The lawn area, although small, offers plenty of room to sit and relax.
When Johanna Hoehner moved into her colonial-style home in Towson there was nothing in the yard but three cherry trees and an endless expanse of grass. A partner in the landscape design firm New Edge Design, Hoehner immediately began the task of transforming her quarter-acre of suburbia into a lush garden paradise that distinguishes itself from its sedate, grassy neighbors like a bright orange crayon in a box of white chalk. This is not a garden one visits in the back yard—it is the yard, encompassing every scrap of space the acreage would yield.
“My friend calls it ‘the oasis in a lawn desert’,” quips Hoehner. “People look at the house and say ‘I can’t even see the house.’ Frankly, the best feature isn’t the house—it’s a nice, normal, suburban colonial that you see next door or across the street.”
Five years ago, Hoehner started New Edge Design with business partner Michelle Cheek. About the same time, she began to lay out her own garden. “This [garden] has grown side by side with the business,” she states. “I’ve learned things and incorporated them into my own back yard, and I try things here to see how they work in real life.”
A native of Sweden, Hoehner recalls how she wanted a garden similar to the plots tended to by families in her home country where space, or the lack of it, was not an issue—those plots were often tiny but well loved.The child of avid gardeners, she grew up around plants and has a particular affection for vegetable gardens, another hallmark of Swedish gardens. “Growing up, people landscaped their front yards,” says Hoehner, recalling how one would drive down the street and need to peek through hedgerows and rosebushes to glimpse a look at the house within. “Here you see lawn and foundation plantings; that’s very foreign to me,” she explains. “I can sit on my front stoop in my PJs with a cup of coffee and no one will know I sit there.”
Unlike her client’s gardens where Hoehner works from a master plan, she states that her own garden is “probably not well thought out.” Instead, it has developed over time, with Hoehner often toting plants around the yard trying to find homes for new arrivals and moving established plants to other areas. The result is a free flowing, whimsical garden. “I’m more of a vignette person,” says Hoehner of her landscape design philosophy. “I can look at a spot and work with that area.”
Hoehner’s house is on a gentle slope, so to create the bones of the landscape design she set terraces into the hillside to make flat surfaces to be planted. Next, she created privacy and shade by enclosing the yard with a screen of Leyland cypress trees and American hollies. (A less opaque string of purple beeches provided a permeable border between the neighbor’s house where Hoehner’s daughter would go to play.) The first garden she made is the enclosed vegetable garden laid out on the lowest terrace. Although tiny, the fenced vegetable garden includes a formal path bordered by boxwoods and bubble gum pink roses, and is home to a multitude of herbs and vegetables. Hoehner gave a defunct fountain new life as a piece of sculpture at the garden’s heart.
The lawn is bordered by a generous assortment of annuals, perennials, and shrubs.
Within the confines of the privacy hedge, Hoehner placed meandering flowerbeds; she also intersected the lawn with what she calls the “island garden” to create paths within the garden.
Walking on the grassy walkways there is a definite sense of movement from one place to the next. One can enter the backyard garden from either side of the house by passing under trellises covered in clematis and climbing roses, or from the two-story wooden deck dripping with green foliage from a climbing kiwi, or from the basement patio with its adjacent pergola dense with grapes and akebia vines. There are winding paths lined with asters, hydrangea, spiraea, variegated liriope, heuchera, and impatiens.
Some of her favorite spots are near the soothing sound of water. Her front entryway features a small water garden, while the backyard has a large pond at the base of the deck. She also has several container fountains with circulating pumps so the restful sound of burbling water is never far away.
The deck and the patio are often overflowing with containers of wave geraniums, sweet potato vine, New Zealand flax, vinca, and oleander. “[Containers] are the pop of color,” she explains. While she’s not afraid to throw together unusual colors and textures, Hoehner tends to stick with blues and grays in the garden. She explains that she likes to punctuate fairly ordinary surroundings with ornamental focal points—be it a unique tree or a piece of garden sculpture—and annuals for color. Whenever possible she uses deer-resistant plants in large, mounded plantings.
For example, in one large bed there is a proliferation of plants: Coreopsis ‘lime rock ruby’, Geranium roseanne, creeping jenny, lamb’s ear, Echinacea ‘Kim’s Knee High’, Black-eyed Susan, daisies, ferns, and astilbe. But the eye is instantly drawn to the structurally magnificent tree-form oxydendrum. The use of interesting trees, like a heritage birch at the front door, a stand of three deodara cedars in the backyard, and a red twig dogwood keeps the garden interesting year-round. She has Japanese maples for their auburn color, a forest pansy for its purple, heart-shaped leaf, and a “mop” tree that offers great texture. “I like unusual things,” says Hoehner, lightly touching the pompom-like heads of a thunderhead conifer.
Although small, the garden never feels claustrophobic. On the contrary, through the creative use of space, texture, water, and curvilinear grass paths, it seems bigger than its quarter-acre lot, a secret garden that seems tiny from the outside but is full of endless nooks, ponds, and wonders within. Benches, chairs, and hammocks are tucked into hedges or left to languish in little squares of sunlit grass, creating many unique and tantalizing resting spots throughout the garden. While she rarely has a free moment to do it, Hoehner says she loves to sit with a cup of coffee and enjoy her garden. When she’s feeling down, you can find her in the comfort of the vegetable garden. “I feel like I can go anywhere around my house and find a nice little spot,” she says.
To view more photos of this Suburban Oasis CLICK HERE
Christianna McCausland is a Contributing Editor to ChesapeakeHome.
Contact:
New Edge Design: 410-335-8090
