Tag Archives: September

A Visit to Andrew Bunting’s Belvidere

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During my September Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the Philadelphia area, my favourite small garden was Andrew Bunting’s delightful property in Swarthmore. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that the owner is the Vice-President of Horticulture with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Founded in 1827, the PHS is the oldest horticultural society in the U.S., responsible for the annual Philadelphia Flower Show as well as a host of endeavors including 120 community gardens; maintenance of public landscapes in the city and suburbs including museums, the art gallery and public squares; street tree programs; the 28-acre estate garden at Meadowbrook Farm; Landcare, in which vacant city lots are turned from blighted properties to neighbourhood parks; pop-up ephemeral gardens; and a program to train former convicts to be gardeners.

Since buying the house on its one-third acre in 1999, this garden is where Andrew has experimented with an eclectic roster of plants and an evolving approach to design – in fact, five redesigns in his time there. I especially loved seeing his home through the tall, wispy wands of ‘Skyracer’ purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea), a grass that shines in my own garden in autumn. Beyond is a gravel garden bisected by a broad flagstone walk with a small patch of lawn that creates a nice balance of negative space, as well as lavenders and verbascums and other drought-tolerant plants, many native. A stone trough acts as a birdbath and a terracotta urn features a chartreuse explosion of colocasia (likely ‘Maui Gold’).

Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) with its needle-like leaves is prominent in the front garden; its blue flowers are attractive in spring but its brilliant gold fall color gives it long-season appeal. Barely visible in the foliage is a wooden chair.  Originally white, the front door and window shutters were painted gray, picking up the colors of the flagstone.

Behind the amsonia is Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ and, at left, willow-leaf spicebush (Lindera glauca var. salicifolia), which also has good autumn colour.

The vine around the door and on the house’s front wall is self-clinging Chinese silver-vein creeper (Parthenocissus henryana).  I love the mailbox and house numbers.

My colour-tuned eye picked up the echo between the red glasses indoors and the big caladium and chartreuse-and-red coleus in Andrew’s windowbox.

Our time was limited and there was so much to see, but I could have spent hours studying the gravel garden, including many native plants like giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), below. Andrew’s influences around gravel include Beth Chatto’s garden in England, the Gravel Garden designed by Lisa Roper at Chanticleer (see my latest blog here) and Jeff Epping’s work at Olbrich Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. The gravel is 1/2 inch granite but Andrew says it’s more like 1/4 inch.

Here is native wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium).

And American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) with its vibrant violet fruit.

Andrew removed much of the original driveway beside the house which was too narrow for cars and turned it into a shady sideyard garden with a path leading to the old garage – which became a charming summerhouse. Those little purple flowers are Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Butterfly’, a good fall bloomer and, incidentally, a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 2023 Gold Medal Plant Winner!

Turning the corner at the back of the house, I saw more evidence of a plantsman’s wonderland with assorted tropicals in pots and a potting bench topped by colourful annuals.

Andrew was holding court in the back garden, so I asked him to pose. His own history in horticulture is very deep. Even at a young age, he knew a career in gardening was in his future – and it relates to the name of his own garden. As he has written in an essay about becoming a gardener, “My grandfather farmed in southeastern Nebraska, just outside a little town called Belvidere. I loved those couple of weeks on the farm every summer. Something about that agrarian lifestyle resonated with me then, and still does today. I loved the crops in the field, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and the smell of hay.” He did internships at the Morton Arboretum, Fairchild Tropical Garden and the Scott Arboretum, where he worked in the late 1980s for three years.  In 1990 he visited more than a hundred gardens in England, meeting Rosemary Verey, Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd and working for a while at Penelope Hobhouse’s  Tintinhull. That autumn, he travelled to New Zealand and worked for a designer for 3 months. Returning to Pennsylvania, he got a part-time position at Chanticleer as it was becoming a public garden, working there for 18 months while starting his own landscape business on the side. In 1993, he became curator of the Scott arboretum at Swarthmore College and stayed there for 22 years, until becoming Assistant Director and Director of Plant Collections at Chicago Botanic Garden in 2015.  

