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Joseph Keller grew up in exurban Connecticut , in a modern wood - and - glass house nuzzle on a hillside amid Norway spruces and sycamores . When he was young , Keller and his buddy played baseball game on a lawn that sloped down to a pond ring with ash , maple , and elm . Two decades subsequently , the game are long over and the pool is gone — having first become overgrown and , finally , a marsh — but Keller is still around . He go across Ithiel Town in his own menage , but gardens his parents ’ belongings . It is his horticultural laboratory and school , where he learns the lessons he apply to customer ’ garden with his landscape designing house .
“ I do it this garden , ” he says of his boyhood plate . “ My business financially underwrites what I do here . If I had my preference , I ’d never leave this place . ”
It ’s not hard to understand why . Keller has metamorphose the landscape into an inventive dialogue between horticulturist and nature . Teaching himself his cunning plant by plant , he has gone in nine years from one small bottom of native perennials to a 4 - acre garden that embraces timber and wetland , veggie and wildflower . The result is not a series of static garden pictures , neither can it ever be viewed as a bird’s-eye whole ; instead , a visitor feel this landscape painting as a constantly changing pattern of scenes and surprises .
Other gardener might have screen off the Reginald Marsh , with its unruly growth and half - fallen tree diagram , but Keller revels in it . “ The chassis and colors of planting at the bottom of the garden reflect what is occur in the fenland , ” he says . “ I endeavor to get my planting and the marsh to flow into each other . ” Though a little over-embellished loosestrife blooms in the shallow water , this invasive industrial plant is edge ( for the minute ) by aboriginal wild rice , with its riotous , feathery oral sex . To run down the J. J. Hill and meet this wilderness of towering yellow-bellied - chocolate-brown pot , Keller deploy the evenly marvelous joe pye weed , Eutrochium maculatum;Rudbeckia maxima ; andErianthusgrass , underlaid with blue star , Amsonia . The lambency from this summer symphony orchestra of colour filter into Keller ’s shady woodland garden , the resplendency of his landscape painting . There , he has clear undergrowth and unaccented second - growth tree to make way for a choice collection of perennial , bush , and understory trees that could qualify as a small botanic garden , with each plant carefully placed to enrapture the wanderer .
“ I call this whole blank space a garden of melodic theme , ” Keller says , “ because I want people who see it to come away with idea for their own gardens — what will fly high in the shade , allow ’s say , or strange plants they may never have thought of using . ” Gardening in alkaline limestone soil , he has only a few battery-acid - loving rhododendron on the property . rather , he relies on an regalia of woodland alternatives : 18 coinage of genus Viburnum , eight of dogwood , and four ofHalesia , a tree with livid , doorbell - shaped flowers . Hundreds of different perennials and a dozen ground underwrite cloak the trading floor of the plantation . Clethra perfumes the air all summer .
Many of the Tree and shrubs curve out over woodwind instrument - Saratoga chip mulch course are aborigine , but there are exotics , too . “ I do n’t separate , ” declares Keller . Here , for object lesson , is gorgeousSyringa reticulata , the Nipponese tree lilac , with lustrous John Brown , cherrylike barque and lily-white panicle of flowers . Over there is an strange native pussy willow tree , Salix melanostachys , whose blue - black ament spring from violet stems . Along another path is Magnolia ‘ Elizabeth ’ , a crossbreed that flowers a wan , pure jaundiced . Keller has even discover a daub for the Nipponese pagoda tree , Sophora japonica , an obstreperous street tree that lifts sidewalks and shoots up with alarming speed . “ Here it just thrives in the understory , without taking over . ”
Keller ’s current favorite is American senior , Sambucus canadensis . “ This underused native shrub can grow to 12 feet in a exclusive time of year . The huge leaf are flawless , the creamy blanched flower clump and regal - dim fruit are beautiful , and no pest or disease bothers it . ” Nature and horticulture terpsichore together along every path . In the gay areas , where the lawn used to border down the hill , Keller has turn out sinuous island bed . By high summer , the soil in these layer has disappeared beneath layers of foliage and flowers , many of which are head - high or taller . The paths become a labyrinth , wander amid gargantuan vegetation that wave in the zephyr . “ I bonk big plants — likePennisetumandCimicifuga — jammed against the edge of a boundary line . It creates a sense of mystery as you stroll through . ” In winter , when perennials have pall back to the ground , the same beds will be almost bare . “ Many people like ‘ winter interest ’ in a garden , ” Keller state , “ but I prefer to see the soil blow up each saltation . ”
Though his is a garden of strong bones and bluff effects , Keller also take pleasure in small meeting . Two aboriginal lobelias , redLobelia cardinalisand blueL. siphilitica , enlace along a woodland path . A shrub border near the vegetable garden weaves the efflorescence , leafage , and bark grain of inkberry , Ilex glabra , with those of hibiscus , spirea , lilac , and native boxwood . A small new recurrent bed filled with grasses mime a prairie .
Serendipity often attends these encounters . In a small pool — made from a bathtub sunk into the priming coat , sealed with polyurethane , and rim with local stone — Keller planted water hyacinth , which bloom at on the nose the same time as neighboring sedum , bush clover , and verbena . “ I had no theme that would happen , ” he admits with a smile . Around the raise beds of the vegetable eyepatch , he has built a cervid fencing of red cedar logs that harmonise with the Wood . A nearby gazebo is also made of rough true cedar log .
What ’s next in this on-going collaboration between plantsman and nature ? “ There are two island in the marshland , ” say Keller , “ where yellow flag iris bloom . ” He has commence to clear all in Tree and to add sedges and Siberian iris . “ You know , you could spend a life here . ”
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