backyard wildlife habitat monarch waystation formal garden native plants mary jasch

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backyard wildlife habitat monarch waystation formal garden native plants mary jasch

Swallowfield, a formal garden with wild plants in suburbia

by Mary Jasch

My mother started the Backyard Wildlife Habitat in 1964. She lived nearby and made friends with James Tilton, the owner. He let her stroll around. It was her dream to have this place. The structures of the gardens and buildings are his. He landscaped in strict Asian style – all grass, no flowers. My mother started to turn it into habitat. When I moved back in the late ‘90s, I did restoration and changed it around, taking out a lot of lawn. Grandpa always said when you plant tomatoes put a handful of Epsom salts and wood ashes on them. - Linda Goff

At Swallowfield, a private residence in Little Silver, New Jersey, a downy woodpecker and ruby-throated hummingbird buzz up to the terrace’s tableside feeders. Linda Goff, who lives there with brother Dan and father Howard, buys 25 cent feeder fish for white egrets, feeds the deer to keep them out of her gardens and chuckles at squirrel and raccoons as they nibble at made-just-for-them tables.

Red fox live there too. “They help keep the rabbit population down. We would be overrun with rabbits if we didn’t have the foxes. I just can’t deny these wildlife,” she says. “People don’t have an appreciation for wildlife. I guess that’s why I take care of them.”

Swallowfield is a certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat and Monarch Waystation which Goff tends every morning at 6 when the rest of the world is at rest, she says, almost as much for the critters as well as her own pleasure. (But don’t ask the muskrats who caved in the pond a couple years ago.) “I’m really blessed that I have this place.” Goff is Chairman of the Little Silver Shade Tree Commission, writes the town newsletter and makes custom cushions.

From the terrace of the Early Craftsman 1910-1930s house, a style that employed a lot of natural building products including a 25 foot hill of fill, one can see all the way down to the edge of the two-acre parcel. The concept was to make the house part of the landscape, Goff says. Tilton divided the property with fences and borders into seven terraces, which represent different stages of life. The gardens are structured in a formal way, bursting wildly with native plants and happily growing tame ones begging to be feral.

Tilton had an Asian concept in mind, Goff says, noting the waterfall as the place to begin the garden journey. Along the way, one makes discoveries and gathers energy from the stream. There, a spruce planted from seed grows with curly willow and plumbago.

“I love the relationship of earth to our lives. I try to keep that spirit going here but we color outside the lines, too,” she assures. She spends warm evenings in a sitting area with butterfly-loving spirea and Grandma’s bleeding hearts surrounded by American holly and leatherleaf viburnum.

From the terrace, an axis ambles through arbors, gates, benches and walkways, straight to the lower pond. Follow the moss-covered brick path between two 1920s benches under grand oaks. In the sun, the path becomes pebbled and passes through a formal milkweed–rose garden where a female monarch takes particular delight in laying her eggs leaf to leaf. “Mom put them all in,” Goff says of native milkweed and varieties.

At each change of structure or planting the 25-foot elevation drops a few feet on its way to the pond. Through the gate and into the Circle of Life Garden, the rose and milkweed garden continues with native daylilies, butterflies, pink lycoris and single-flowered kerria. The garden is named because it leads straight from the mountain and the circular path confuses any evil spirits and energy and chases them off before you get to the pond, life’s final destination.

Off to the side, a cushioned swing hangs from a century-old Bloodgood Japanese maple. Next to the swing, a row of Anthony Waterer spirea takes the place of a rotted fence. Goff often enjoys her morning coffee here.

Continue on the pebble path to the pond burgeoning with wild and planted life. Dug from an underground stream, the pond’s bottom is clay and pea gravel. Downspouts and gutters on the house drain into other drains and finally into the pond. It is the ultimate 1920s Rain Garden!

Native blue flag and yellow iris, Joe-Pye, sensitive fern, wild impatiens and Jack-in-the Pulpit and pink and white 30-year old water lilies planted by Mom grow with astilbe, ornamental grasses and the usual pond critters. A thick stand of bamboo screens the nearby wetland and its inhabitants.

Up toward the right of the house a border of evergreens flourishes: holly, yew, ostrich fern, thuja, Atlantic white cedar and Grandma’s August lily, Hosta plantaginea, with enormous, fragrant white blossoms. Continue through a peony border and a 90-year-old andromeda alleeʹ. “We think Mr. Tilton put in mature plants because he wanted the landscape finished,” Goff says, indicating the alleʹ and a 120 year-old Japanese maple near the house.

Gardens are everywhere: a bird/squirrel feeder on a sugar maple stump garden, terraced shrub and perennial butterfly gardens started by Mom with an antique cement and tile picnic table and benches and a thistle that Goff couldn’t bear to rip out. “It planted itself there. It wanted so bad to be a part of this garden.”

Upward, a wall of mophead and oakleaf hydrangea, wisteria, lilac, crepe myrtle given to Mom as a dwarf, Chinese ground orchid, perfect prickly pear, tall rosy swamp mallow and red raspberries.

“There’s a very peaceful, tranquil spirit here started by the original owner and perpetuated by our family’s love of nature,’ Goff explains. “So much was given to us by family, friends, and loved ones and that all contributes to a natural spirit. Besides original plantings given to us, there’s very little we purchase from a nursery. Everything was gifted. That contributes to a world that isn’t so antiseptic.”