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Joseph Keller grow up in exurban Connecticut , in a forward-looking wood - and - glass house nestled on a hillside amid Norway spruces and sycamores . When he was young , Keller and his brother played baseball on a lawn that squish down to a pool ringed with ash tree , maple , and elm . Two decades afterward , the games are long over and the pool is go — having first become overgrown and , finally , a marsh — but Keller is still around . He hold out across townsfolk in his own house , but gardens his parent ’ property . It is his horticultural laboratory and shoal , where he larn the lessons he employ to client ’ garden with his landscape design business firm .
“ I have it away this garden , ” he says of his boyhood home . “ My business financially subvent what I do here . If I had my preference , I ’d never leave this place . ”
It ’s not hard to infer why . Keller has metamorphose the landscape into an inventive dialogue between plantsman and nature . Teaching himself his craftsmanship plant by plant , he has gone in nine years from one pocket-sized bed of native perennials to a 4 - acre garden that embraces forest and wetland , vegetables and wild flower . The result is not a serial publication of static garden pictures , neither can it ever be see as a panoramic whole ; instead , a visitor experiences this landscape painting as a constantly change pattern of scenes and surprise .
Other gardener might have screen off the fen , with its unruly growth and half - fallen tree , but Keller make happy in it . “ The shapes and colors of planting at the bottom of the garden reflect what is happen in the Ngaio Marsh , ” he say . “ I endeavor to get my plantings and the marsh to flow into each other . ” Though a petty purplish loosestrife blooms in the shallow water , this invading plant is march ( for the bit ) by aboriginal violent rice , with its exuberant , feathery head . To turn tail down the pitcher’s mound and meet this wilderness of tower icteric - brown grass , Keller deploy the equally magniloquent joe pye weed , Eutrochium maculatum;Rudbeckia maxima ; andErianthusgrass , underlaid with downcast hotshot , Amsonia . The glow from this summer symphony of people of color filter into Keller ’s fly-by-night woodland garden , the glory of his landscape . There , he has clear up undergrowth and washy 2nd - growth Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree to make room for a option collection of perennials , shrubs , and understory trees that could qualify as a small botanical garden , with each flora cautiously place to transport the rover .
“ I call this whole place a garden of estimation , ” Keller says , “ because I want people who see it to come away with musical theme for their own garden — what will prosper in the specter , let ’s say , or strange plant they may never have consider of using . ” Gardening in alkaline limestone dirt , he has only a few acid - enjoy rhododendrons on the belongings . alternatively , he relies on an regalia of woodland alternatives : 18 species of genus Viburnum , eight of cornel , and four ofHalesia , a tree with white , Vanessa Stephen - shaped flowers . Hundreds of different perennial and a dozen ground covers dissemble the floor of the grove . Clethra perfumes the air all summer .
Many of the trees and shrubs arc out over wood - chip mulch path are native , but there are exotics , too . “ I do n’t discriminate , ” declare Keller . Here , for example , is gorgeousSyringa reticulata , the Japanese Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree lilac , with lustrous brown , cherrylike barque and white-hot panicles of efflorescence . Over there is an unusual native pussy willow , Salix melanostachys , whose blue - black catkins spring from purple root . Along another path is Magnolia ‘ Elizabeth ’ , a hybrid that flowers a pale , arrant yellow . Keller has even found a billet for the Japanese pagoda Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , Sophora japonica , an obstreperous street tree that lifts sidewalks and shoots up with alarming speed . “ Here it just flourish in the understory , without taking over . ”
Keller ’s current favourite is American elder , Sambucus canadensis . “ This underused aboriginal shrub can grow to 12 feet in a single season . The huge leaves are flawless , the creamy white heyday cluster and royal - black fruit are beautiful , and no cuss or disease bothers it . ” Nature and gardening dance together along every itinerary . In the gay area , where the lawn used to march down the Benny Hill , Keller has turn off sinuous island bed . By gamey summer , the soil in these bed has vanish beneath layer of foliage and blossom , many of which are head - high or taller . The path become a labyrinth , wind up amid gargantuan vegetation that waves in the duck soup . “ I make out cock-a-hoop plants — likePennisetumandCimicifuga — jammed against the boundary of a border . It creates a gumption of closed book as you stroll through . ” In wintertime , when perennials have died back to the primer coat , the same beds will be almost bare . “ Many mass like ‘ wintertime interest ’ in a garden , ” Keller says , “ but I choose to see the grease explode each spring . ”
Though his is a garden of strong bones and bold effects , Keller also take delight in small meetings . Two native lobelia , redLobelia cardinalisand blueL. siphilitica , intertwine along a woodland track . A bush mete near the vegetable garden weaves the prime , leaf , and bark textures of gallberry , Ilex glabra , with those of hibiscus , spirea , lilac , and native box . A small new perennial bed filled with weed mimic a prairie .
Serendipity often attends these encounters . In a little pond — made from a bath sunk into the basis , seal with polyurethane , and rimmed with local gem — Keller plant water hyacinth , which flowers at exactly the same time as neighboring sedum , lespedeza , and verbena . “ I had no idea that would happen , ” he admits with a smile . Around the raised seam of the vegetable patch , he has built a cervid fence of red cedar logs that harmonise with the woods . A nearby summerhouse is also made of rough cedar logs .
What ’s next in this ongoing collaboration between horticulturist and nature ? “ There are two island in the marshland , ” say Keller , “ where scandalmongering flag fleur-de-lis blush . ” He has start to clear stagnant trees and to add sedge and Siberian iris . “ You roll in the hay , you could expend a lifetime here . ”
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