I saw Andrew during a garden symposium in Chicago in 2018, below, when he spoke about how he directed the content and curation of CBG’s permanent plant collection. Next, a job offer at the Atlanta Botanic Garden arose and he became Vice-President of Horticulture and Plant Collections at Atlanta Botanic Garden, giving him the chance to grow broad-leaved plants. Then the opportunity at Pennsylvania Horticultural Society opened up and he returned to Swarthmore and the abundance of public gardens that make the Philadelphia area “America’s Garden Capital”.  

When Andrew bought the house in 1999 the back yard was filled with a jungle of pokeweed. With the help of his landscape crew and a bobcat, he installed a 35 x 12 foot patio spanning the back of the house.  It’s the perfect setting for a lush ‘garden room’ created with pots of banana, canna and palms.  These tropicals get carried down to the cool, damp, cellar-like basement for winter through the entrance partially shown at left.

There are potted plants everywhere, many on vintage tables…..

…. and étageres.

Textural foliage combinations caught my eye, like this chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) with Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ euphorbia and a fancy-leaved pelargonium.

There are bromeliads here too, like Portea petropolitana.

Most chairs in the garden were built by Chanticleer’s Dan Benarcik – and can actually be ordered custom online as kits or fully assembled! Note that the granite gravel has been used here, which Andrew says is a less expensive solution than flagstone paving. At right, you can see the entrance to the covered part of the summerhouse, aka the old garage.

So many artful touches here, combining with the rich plant palette to create a beautiful outdoor living space.

Let’s take a peek into the summerhouse, where a comfy leather sofa awaits.  As Andrew once said in an online Masterclass chat with Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle, many people in the Philadelphia area go to the New Jersey shore or the Poconos in summer, but he prefers his own garden – “less traffic and more access to gardening”.  And I can imagine sitting in here behind the screen doors during a summer thunderstorm, candles lit, perhaps with a little glass of something tasty.

The back of the summerhouse is more open to the elements and features the perfect stage set. I don’t know what the silvery Adonis mannequin was once wearing on his sculpted torso, but I’m willing to bet it was Ralph Lauren, now nicely accented with tillandsias and begonias.

Nearby are more colocasias and blue Salvia guaranitica.

I loved all the seating (still more Dan Benarcik chairs), this time on a shady patio with a dining table.

Sometimes the seating is more about atmosphere and lichen-rich patina than it is about an actual place to sit.

In a shady spot at the back of the garden is a naturalistic pond because… every garden needs a little water.

I was sad not to have time to take a peek behind the back fence into the neighbour’s yard, where there’s an Andrew-designed large, shared quadrangle vegetable garden, but it was late in the season for veggies anyway.  Mostly, I was happy that we were able to see this lovely garden in dry weather, since we were soon to find ourselves on the soaking end of Tropical Storm Ophelia.

Harvest Time on the Palouse

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After our lovely one-night stay at Abeja Inn and Winery in Walla Walla following our visit to Oregon’s John Day Fossil Unit National Monument, including the spectacular Painted Hills and the excellent Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, we headed north on Highway 12 in the direction of Spokane via Dayton and Colfax.  My purpose in visiting this part of Washington State (apart from returning eventually to Vancouver to fly back home to Toronto) during our Pacific Northwest road trip was to see The Palouse. As a photographer I had admired my colleagues’ summer photos of the rolling green hills of the area. Even though driving through on September 11th meant there was little green to be seen, I was looking forward to visiting this unique place, one of the Seven Wonders of Washington.

Right away, we caught the flavour of the next several hours as we were flanked on both sides by wheat, wheat and more wheat. (Most of the following photos are through the window of our rental car, so if they’re not quite up to par, blame dirty windshields at 60 miles an hour.)

