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Mighty Gardens Of Pretty Plants
by Mary Jasch
Diane Guidone, landscape designer with the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, created three small space gardens in New Jersey: a ¼-acre residential lot in suburban Madison, garden areas on one lot in Atlantic Highlands, and a foundation garden that wraps around the Middletown Township Public Library.
Cindy Lowden’s garden in Madison is all about family treasures and favorite collections. Enter Diane Guidone to help her incorporate these personal themes into a soft, flowing design.
In front, mossy brick edges a gently curved garden. Roses with purple-tinged leaves, her parents’ heirloom red Japanese maple, daylilies and terra cotta pots enhance the hues of the taupe stucco home.
Around the side, a walkway to the backyard lays between a bed of pachysandra and lily-of-the-valley on the left and her grandmother’s hollyhocks and rose arbor on the right. Lowden had found a slip of the original rose bush struggling under the pachysandra. Her great grandmother planted it in 1919! She transplanted the rose; Guidone ordered the arbor; then Lowden decided to plant her entire garden around that rose.
The back garden bursts into view along a serpentine walk of heart-shaped terra cotta stepping stones that lead through plantings to roses on a moon gate at the far end of the yard. Lowden’s ex-boyfriend had delivered the hearts one day as a gift.
Hearts and roses, texture and color – muted, soft, sensitive and seamless: Guidone trademarks.
The garden begins with a custom-made black lattice fence that separates this part from a neighboring yard. This intimate area has intricate stories.
Here, a fountain and sundial keep company with pink roses and catmint, silvery senecio, and peony foliage edged with native violets and their heart-shaped leaves. Plus heirlooms of Lowden’s own heart: the base of the fountain and the top of the sundial are both shaped like her Phi Mu sorority badge – a quatrefoil. And, her sorority’s symbol is on the fountain – a lion.
The planting melds into trees, shrubs and more perennials: a fountain of day lilies, cryptomeria – the chenille of evergreens, Lowden says – then soft, powder blue spruce, purple smoke bush, hydrangea and white lilac. “When they bloom you feel like lying down underneath them to absorb the fragrance. It’s just spectacular.”
Midway, the path becomes a circle with a bistro set and wrought iron urn, somewhat undistinguished from exuberant perennials, and spirea up to the rose-covered moon gate at garden’s end.
Across the path, a grove of towering American holly, fragrant white fir and Norway spruce is backdrop for a vintage iron settee with a heart-shaped back. Right there, Lowden recently planted a purple-leafed redbud, Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy,’ chosen for its heart-shaped leaves. She often reads the morning paper here.
The drive to Jo Ann Strano’s house is one of the steepest along the eastern U.S. coast, but the view is worth the climb. The front garden drops down an embankment to the house and unfolds as the visitor comes near.
Guidone redesigned it from a typical foundation planting with minimal deciduous plants and no perennials or grasses to a garden of blooming shrubs and colors of green.
“She was looking for a change, a garden that she could enjoy, something that would have interest for all four seasons. She wanted successive blooming and a very full garden within the cottage style,” she says.
Up at the road, a holly hedge hides the property. Its glossy leaves complement wide oakleaf hydrangea, speckled aucuba and roses.
The garden continues around the south side with a palette of green: silvery lamium under white pine and yellow-greens of azalea, aucuba, hydrangea.
On one eroded hillside, Guidone installed steps with an exceptionally long run “to make it a more gracious approach down to that garden and to work with that slope.”
She created a garden round back overlooking Sandy Hook Bay. It’s Strano’s outdoor room where she likes to sit with tea and a book and sometimes company. “It’s peaceful and affords me a sense of privacy. It encloses me,” she says.
Strano’s deck is above the tree tops on the back slope. The view is reminiscent of Thoreau’s “walking on tree tops” on Mount Katahdin in his book, The Maine Woods. The tree tops are trimmed every three years to maintain the view.
On one particular day, Strano watches a military ship. “It’s a moving landscape that changes all the time, she says, “the ferries, the clammers, fishing boats. At night you have the lights of Manhattan and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.”
But the deck is ultra sunny so, in summer, despite the great view and pots of flowers, she enjoys it from inside. Says Guidone: “That’s why she likes the garden down below. Because, there, it’s a respite from the sun and the setting is breathtaking.”
When Susan O’Neal, director of the Middletown Township Public Library, called Guidone to design a few garden spaces at the library, she handed her a job that only multi-tasking plants could fill.
O’Neal wanted gardens that gave pleasure to library users the moment they pulled up in their cars. She wanted a children’s garden and one that deer wouldn’t eat. All on a hot, sunny slope on a property next to woods.
“I felt that outside of the library was as important an experience as the inside. I wanted people, when they pulled up, to know they were in a special place to experience the library. That was the concept that Diane had to work with,” O’Neal says. “She planted gardens around the picture window that give people a beautiful view from outside and the people inside feel like they are in a garden. From the inside most of Diane’s work is visible from the children’s room, but from the outside everyone can see it.”
Enter a master of sensitivity, plant knowledge, and seamless thinking.
“When I design a space,” says Guidone, “I think about the space that’s available and the shape of the building, and then the shape of the garden – broad shapes first and the functionality of what needs to happen here. After I have that worked out, I bring plants into it.”
Plant demands were simple: deer-resistant, able to withstand compacted soil and full summer sun, no broadleafs, and as many natives that she could work into the scheme. She chose as mainstays: river birch, grasses, boxwood, smokebush, heuchera, liatrus, and nepeta.
Her design of the Children’s Reading Garden includes a round garden outlined in boxwood which wraps around the front of the library in six-foot deep beds of purple smoke bush, upright and columnar Panicum virgatum Northwind and Knockout roses in repeating patterns.
The original plan was to bring children out and read stories in the garden but O’Neal admits that they haven’t used it as much as they would have liked to, due to environmental reasons like pesticides. Instead, they installed a granite bench and bird bath. People use the bench all the time. O’Neal feels it’s because they “created a restful, beautiful place.
“We get compliments all the time. We have not had a single problem with deer. Our designer knew the environment the library is in and knew the plants’ histories. The sensitivity she has to those things…”
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published July 29, 2009
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