Date: Fri 17-Jul-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SUZANN

Quick Words:

Gardens-Jekyll-tour

Full Text:

The Jekyll Garden Tour: Relating To The Land And Its Creatures

(with cuts)

BY SUZANNA NYBERG

WOODBURY -- A few Sundays ago, gardeners, keen to try good ideas, toured

gardens in Bridgewater, Washington and Woodbury during the annual Jekyll

Garden Tour. They promenaded on well-tended, perhaps too-well tended lawns,

and enjoyed a picnic lunch at Glebe House in Woodbury. The Jekyll Garden at

the Glebe House Museum is the only American garden designed by the late 19th

Century English gardener, Gertrude Jekyll (pronounced "gee-kill").

One would want to sit in any of these gardens from sunrise until late into the

evening, smelling the scented air. Situated so that they could be seen and

enjoyed from the inside and out, the gardens were hardly postage-stamp plots,

but instead the size of outfields and concert halls. Despite their size, there

was the sense that families here were digging and ditching and sweating,

turning the soil over and dividing and watering plants at the proper time.

Each garden had a different conception of beauty, and each garden, in fact,

each part of the garden, favored different plants. The tour showed the range

of possibilities for gardeners: gently sloping hillsides, water gardens,

shaded areas.

The Jekyll garden, of course, is an English classic: a deep herbaceous border

backed by a protective fence. Designed by Gertrude Jekyll, the passion for

color is developed here like none other on the tour. Ms Jekyll's recipe for an

herbaceous border includes long swathes of black-eyed Susans, delphinium

waving like blue wands, battalions of phlox, and bee balm, bountiful but not

yet blooming.

"Ms Jekyll planted things en masse," said Laurie Clement Lawrason, the

garden's curator. "She allowed plants to self-sow and grow naturally if

appropriate."

Ms Jekyll also liked variety. Shapes and colors blend and contrast. As in an

Impressionist painting, blues meld with golds, pinks mix with whites. The

200-year old Sycamore tree in front of the house, reputed to be the ninth

largest in Connecticut, provides shade for the white campanula and buttermilk

foxglove.

The gazebo, the porch and the pool at The Cornucopia in Southbury all were

places to view a garden. A long oval island, bounded by the driveway, was

awash with flowers, fuschia thistle, burgundy astilbe, rampant buttercups, and

clematis twining about.

Water, too, provided an opportunity for Jennifer Thurstan, the bed and

breakfast's owner. The pond, with water lilies grown in pots and sunk into the

water was a nice idea, providing a place to quench the thirst of birds and a

place for frogs and toads to breed. It also had a calming effect on frazzled

human beings. Unfortunately, the fish did not get on swimmingly. "A great blue

heron with a seven-foot wing span gulped them down, right after my grandson

named them," Mrs Thurstan said.

There is never an end to gardening. On the edge of the pond, Mrs Thurstan has

placed the river-washed stones her uncle gave her when he came back from Japan

after the Second World War. And it will not take long before tiny hedges, more

than 500 of them, fill out and form an English maze replete with surprises,

birdbaths and sundials, waiting at paths' end.

The Fisher Garden in Bridgewater is no modest garden. An element of surprise

greets one with the varying views, the lake, the horse pasture; the viewer

could look up or down and be delighted, walk sentry-like paths or ramble

through a field and be pleased. This was a garden that undulated; winding up

to the house was a long, curving path, lined with irises, no longer in bloom,

but still appealing for the spiky foliage, and pink roses, blooming profusely.

Like the Jekyll Garden, it, too, was addicted to colorful borders, but it

seemed a relic of a more formal age. With its changing levels, it had a

European feel to it, reminding one of the grand scale terraces built in

Renaissance Italy. There were urns, steps, statues, and balustrades; it needed

only a fountain in the middle to make it complete.

The McNaughton garden, also in Bridgewater, both practical and aesthetic,

demonstrated the benefits of successful fruit and vegetable cultivation.

Thanks to their efforts, the family's greatest dining pleasure this summer

will probably be fresh berries -- strawberries, blueberries, raspberries --

and in the fall, that most popular of all fruits, apples.

The flowering garden emphasizes line: lines from a hedge to a path to a knot

garden to the arbor, covered with clematis. A summer garden party is a

difficult thing to arrange; one never knows what will be flowering and giving

off scents, but here the fragile blossoms of the baby's breath were in bloom,

and the pink petals of poppies softened a border bright with standard yellow

yarrow and handsome tea roses. Huge, bulging mountain laurels hid the house.

While order impressed one in the McNaughton Garden, the very lack of precision

attracted one to the Slodowitz Garden in Washington, a garden contrasting the

formal with the wild, the shadow with the sunlight, yin with yang. One would

want to come home here. Instead of formal arrangements, flowers appeared to

grow naturally, right up to the doors and walls of the house while a line of

stella d'oro daylilies led to a pool.

Miniature delphiniums of cobalt blue, with no sense of reserve, peeped from a

blanket of differently textured foliage. A haven of serenity, surrounded by

woods, one sensed that the human hand was not as involved, the brain not as

active in planning. This garden, a naturalist's delight, was less serious,

less intense, and less intimidating than other gardens on the tour.

It is lovely when people share their private passions and their ideas, for a

garden is, if nothing else, an idea. It is an idea about the land and how we

relate to the land and how we relate to those creatures that fly through air

and tread upon the earth.