There was something so beautiful about these highway scenes, especially in mid-September when the wheat is nearing harvest. And make no mistake about it, this is big business. In the top 5 of wheat-producing states, Washington is #4 after #1 North Dakota, #2 Kansas, #3 Montana; Idaho is #5. In 2018, when we visited, wheat growers in Washington harvested 2.2 million acres of wheat with an average yield of 70.8 bushels per acre. Total production in the year was 153.2 million bushels with a value of $690 million. Of its total production, 85-90 percent is exported, compared with the overall US total of 46 percent. (Statistics from the Washington Grain Commission)

We passed grain elevators…..

….. and little farms. Though we passed this one at 60 miles an hour, I was delighted later to be able to make out the name in my image and read the story online. Just Another Chance Ranch near Waitsburg rescues horses and connects them in programs “to bring healing and purpose to youth”.

Between Waitsburg and Dayton, the characteristic rolling hills of the Palouse began to take shape behind the Columbia County Grain Growers Silo. The strip farming on the slope seems to be part of the strategy to conserve soil, a major concern in the region. More on that later.

We passed through the small town of Dayton.

For the most part we saw wheat, but here and there farmers grew other crops that stood out in sharp contrast to the sea of golden grain.

Wind farms dot the landscape in eastern Washington and Oregon. This is the Tucannon River Valley with the Hopkins Ridge Wind Farm.

The river valley sustains its share of agriculture. You can’t see the Tucannon River, a tributary of the Snake, but it’s winding beneath the hills.

We crossed the Snake River via the Elmer C. Huntley Central Ferry Bridge.

We were on Highway 127 now. I loved the little farms with their clusters of windbreak trees.

As we drove through the hills our vision was limited but I was sure I could see smoke from a fire in the distance. “Maybe a grass fire?” I said to my husband.

A few miles later, we discovered the source of “the smoke”. It was dust blowing from a farmer tilling his field. Fittingly, we were near the town of Dusty! This might be a good place to talk for a bit about soil conservation on the Palouse. Before farmers arrived from the east, the region was bunchgrass prairie, including bluebunch wheatgrass (which we saw in Oregon’s Painted Hills a few days earlier). Palouse wildflowers included arrowleaf balsamroot, biscuitroot, Lewis flax, prairie smoke, velvet lupine and sticky geranium. Wild roses grew among the grasses, as did serviceberry, hawthorn and chokecherry. The prairie yielded much of the traditional food and medicine for the indigenous people of the area, including the Palouse (Palus), Coeur d’Alene and Spokane Tribes. In 1855, a member of the surveying party of Isaac Stevens, a US Army officer and first Governor of the newly-created Washington Territory, wrote:  “I will again say, we have been astonished today at the luxuriance of the grass and the richness of the soil. The whole view presents to the eye a vast bed of flowers in all their varied beauty. The country is a rolling tableland and the soil is like that of the prairies of Illinois.” But the arrival of the Army, the resultant Indian wars and subjugation of the local tribes spelled the end of the use of the virgin prairie for its natural gifts. Homesteaders arrived from the east in the 1860s and began to dig up the Palouse Prairie to plant crops. With the arrival of the railroad, farmers could ship their grain to points east, enabling large-scale wheat farming. By the time the disastrous 1920s Dust Bowl of the Midwest forced the nation to understand that the erosion of topsoil was caused by bad farming practices coupled with drought, wheat had been grown for a half-century in Washington State. But the Palouse was different: it was hilly, not flat, and the erosion came not just from wind but from winter snows. Without the roots of the native plants, the silty Palouse soil – called “loess”, which rhymes with “nurse” – was highly susceptible to hillside erosion. In 1930, the Pacific Northwest Soil Erosion Station at Pullman, Washington opened, one of ten to open in the U.S. under passionate conservationist Hugh Bennett, to study the “national menace” of soil erosion. Experimental plots were set up using major cropping and tilling systems and testing the run-off, while demonstration plots showed the benefits of good farming practices such as stopping summer fallow: i.e.leaving fields unplanted every other year, requiring excessive tillage of the stubble fields when the soil was at its wettest, causing it to wash away. (If you’re interested, you can read a fascinating memoir by William A. Rockie, the soil conservationist who set up the Pullman station.) Today, soil conservation remains an important focus in the Palouse where it is estimated that in just over a century of farming, half the soil has disappeared. Farmers are encouraged to do direct (no-till) seeding in the stubble mulch of the previous crop; to do contour strip farming, especially on slopes; and to plant cover crops. Steeper land can be placed into the USDA-funded Conservation Reserve Program, effectively paying land owners not to farm (though this program has unfortunately seen cutbacks recently).

