The historic stone house is complemented by acres of spring blooming gardens.
Gardening is equal parts academic pursuit, creative expression, and love affair. The gardener must understand horticultural science, must think creatively, and must have a passion for growing things green and flowering.
Such must have been the thinking of 18th century author and scholar Samuel Johnson when he appropriately compared gardening to writing, an activity that also stems from academics, creativity, and passion.
“The work of a correct and regular writer,” wrote Johnson, “is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers . . . oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”
As s a writer with an appreciation for beautiful landscape, I’ve always found Johnson’s comparison to be accurate, if not even artful and inspiring. And then last fall while touring gardens with Tom Nugent, this analogy gained new meaning. As Nugent, a landscape architect with Chapel Valley Landscape Company, told me about his client, the work of the gardener and the work of the writer became one. A writer, avid horticulturalist, and Egyptologist, Nugent’s client travels extensively, works from home and looks to her garden not only as a respite, but, I surmised, as a physical manifestation of her creativity. Upon first surveying the garden, I was struck by its majesty.
It was late fall. Bare branches opened vistas to the surrounding foothills. Various shrubs blazed with color. Magenta and orange punctuated the brown grass, soggy underfoot from the previous day’s rain. Thick, low, gray clouds threatened. Still, the garden’s structure evoked its spring and summer splendor. Trellises, walls, ponds, evergreens, sculpture, sweeping pathways, and gently sloped lawns—all seamlessly blended as if a happenstance of nature. But, I was also secretly pleased to see the garden a bit unkempt, interspersed, as Johnson would have it, with occasional weeds and brambles—a sign, I presumed, of the gardener’s own raw aesthetic.
For me the fruits of Nugent’s design provide what all great landscapes and, according to Johnson, all great pieces of writing, should provide: control, variety, majesty, and spontaneity. But of these elements, the first is control. In a way the garden is also like jazz, where the improvisational outpouring succeeds only when measured with restraint—a base line, a basic chord progression, repetitions or variations on a theme.
Such was Nugent’s challenge—to organize, plan, measure, control, and then provide for a little bit of improvisation. Eventually, like it or not, all plants will do their thing. Operating, of course, according to natural law but also according to their own sense of place, reacting to soil conditions, light, heat, humidity, precipitation, and, perhaps, the occasional pruning shear.
The added challenge here for landscape architect Tom Nugent was to create an entirely new garden that blended with one that had already been well-established. Easy enough would the two gardens adhere to the same basic style, but Nugent needed to marry two gardens with completely different styles—the new formal, classical garden and the existing informal English country garden. Fortunately for Nugent, he had plenty of space, and he was given three helpful guideposts: the existing garden, a specific plant palette suggested by the client, and an impressive piece of classical sculpture.
To begin understanding the garden he was about to design, Nugent first needed to understand the client—works from home, travels frequently, avid horticulturalist, Egyptologist. Nugent knew early on that she would be very specific about the plants she would or would not want to use and that her travels to exotic lands would influence her choice of garden ornamentation. In order to balance the existing informal English country style garden with what would become the new more formal garden, Nugent conceived of the landscape as a series of rooms, where the development would seem organic. To achieve this natural feeling, the garden was completed in phases. First the new garden was established, and then a transitional space was created—a vehicle that transports one from the informal to the formal. Then, a final phase rebuilt the existing pond, terrace, and rose arbor.
To further develop an understanding of how the new spaces would function, Nugent spent some time studying the existing garden. First and foremost, the impact is all about roses—over two dozen varieties including climbers, ramblers, old-fashioneds, rugosas, and tea roses. Other notable plants include peonies (a flood of peonies, in fact), lilacs and iris, geranium, clematis—a very typical English country palette all linked by a naturalistic pond and waterfall, trellises, terraces, and arbors.
Avid gardeners will note that the palette prioritizes spring bloom. This is by design. The garden is an escape for the client, and because she travels extensively, spring and early summer are the only times she has to spend enjoying its loveliness. So why waste space with late summer and fall flowering shrubs and perennials when no one would be around to enjoy them? “It was fun to design a garden this way,” says Nugent. “Most gardens need to have a real multi-season interest. With this garden we really got to have some fun with designing specifically for one season.”
Still, carrying the functional aesthetic needs of the client into the new garden would prove to be a challenge. Nugent designed what is now referred to as the “secret garden” or “sculpture garden” specifically to incorporate a larger-than-life-size example of classical Greek sculpture. On a trip to Italy, Nugent’s client had commissioned an Italian sculptor to reproduce the famous Greek Discobolus (Discus-Thrower). Hand carved from a single piece of white Italian marble, the finished sculpture stands (crouching) nearly seven feet tall. Priority number one—the client wanted to create a home for this sculpture.
She also wanted this “home” to echo the colonnade at Hadrian’s Villa, a 1,900-year-old palace in Tivoli, just outside of Rome. So with Hadrian and the Discobolus for inspiration, Nugent set out to design a garden that reflects classical Greek and Roman design in its style, proportions, dimensions. Nugent did geometric studies to plan the precise location of the garden, its size, and its shape and then made calculations to determine how to position the sculpture so that the entire Discobolus would be mirrored in the reflecting pool as one approaches the garden. To frame the sculpture and reflecting pool, Nugent designed custom columns and an arch reminiscent of Hadrian’s Canopus. As a backdrop, Nugent screened the area with a cedar trellis covered with Constance Spry and Paul’s Himalayan Musk climbing roses.
Because the garden’s purpose was the sculpture, the plantings needed to evoke a classical style—Nugent and the client cultivated a spare Mediterranean look. A simple Taxus (common yew) hedge is punctuated by European hornbeam, hollies, ‘Yoshino’ Cryptomeria, and, during warm months, potted lemon trees, which are moved to the space from the client’s greenhouse.
To transition from this new formal space to the informal existing garden, Nugent created what he calls the strolling garden—a dramatic sequence that leads from the informal to the formal or vice versa. “I tried to create order,” notes Nugent, “a sequential experience that leads to the sculpture garden but at the same time hides it from view until the last moment.” To enter this transitional space from the English garden, one passes through a rose-covered iron trellis. The strolling garden is theater of transformation, and the materials that shape the pathway itself evolve from informal grass to a gravel surface, then to a stone and gravel mix, and then to a formal stone paving in the “forecourt” of the secret garden.
Plant materials parallel this evolution of elements from informal to formal. The strolling garden layers over 4,000 bulbs, as well as specimens such as sweet box, lady’s mantle, sweet woodruff, Geranium, Hosta, Japanese dwarf black pine, pink dogwood, Fothergilla, yellow wood, Hydrangea, and crab apple. Because peonies are important to the garden, Nugent had them added around the metal arbor, which leads to the strolling garden. “We used many that were already on site and worked with the client to select new ones as well,” notes Nugent.
What makes the strolling garden transition most successful, perhaps, is the surprise that awaits at the end of the path. The entire sculpture garden is screened until you get to the forecourt and round the corner. Nugent capitalized on a large existing stand of white pine as well as added screening materials to hide the sculpture garden from view, until at last one steps onto the paved stone forecourt surrounded by English boxwood and beautyberry. And then the anticipated drama unfolds—the Discobolus comes into view for the first time, its full reflection cast by the still water. The moment is at once serene and breathtaking. A simple bench awaits, a fitting denouement to the story told by writer and gardener.
Contact:
Chapel Valley Landscape Company: chapelvalley.com, 703- 406-0802, or 301-924-5400
