Jacobs Garden in the summer
Masses of daffodils and vibrant tulips in the garden are a rite of spring. A landscape populated by daylilies and flowering perennials announce the pinnacle of summer, while autumn color and empty seed pods often begin the garden’s final act. But what of winter? Typically gardens in winter offer only shadows of summer’s glory. For most gardeners, winter is a time to plan, to skim plant catalogs for new additions to the landscape, to dream of summer evenings, of butterflies and hummingbirds, to long for the first flowering bulb.
But winter needn’t be a dismal caesura. Located in the Washington,DC suburbs, the beautiful Jacobs garden stimulates the senses throughout all four seasons, offering not only buds, blooms, and fragrances but also understated elegance, organizational patterns, and architecture for the year-round gardener.
Such a garden does not materialize overnight. Rather, the Jacobs garden is a product of time—evolving over three decades. Working initially with landscape architect Lester Collins, then with the firm Oehme van Sweden Associates, Inc., and currently with Clinton & Associates, Mrs. Jacobs has taken the garden through many phases. She first developed the magnificent stone terraces and then expanded the planting scheme to correspond with an addition to the home, all the while continuing to research and learn about new plants and unique combinations that might be added to her garden.
The story of the Jacobs garden begins in the late 1970s just after Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs purchased “a small house on a beautiful piece of property with a woodland garden.” Upon moving, the Jacobses started making plans for an addition to the home. To balance the addition, they wanted to establish some structure to the landscape and so consulted Lester Collins, who designed a series of stone terraces that step down the sloping property to the pool and pergola area—a landscape he referred to as “the hanging gardens.”
Having established the architecture of the garden, Collins then trans-planted azaleas from borders around the house into the woodland garden. Because Mrs. Jacobs’s floral design business, Flower Craft, would rely on using cut flowers from her own garden, the hanging gardens were planted with daylilies, seasonal perennials, and ever-greens in the upper tiers, allowing the lower tiers for tulips, other spring bulbs, and perennials.
Jacobs's front yard in spring and summer
When the Jacobses decided to renovate their home again years later, adding a bedroom wing and side patio with a hot tub, Collins had retired, so they consulted landscape architecture firm Oehme van Sweden to rework the landscape in accord with the new addition. “I had gotten interested in grasses and fall interest,” says Mrs. Jacobs, and since Oehme van Sweden had become known for its use of ornamental grasses and other unique plant materials, she thought the firm would be perfect for enhancing the gardens and designing a lily pond as well as an additional terrace to match those designed by Lester Collins.
Initially the goal was to enhance the existing garden and blend a new garden into what Collins had designed. According to landscape architect James van Sweden, “Lester Collins did a beautiful job designing the swimming pool area and terraces, but he was truly a landscape architect in the traditional sense. The importance of the landscape, for him, was the architecture; he wasn’t a plant person.” That said, Oehme van Sweden would do more with the plantings themselves to help create a four-season interest.
When van Sweden began envisioning a new design, the existing western half of the property was woodland—dogwoods, azaleas, and rhododendrons beneath hemlocks, oaks, and tulip poplars with holly in the background. Taking advantage of large, existing, mature trees, he developed and expanded understory woodland perennial beds and designed a new cut granite driveway, the front walk, raised beds for vegetables and cut flowers, a new terrace area adjacent to the bed-room addition, planting beds to border the house and wrap around toward the existing terraces and pool area, and anew lawn, which van Sweden refers to as a “river of green” that flows between the home and the wooded area.
Jacobs's front yard in fall and winter
Important to enhancing the design was establishing a plant palette that creates year-round interest. According to van Sweden, “I like to think of the garden in winter as a beautiful dried bouquet.” Therefore, a variety of sculptural and textural perennials and grasses were chosen to enhance the existing landscape and highlight the new lily pool. The lily pool itself is inspired by van Sweden’s travels to Japan, he says. Influenced by the simple, naturalistic Asian landscape aesthetic, the lily pond is set into a slope comprising upper and lower pools, a waterfall, and large stones “vignetted up and down the hill to give the appearance of a dry stream bed which leads to the pool.”
Because the new garden being designed by Oehme van Sweden would need to blend into the old, careful consideration was given to the maturity and size of plant materials. Mrs.Jacobs wanted the garden to look established, as if it had always been there, and encouraged van Sweden to think big—a request that resulted in using a crane to hoist a large,20-year-old star magnolia into a prominent location in front of the house.