With all that in mind, let’s get back to our road trip. Two-and-a-half hours after leaving Walla Walla, we were now 8 miles north of Colfax on Hume Road in sight of Steptoe Butte, a unique geologic formation in the Palouse.

A little while later and we were at the entrance to Steptoe Butte State Park. We parked on the access road so I could get out of the car and photograph it straight on. At a height of 1,100 feet (335 metres), it doesn’t exactly “loom” over the Palouse but it’s definitely the tallest thing around. It was named (alas) after the US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe, famous for his defeat (and retreat), along with his 164 men, by a combined force of one thousand Palouse, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane warriors during the 1858 Battle of Pine Creek.  Despite being immortalized as the “Steptoe Disaster” the butte was named for him – and in fact became the archetype for other such geologic formations, where an island-like bedrock mountain protrudes through a lava flow, in this case a 400Ma Precambrian quartzite mountain protruding through the 16Ma Columbia River Basalt flow (see my previous blog). In 1946 pharmacist Virgil McCoskey, who had spent his childhood on the family farm at the base of Steptoe Butte and was passionate about retaining it as a natural feature, donated 120 acres (49 hectares) to form the state park, later increasing it to 150 acres . In 2016, Kent and Elaine Bassett purchased 437 acres (177 hectares) of the lower slopes to ensure its protection.

Let’s drive up Steptoe Butte. Here you see the native quartzite bedrock peeking through late summer grasses.

From Wiki: “Quartzite is a hard, non-foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts (during mountain building). Pure quartzite is usually white to grey, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink and red due to varying amounts of iron oxide.”

We stopped partway up to get a sense of the mountain. Those transmission towers – or earlier versions – were erected when Virgil McCoskey was still involved, and he hated them. But you have to admit that the telecom companies found the ideal place.

Here are more colours of the native quartzite at the summit….

…. including pink-splashed rock at the precipice.

There is room for parking at the summit which at one time featured a hotel! Built in 1888 by English-born merchant James S. “Cashup” Davis (for cash upfront), it wasn’t exactly a roaring success. In time Davis lived alone there, hoping the odd guest might drive the winding road up the butte. He died in 1896, and in 1911 it burned down in a fire started by teens.

There are three interpretive signs at the top: one about Virgil McCroskey and Cashup’s Grand Hotel; one identifies the mountains visible in the distance in the Selkirk Range; and one explains….

….. the geology of Steptoe Butte.

I tried not to notice the telecommunications towers…..

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Now, with your permission, I’m going to geek out a little on crop pattern photography.  I switched back and forth from my camera with the wide-angle lens to the one with the 70-200 F4 telephoto lens. I wanted the full panorama, but also the incredible texture of the fields

At first I was disappointed that I wasn’t going to be seeing the Palouse in early summer, when the crops reflect back a hundred shades of green. But then I realized there are hundreds of shades of brown as well.

The tracks made by the big combines in the shorn fields were like the nap of well-worn velvet.

From a thousand feet up, the farms and wheat trucks below could have been tiny toys.

I tried to imagine living in a farm down there in the Palouse, hoping for summer rain to water the grains and not getting any. Other years, seeing your seed and soil washed away in spring torrents.

Green gullies and winding roads were the seams in this undulating harvest cloth.

The combine patterns emphasized the contours of the loess hills.

In some respects the Palouse reminded me of the hills of Tuscany, only with Ponderosa pines instead of cypress trees.

The same combine tractor worked the crops below. And we would see it later as we headed out of the park.

Looking south, the view included a Douglas fir on the butte’s slope.

