellefield in Hyde Park, Locust Grove in Poughkeepsie, Montgomery Place in Annandale-on-Hudson, Frederic Edwin Church’s Olana in Hudson, Wilderstein in Rhinebeck—the authors have also included several private residences that maintain the region’s grand garden tradition. There are luscious photographs of contemporary gardens belonging to folks such as Dr. Norman Posner and Charles A. Baker of Hudson Bush Farm in Claverack (photo above), Gerald Moore and Joyce Nereaux on Mount Merino, Conrad Hanson in Germantown, and Amy Goldman in Rhinebeck.
While the book features photographs of the gardens at their various peak moments, Blithewood—the riverfront Italianate garden behind the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College—is worth visiting around dusk anytime of the year (photos top and bottom.) The Hudson River is four-miles wide at this spot which lends an added majesty to the walled garden that has an enchanting, ghostly aura when it’s not in bloom; there is no better spot to watch the sun as it sets behind the Catskill Mountains.
Photographs reprinted from the book Gardens of the Hudson Valley by Susan Daley and Steve Gross.
Copyright © 2010 by Susan Daley and Steve Gross. Published by The Monacelli Press, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 10/27/10 at 04:20 PM • Permalink
Book News: “The Private Gardens of Connecticut”
Gardens go dormant as the cold weather settles in, but gardeners never do. “Now is the time I start thinking about what I am going to plant next year,” says author Jane Garmey, whose just-published collaboration with photographer John M. Hall, Private Gardens of Connecticut (Monacelli Press; $65), will set the mind racing with the possibilities for next spring. Garmey, who is English but never gardened until she and her husband bought a weekend house in northwestern Connecticut more than 30 years ago, has an autodidact’s curiosity, which is reflected in the thoughtful text that is filled with the sorts of juicy bits that you normally only pick up on a garden tour. She and Hall spent nearly two years crisscrossing the state (which Garmey notes is the third smallest in the nation) to make the book live up to its name. “We really wanted to show the great variety of gardens in the state—from the Long Island Sound to the Litchfield Hills,” she says.
While some of the 28 gardens are regional favorites that are often featured on garden tours or Open Days (such as Michael Trapp’s in Cornwall and Bunny Williams’s in Falls Village), Garmey scored a coup by photographing the rarely seen Kent garden of Annette and Oscar de la Renta in (whose garden gate made the book’s cover) and the South Kent garden of philanthropist Anne M. Bass. “Those gardens are never on Open Days,” says Garmey. The book also features the garden of Agnes Gund, the former president of MoMA, whose landscape showcases sculptures by Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly and Mark De Suvero.
While this is not a how-to book, Garmey and Hall only chose gardens where the owners were fully invested in their land, even if they have a full-time staff.
Garmey notes that Bass walks around the garden with her clippers in her hand and used to write out seed orders in Latin for her rose garden so she would learn the Latin names for all the species and have meticulous records for the more than 140 varieties of roses she grows. Garmey and Hall also chose mature gardens that have stories about their growth and evolution. “You don’t make a good garden overnight,” says Garmey. “Well, you can, but I didn’t want that type of garden in our book.”
Private Gardens of Connecticut (The Monacelli Press; $65)
Jane Garmey Book Signings
Saturday, October 9; 5 - 7 p.m.
Johnnycake Books
Salisbury, CT
Saturday, November 6 at 2 p.m.
Oblong Books
Millerton, NY
Saturday, November 21
Hickory Stick Bookshop
Washington Depot, CT
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