Date: Fri 12-Jun-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

Gertrude-Jekyll-Glebe-Bleach

Full Text:

SUBURBAN GARDENER: Six Unusual Gardens To Visit

By Anthony C. Bleach

Six private gardens in Litchfield County will be open for an annual tour

sponsored by the Gertrude Jekyll Garden and Glebe House Museum in Woodbury on

Sunday, June 21, from 10 am to 4 pm.

The gardens are located in South Kent, New Preston, Washington and

Bridgewater. They display a stylish mix of landscape design and

architecturally inspired gardens, representing a wide array of styles from

casual to formal.

In South Kent, the garden built into a hillside encloses dwarf apple trees,

and a Medieval garden with a rustic fence encircles abundant cutting flowers.

In Washington, participants are invited to follow the path to a kitchen

garden, a potting shed garden and a pool garden and to admire the pond and

pasture beyond.

Also in Washington, a colorful cottage garden is featured.

One home in Bridgewater boasts a garden of terraced hillsides and miniature

fruit trees, a vegetable and cutting garden, a perennial border, a rock

garden, an herb garden and a heather garden with views over the Shepaug River.

Also in Bridgewater, participants will enjoy a private garden of mature

azaleas and rhododendrons overlooking Lake Lillinonah as well as a collection

of more than 100 varieties of fragrant lilacs and a shrub and grass garden.

The six gardens on tour are open for self-guided tours. Participants will

receive maps and tickets by mail. Tickets, which cost $60, are available only

by reservation in advance.

A gourmet box luncheon will be served on the lawn of the Glebe House Museum,

the site of the only surviving Jekyll Garden in the United States. All

proceeds support the upkeep of the Jekyll Garden.

The Gardener Miss Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll loved the cottage garden and reinterpreted it in multiple

medium and small-scale landscapes in Edwardian England. Her books Colour in

the Flower Garden (1908) and Gardens for Small Country Houses (1912) helped

popularize her ideas on "controlled" wildness and herbaceous borders.

Much of her design approach was developed during visits to the Austrian Tyrol

and the Swiss Alps. Her studies of the tiny formalism of the vernacular (or

popular) gardens she found in them added to her design repertory.

Other books by Gertrude Jekyll are Wood and Garden, Home and Garden and Old

English Household Life. The recent work Gardens of a Golden Afternoon treats

the lives and work of Miss Jekyll and Sir Edwin Lutyens, with whom she shared

a long collaboration.

She had profound influence on modern garden design and many consider her the

greatest gardener of the 20th Century.

The Glebe House garden includes 600 feet of classic English style mixed border

and foundation plantings, a planted stone terrace and an intimate rose allee!

We shall never know why the garden Miss Jekyll planned was never fully

installed in the 1920s. In fact its existence was forgotten until UConn

graduate student Susan Schnare found it among the papers of the great Beatrix

Farrand at Berkeley in 1985. Nelly Doolan of Woodbury then enlisted, with the

passion of an apostle, the aid of garden experts, students at Naugatuck Valley

College and The Jekyll Association of weeders (jaws!) to restore this unique

garden.

Although the Gertrude Jekyll Garden is not part of the tour, later this month

it is open to the public and all proceeds will benefit this historic garden.

For more information about the Glebe House Museum, the Gertrude Jekyll Garden

or the Litchfield County garden tour, contact the Glebe House Museum by

calling 263-2855.

(Anthony C. Bleach coordinates the horticulture degree program at Naugatuck

Valley College in Waterbury.)