A hundred names for brown. Buff bronze ecru sepia ash camel taupe chocolate tan heather ochre…. and so many more. The colours obviously reflect the crops, but I couldn’t begin to separate them by hue. In the Palouse, they grow wheat in all its variety and gluten content. Soft white wheat, both winter and spring, is used in cakes and cereals and pastries. Hard red wheat is for breads and pizza crusts. Soft red winter wheat is best for pretzels. Durum is the wheat for pasta. Hard white represents ethnic menus, especially Asian noodles and steambreads. Barley grows here too. Lentils are a major crop, having arrived via seed from Europe in 1916. Farms in the Palouse now supply 95 percent of America’s lentils. Chickpeas are grown in the Palouse as well.

We headed back down the mountain but I begged to stop at a little clearing.

I wanted to fill my imagination with these fields….

….. and their captivating textures.

Off in the distance I could see more wind turbines.

I focused with my telephoto lens…..

….. and it occurred to me that the prairie wind that turns the blades that powers the turbines…..

…. is the same wind that carries away the silty soil of the Palouse into the air behind the blades of the big combines.

We got down to the bottom of the butte and met one of its resident deer skittering across the road.

No doubt it had been eating the apples in the historic old orchard nearby….

…. where no one was there to harvest them.

We laid out a picnic of the deli food I’d bought at the Safeway in Bend, Oregon, two days earlier, still cold thanks to the refrigerator in the well-stocked kitchen of Abeja Inn back in Walla Walla. Some things had even been transported all the way from the supermarket near my brother’s place outside Vancouver ten days ago. No one can accuse us of not being frugal on the road!

Then we headed north towards Spokane. Naturally there was road construction holding things up, but I didn’t mind.

Wheat fields and blue sky.  What could be lovelier for a last stop on the highway in one of America’s most picturesque bread baskets, the Palouse.

Flora & Friendship at Seattle’s Soest Garden

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What a pleasure it was for me to visit the University of Washington Botanic Garden’s (UWBG) Center for Urban Horticulture and the Soest Herbaceous Display Garden in Seattle earlier this month! Part of the fun was that I was meeting a little group of Facebook friends for a picnic – a bring-what-you-wish buffet among people who’ve “known” each other online for years, but answered my invite to meet “in the flesh” on the first leg of a 2-1/2 week circular driving vacation my husband and I embarked on from Vancouver throughout Washington and Oregon. (More on that later.)  But much of the pleasure came from exploring a garden where the fullness of late summer was on show everywhere, including these spectacular swamp hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos) adjacent to the parking area.

We wound our way past an impressive Hydrangea integrifolia (a new species for me) blanketing a building wall…..

…. down a path beside the library…..

…and arrived in a courtyard outside the NHS Hall. Here were colourful container displays of annuals and tropicals…..

…. and a lovely combination of ‘Rustic Orange’ coleus (Plectranthus scuttelarioides) with Begonia boliviensis.

I was drawn by the sound of water through the arches in the little Fragrance Garden (where we’d have our picnic later)…..

….toward the charming fountain at the center of the Soest Garden.

The Soest Garden is designed with eight beds radiating out from the central fountain and all divided by paths. This is what it looks like standing at the fountain and turning slowly to view the garden.

At the beginning of September, the garden was resplendent with ornamental grasses and late-flowering perennials. Here are some of the spectacular plants and combinations, beginning with beautiful ‘Sparkling Burgundy’ pineapple lily (Eucomis comosa) combined with Antonow’s honey bush (Melianthus major ‘Antonow’s Blue’).

The foliage on the honey bush is entrancing, isn’t it?

It was fun to see azure-blue Agapanthus inapertus.

I liked the dark-red colour echo going on with the Potentilla thurberi and the ‘Cheyenne’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum).

The beds have useful signs to identify some (not all) of the plants.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen largest masterwort (Astrantia maxima) before.

Northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) was one of several native grasses putting on a late-summer show..

Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’) is always among the most graceful of edgers in any design.

