‘Glimpse of The Garden’—

Gardens’ Beauty Equal The Sum Of The Total

By Nancy K. Crevier

“A Glimpse Of The Garden” is a miniseries focusing on the heart of a gardener’s work — a special spot, an extraordinary plant, a place of respite, or a place that evokes a heartfelt memory. What is down the garden path of your friends and neighbors? What is down your garden path?

“I love everything in total: the lawns, the gardens, the house. Everything seems to fit like a painting. It’s a very special place,” said Henry Hull. Mr Hull is the owner of an early 1800s home surrounded by antique statuary and gardens that, with the help of friends and professionals, he has created since purchasing the property in 2005.

Towering magnolia and lilac bushes line the gravel driveway leading up to the house, where a mossy path breaks to either side of the house. It leads one way to the stone patio at the front. There, white hydrangea blossoms lean over the short wall on one end, and an ancient rhododendron spreads its arms the breadth of another side.

Turn the other way on the path and head past the sun garden, to the deck overlooking the back yard. The foundation of the home is knee deep in hosta and fern, with tall stalks of purple turtle head peeking around one corner.

From the deck, the sun garden meanders off to one side. A woodland garden at the rear of the property, all trees when the property was purchased, beckons on a warm day. A smaller garden that blooms with hundreds of bulb flowers is dormant in late summer, only tall stands of maidenhair grass drawing the eye. A picket fence shaded by joe pye bushes surrounds the pool, where potted red canna, geraniums, palms, and phlox add color to the relaxing area.

The property’s original well, located at the entrance to the pool area, continues to provide water for irrigation through a pipe that creeps over the edge, and serves as a large planter for hot pink pentas, colorful Joseph’s Coat, red geraniums, and delicate white euphorbia.

None of the gardens existed when the retired Wall Street and insurance businessman first walked the property in 2005, but Mr Hull could see the character of the house and property.

Mr Hull, current president of Newtown Horticulture Club and a master gardener since 2007, fashioned his sun garden after being inspired by those at Bartlett Arboretum in Stamford. The garden is anchored at one end by a white tree hydrangea, a gift from a co-worker’s wife. At the other end of the 50-foot long stretch of garden, buddleia and hyssop invite butterflies and bees to feast. In between are found boxwood, red bee balm, lamb’s ear, the remains of the summer’s cosmos, and low growing lambium with its dusky purple flowers and white-frosted leaves. A cluster of Marguerite daisies stretches white petaled flowers out beneath a tall stand of Mexican sunflowers. In late summer, clumps of saffron-colored black-eyed Susans and pink, white and rose-colored phlox add dashes of color to the areas once brightened by day lilies, climbing hydrangea crawling up the pole to one of two birdhouses from the 1800s, and early summer blooming clematis. Buds on the Rose of Sharon hint at the purple flowers they will become. Where flowers do not bloom, hosta and fern ensure no bare spots will show.

The woodland garden offers a reprieve from the heat. Through a cast iron archway, a rustic stone path leads visitors in a circle past latent peonies draped over the knee-high fencing, bee balm and delphinium plants, and red and white-leafed caladium to a mossy stone bench. There one can sit in wonder beneath the shade of an elephant magnolia, an extremely rare tree with head-sized green leaves. The elephant magnolia is one of several lovely things on the property when Mr Hull bought it, he said. Included in that list is a tin cornice-type “ornament” that presides over a circular patch of pachysandra on the front lawn.

“There are  many stories about the ornament. One is that it came off the roof of the Vanderbilt mansion in New York City,” Mr Hull said, and added, “I have no proof. The ornament was here long before I was, but it makes a good story.”

A good story is what Mr Hull tells the youngest visitors that come to his house about the tall maple in his yard. In the hollow of the tree just near the roots is a space “just big enough for fairies to go in. I call it the Fairy Tree, and have even put a little door there,” said Mr Hull. To further the experience, he tells his youngest guests that after dark, the fairies party nearby under the canopy of the pine trees.

The gardens are planted to provide beauty through the seasons, said Mr Hull, and he is appreciative of the overall joy he finds in them.

“There is nothing I like better,” he admitted, “than sitting in my pool area and looking back toward the house. It is so peaceful.”

That is what is down the garden path at Henry Hull’s.