Outdoor Rooms English landscape provides inspiration, ideas for Maine gardeners

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When Lois Stack took a group to England last spring to tour some of the country’s well-known gardens, she wanted to collect ideas.

She knew she couldn’t re-create the 100-acre landscape that reveals itself bit by bit at Stourhead. Nor did she have a gigantic manor like Cliveden to surround with sweeping lawns and rose gardens. But that didn’t matter. She could use these famous properties as a starting point, and find aspects of the gardens that Mainers could use in their own back yards.

“What I usually think of English gardens is a cottage garden, but that’s one little part of what an English garden is,” Stack said.

Stack, a specialist in ornamental horticulture for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, gave a talk recently at UMaine on “Garden Design with an English Accent.” The 10 gardens and one garden show that Stack and her group toured are too big, too old and too elaborate for most people to copy at home. Besides, what fun is a copy of a garden? One of the sheer joys in gardening is creating a personal landscape. Rather than detailed garden plans, Stack came up with themes that gardeners can interpret any way they choose.

“A garden should be personal,” Stack said. “It should reflect its gardener.”

No garden on their tour illustrated this better than the one at Iford Manor, originally designed by architect and landscape gardener Harold Peto. In the classic Italianate style, he incorporated urns, a sarcophagus, marble benches and statues nestled among the cypress and yew. The current owner of the property has taken the gardens in an entirely different direction. Elizabeth Cartwright Hignett is a poet, and in an area of the grounds where there is a checkerboard of grass and stone, she has inlaid a poem in the alternating stone slabs, mosaic-style, using light and dark rocks.

“There’s something special about what they put into this garden,” Stack said.

A personal statement needn’t be this dramatic, however. It just requires gardeners to take a look at their interests, whether they involve bird-watching or collecting outdoor sculpture, and including them in the landscape. It can be as simple as hanging up a few bird feeders or as elaborate as planting tulips in the shape of a sailboat.

This ties in with the gardens at Sudeley Castle, where a closer look at the gardens reveals one sculpture after another among the greenery.

“A garden is more than just plants,” Stack said.

Whether it’s a pergola strewn with vines, a birdbath or a wild, wiry sculpture, different architectural elements add an element of discovery to a garden that can be more interesting than plants alone.

One of those architectural elements could be a bench, which gives gardeners a place to sit back and enjoy their efforts.

“I know a lot of people who have a bench in their garden but they never sit in it,” Stack said.

When she was touring the gardens at The Courts, Stack noticed a blue bench that jumped out from the reddish-brown smoke tree behind it. At first, she thought it was a little jarring, but the more she thought about it, the more she thought it belonged there, as a place to savor the garden.

“It’s one thing to look at a garden but it’s another thing to be in a garden, not just to work in it,” she said.

At Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Stack found a way to cut back on all that work, too. Though much of the garden is formal, with velvety lawns edged in manicured hedges, there’s one section that’s just a field. The meadow has wide paths mowed through it so that people can walk through it, but essentially, it’s just a field. After seeing this, Stack realized that she and her husband didn’t have to keep mowing the meadow behind their house. Now, they just have a path mowed through it.

“We can still enjoy the field, and it encourages wildflowers, birds, insects,” she said.

The tall, rounded hedges in the more formal part of Sissinghurst sectioned off one part of the garden from another – a pattern Stack noticed in many English gardens.

“One thing that really makes English gardens different from American gardens is that American gardens are open,” Stack said. “English gardens are much more like outdoor rooms. There are walls and fences and the laburnum walk might be between gardens. That makes gardens pretty special.”

The laburnum walk consists of a woody shrub, often flowering, pruned so it covers an arbor that people walk under. It’s a classic element of the English garden, and they are fairly common.

“Those transitions become gardens within themselves,” Stack said. “You have to move from one garden to the other and take your time to enjoy the trip.”

A benefit of creating transitions, whether a laburnum walk, a fence, or a bridge over a stream, is that they add an element of the unknown to the garden.

“You have to go and explore it. You can’t just sit in one place and see the whole garden. You have to experience it,” Stack said. “It encourages you to spend time in the garden and get to know it.”

Transitional areas, such as the walkways Stack saw at Hidcote Manor, break up aspects of the garden that may not necessarily look that great next to each other.

“It also means you can have very different ideas in the same landscape,” she said. “Sometimes it’s difficult to get these ideas to blend together and look right.”

The same can be said of formal gardens in a natural landscape. Often, Stack said, people have gardening ideas that look completely out of place with their surroundings, such as a cactus garden in Maine, or a carpet of grass edged with crisp rows of flowers beside an overgrown, woody hillside.