Of course between major design phases, the Jacobs garden continued to evolve. Always interested in incorporating new plants or experimenting with unique combinations, Mrs. Jacobs would add camellias here or plant a grouping off oxglove there to see how they would work. But when two large tulip poplars in the backyard were destroyed by a severe storm, what was designed as a shady woodland garden was suddenly in full sun. At that point, Sandra Youssef Clinton, who had already come to know the Jacobs garden while working as a landscape architect for Oehme van Sweden and had since established her own firm, Clinton & Associates, began working with Mrs. Jacobs to redesign the back beds with the new, sunny disposition in mind.
“When we started expanding the back bed,” says Clinton, “we began by transplanting crepe myrtles from another part of the landscape to add interest and create a richer look with more levels. The back bed originally consisted of large pines and azaleas; we used the crepe myrtles at the mid-level for added interest.”
“We also expanded the depth of the back bed by adding oak leaf hydrangeas,” notes Mrs. Jacobs. “In addition, we have been continually tweaking and refining the terraces and woodland border, trying new materials, adding evergreens such as male skimmia and Cotoneaster, and incorporating witch hazel and Fothergilla near the newer terrace.”
Since then, Clinton has cultivated the working relationship with Mrs. Jacobs, offering advice and support as the garden continues to evolve. Most of Clinton’s input has been on updating and upgrading plantings, bringing in seasonal interest and color, and creating pathways through the woodland garden—suggesting ‘Heritage’ river birch for its pest resistance and beautiful bark or the little known evergreen Ilex pedunculosa (longstalk holly) for its winter hardiness. According to Clinton, she has also started getting involved with redeveloping aspects of the existing landscape including the lily pond, where she has introduced companion plantings such as Hakonechloa macra and Geranium macrorrhizum “Ingwersen’s Variety” to combine a low-growing shade grass and a flowering perennial and added Carex muskingumensis (palm sedge grass) to balance the existing hellebores and Chasmanthium latifolium (wildoats).
Combinations such as these, suggests Clinton, are important to maintaining the landscape’s four-season interest. In order to design woodland borders with a truly naturalistic feel, the strategy was to blend plantings to create continual interest throughout the seasons. For example in the woodland border, Clinton combined bleeding hearts for early spring interest with hostas, which are at their best come mid-summer.
But just as the handiwork of horticultural and design experts has structured this garden over the course of three decades, Mrs. Jacobs’s passion, inquisitiveness, and efforts have nurtured the garden along the way, imbuing the landscape with personality, energy, and verve.
Jacobs's lilly pond designed by Oehme Van Sweden
The garden is truly a product of time and an evolving aesthetic. According to Mrs. Jacobs, “I never really had a master plan. As I travel, I draw on aspects of other gardens I love and try to incorporate ideas I get from them…I realized early that instead of shopping for plants out of catalogs, I should go to local nurseries and garden centers to learn about what I like and what works well in this area. I find something that looks stunning, something that inspires me, something I love, and I find a way to use it. My garden is always evolving.”
Over the years, Mrs. Jacobs’s goals, like the garden itself, have evolved, but always paramount were a few select criteria. “Color and texture are important,” she says. “Flowers are important, but they are not the garden. The main aspect of the garden is the way colors and textures combine and work together. I am always working to create more depth and richness by using evergreens, color, and texture.”
“It has always been important tome that the garden is in harmony,” says Mrs. Jacobs. As Clinton says, “Mrs. Jacobs is sensitive to views, how light works, and what seems out of place throughout the seasons.” So while she admits that color is important to her garden, so is a sense of balance. “When the azaleas and dogwoods and the monochromatic groupings of tulips are in bloom along the woodland border, I try to keep the terrace beds quiet shades of green foliage.” And when the woodland blooms begin to fade, Jacobs turns her attention to the terraced gardens, playing with blooms in warm hues of orange, pink, yellow, and gold.
Consulting a variety of horticultural and design professionals over the years, Mrs. Jacobs has been able to experiment and give the plants she truly loves a home in her garden. Drawing on her travels and research or taking cues from the landscape professionals with whom she has worked, Mrs. Jacobs incorporates favorites such as tree peonies, hellebores, honeysuckle, Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ (mountain fleece),Japanese anemone, lilies such as ‘Golden Splendor’ and ‘Pink Perfection,’ and of course, tulips. “My favorite flowers are tulips,” says Mrs. Jacobs.
Still, knowing that colorful blooms can last only so long, Mrs. Jacobs has worked with some of the area’s top landscape architects to ensure that flowers function primarily as an accent to the garden. From season to season, the structure persists, offering contrasts and continuity, emulating the best of nature, combining the most basic elements in a way that evokes a thing of beauty, whether it is 9° or 90°, whether the sun shines or the rain falls, any day of the year.
Dennis Hockman is the Editor of ChesapeakeHome.
Contacts:
Clinton & Associates: clinton-la.com or 301-699-5600
Oehme van Sweden Associates,Inc.: ovsla.com or 202-546-7575