In a garden full of often-rare plants, there were some familiar favourites, like Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’.

Persicaria ‘Painter’s Palette’ was paired with Phlox paniculata ‘Nora Leigh’. 

Long-blooming Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’ peeked out from a cloud of fall asters still in bud.

Here’s a fabulous Spanish grass I wish was hardy for us, giant feather grass (Stipa gigantea).

And here it is as background for hemp-agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum) and the newish white-flowered coreopsis Star Cluster, at front.

I’ve always liked the romantic late-summer combination of pink-flowered border sedums like ‘Autumn Joy’ with the soft blue flowers of Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia ‘Little Spire’).

The shape of this bed is enhanced by the chartreuse foliage of Sedum ruprestre ‘Angelina’, which is itself enhanced by the soft shield fern (Polystichum setiferum ‘Divisilobum’) behind it.


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At the opposite end of the garden to that which I entered is the public entrance from the parking lot. Here visitors can see the donors who made this wondrous garden possible, the late Orin Soest and his wife Althea Soest. As the obituary for Orin Soest stated: “In 1990, he began a relationship that continues in perpetuity with the University of Washington and the Center for Urban Horticulture. In 1998, The Orin and Althea Soest Herbaceous Garden was dedicated and has been a cherished gift to the University and the community of Seattle for its educational and healing purposes.”

And here we see the overall layout of the Center for Urban Horticulture and the context of the display garden within it.

Grasses like variegated purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea ‘Variegata’) are airy enough to act as scrims or screens for plants behind them. I liked how the little flame lilies (Hesperantha coccinea) sparkle behind the molinia.

Here’s the purple moor grass from the far side of the bed.

And this fabulous big shrub is Himalayan honeysuckle (Leycesteria formosa).

Although the flowers had withered, angel’s fishing rod (Dierama pulcherrimum) still created an interesting effect in this bed.

One of my favourite images of the Soest garden was this luscious pairing of globe thistle (Echinops ritro) and ‘Gateway’ Joe Pye Weed (Eutrochium maculatum). Even in the northeast, this is one combination we can carry off!

This is the view from the far end of the garden. What a lovely place for strolling slowly, absorbing the plant combinations and taking in details large and small.

I think this is a dry streambed in the South Slope below the garden, with a variety of heaths, heathers and drought-tolerant sedges like Carex buchananii.

The beautiful begonia (B. grandis ‘Heron’s Pirouette’) was collected in Japan in 1997 by Dan Hinkley (Heronswood) and is hardy to USDA Zone 6.

Circling around the garden, I came to some benches framed with ornamental grasses and containers of succulents.

I loved the way this tree aeonium (Aeonium arboreum var. atropurpureum) – in the container with blue chalk sticks (Senecio serpens) – echoed the flowers of the fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides).  Behind is tall toe toe grass (Cortaderia richardii) and yellow-flowered shrubby hare’s ear (Bupleurum fruticosum).

Finally I came to a generous stand of Fuchsia magellanica …..

….being explored for nectar by a honey bee.  It seemed like the perfect time to stop for lunch.

***************

For it was now time to meet my friends: Seattle photographer-writer-philosopher David Perry and his partner, UW School of Medicine Administrator Mary Pyper, (me in the centre), the Center for Urban Horticulture Elisabeth C. Miller Library’s  librarian-poet Rebecca Alexander,  and Sue Nevler, who has been trustee or board member for some of Seattle’s finest gardens, including this one.

We tucked into our picnic, made special with freshly-smoked salmon and all the trimmings from David and Mary…..

…… and an apple cake made by Rebecca’s partner, Carlo, from their own Akane apples.

There was a gift of dahlias from Sue’s garden, with a special ‘pollinator nosegay’ to honour my love of bees.

We took our plates to the Fragrance Garden, where scented lilies…..

…. and white summer phlox (P. paniculata ‘David’)…..

… and English roses perfumed the air.

It was a day for exploring a most charming garden – and bringing friendships made in cyberspace down to fruitful, late-summer earth.