“Sometimes we have very unique garden ideas, and that’s great, that’s what makes it individual … but sometimes our ideas are so unique they don’t blend into their surroundings,” Stack said.

To remedy this, gardeners can take a cue from Cliveden, where the transition from formal garden to wooded path looks seamless. The simplest way to do this is to incorporate native plants at the edges to blur the line where garden leaves off and nature begins.

In some gardens, such as Heale House, it pays to let nature take over. Rather than fight the greenery growing up between stones on a path, the gardeners there let it grow, adding a little character to what could’ve been a boring walkway.

“If nature invades your garden in a positive way, let it,” Stack said. “A little wildness makes your garden friendly and invites people to explore it.”

Another way to invite people into the garden is to make sure they can’t see too much at once. At Stourhead, a classic landscape garden, a path winds around 100 acres of rolling hills, lush old trees, flower gardens and a pond. As visitors walk around the path, they’re greeted by something new at every turn, leaving them to wonder what they’ll see next.

“If you’re enjoying something, you’ll enjoy it longer if you can only see it bit by bit,” Stack said.

At Kiftsgate, Stack found that a garden built on different levels also encourages exploration. Here, the gardeners have turned the hilly landscape into an asset, rather than dwelling on the challenge it presents.

“It seems that when people develop new houses they often bulldoze what’s there and make it flat,” Stack said. “All that landscape and relief adds interest to a garden.”

She encourages gardeners to “not just deal with it, but embellish it and make it an interesting part of the garden.

“If you have relief in your landscape, don’t flatten it. Leave it there and let it become part of your garden.”

Regardless of the shape or size of the yard or garden plot, every gardener can invite a little green into the flower beds. Adding foliage plants to the mix ensures that there’s something interesting to look at even when nothing’s in bloom. Plus, they add texture and depth.

“We’re so focused on flowers,” Stack said. “It really struck me how spectacular the foliage was. That adds tremendous interest in the off-flowering times.”

At the Chelsea Flower Show in London, Stack saw a display of iris and cabbage planted together that she plans to re-create with a group of master gardeners in Orono.

“The foliage is just beautiful,” Stack said as she showed a slide of the display. “You don’t need to think of vegetables as just food. It’s stunning. There’s almost nothing in bloom in this garden and yet it’s beautiful because of the foliage.”

Perhaps the important gardening idea, however, came from Barnsley House, the home of garden author Rosemary Verey. There, Verey developed her garden around her house, adding to it as the years went by. As she got older, she transferred care of the grounds to her son and developed “a mature person’s garden,” with level grounds, lots of containers and raised beds. This ensures that Verey can still enjoy her garden without worrying about straining herself.

“You change as you age,” Stack said. “Your interests change. Your abilities change. If you do it right, gardening should last a lifetime.”

Stack plans take another guide garden tour in either England or Germany in the summer of 2002. A maximum of 12 people can attend. Anyone interested should send a note to: Lois Stack, 1153 Kennebec Road, Hampden 04444.

Tips on planting English gardens in Maine

During a talk at UMaine on Maine Garden Day, Lois Stack offered the following ideas to incorporate elements of classic English gardens into the Maine landscape:

. Foliage is not just photosynthetic; it’s also photogenic. Good use of foliage can add texture, color, form and variety to the garden year round.

. Blur the line between developed and natural areas to help your garden “fit” its surroundings.

. Invite nature into your garden. When nature invades your landscape in a positive way, support the invasion.

. Grade changes add interest to the landscape.

. Getting there is half the fun. The passage from one garden to the next can be a simple opening or gate, but a pergola, walkway or other more elaborate transition can become a very interesting garden in itself.

. You’ll enjoy a treat longer if you take little bites. A landscape with hidden views, twisting paths and grade changes forces the visitor to get more involved.

. Looking at a garden is different from being in a garden. Your garden is the perfect place to listen to the birds, read a book, smell the flowers or have a good conversation.

. Gardens should be more than just plant collections. Interesting landscape (and sculpture) creates the context of a garden.

. Take time to enjoy your garden – reduce the labor. If you don’t enjoy some parts of gardening, eliminate those chores.

. Your garden should reflect you. You’ll enjoy your garden more if it reflects your ideas – you might be a bird-watcher, a sculpture collector, an amateur day lily breeder or a collector of a particular group of plants. Design your garden around your ideas and interests, and it will become your own.

. Gardening should last a lifetime. If you’re looking forward to a time when you’ll spend more time relaxing but still maintain some level of garden activity, plan ahead. Build raised beds or reduce the number of high-maintenance gardens in your landscape.