Kentucky's Secret Gardens

[Music] welcome to kentucky's secret garden i'm tavia cathcart brown and i've been passionate about plants and gardening since i was a little girl in this show you'll meet other kentuckians who share this passion will visit a variety of fascinating private gardens across the state and learn why and how they were created every garden is as unique as the interests and aspirations of its owners kentucky secret gardens are found on large country estates and in tiny backyards in the city they're filled with beautiful views inspiring ideas and plenty of surprises please join me as we take a look at what's beyond the garden gate my very first memory was when i was about two years old and i was crawling in my grandmother's zinnia garden and my first love affair was with flowers my husband and i designed our garden to be a paradise for butterflies birds and bees and it's a secret garden getaway for us my garden is located on a farm in louisville it serves as a source of joy for my husband and for me it engages us with nature in a hands-on way it serves pollinators such as bees and monarch butterflies and birds which really need help right now and in fact it's a certified monarch way station the front garden is really just to soften the front of the house and it's sunny so we get to put lots of our sunny plants out there the backyard is more of our secret garden entices you in gets you up close and personal with the pollinators and is really a place to relax i like to feel enclosed by plants enclosed within a garden room that's what makes me happy when we decided on the different seating areas we wanted to view the garden from different perspectives and then one of my favorite spots is our hammock the hammock is shady there's a wishbone branch right above when i look up and i always make wishes on it and it looks literally like a wishbone and it's also a great spot because it's near the hostas and the heucheras the birds like to come visit if you're quiet it's a very restful spot art has a way of just adding surprises to the garden we like art that has been done by maybe somebody who's not trained as an artist but who really has their own vision we have art that might flow with a wind with a breeze other art people have given us a little ceramic fox or something we might tuck it under a flower so that only we know it's there but when we see it it makes us think of the person who gave it to us we have at one time up to 14 different bird feeders and usually around half a dozen bird houses we adore birds birds are colorful they're playful they have really funny personalities [Music] the reason that i picked the flowers i did for the garden really has to do with their beauty it has to do with their colors when they flower i love things to flower year round has to do with the textures of the leaves but really at the heart of it is are they beautiful do they have beautiful flowers when a gardener chooses a plant the number one thing to look at is will this grow in my zone every area has its in kentucky we're zoned in six or seven some winters are colder than others and some summers are hotter than others plant plants for zone six and you'll be safe choose a plant that will grow in shade or sun dry or moist areas depending on what you need in your garden right plant right place choose one that speaks to you in some way use your creativity and imagine what you want your garden to look like and then take a chance you can always move a plant you can always give it away trade for another plant with another gardener our garden is really a perennial garden and the garden has native spring wildflowers lots of native shrubs the good old gardener sang is a first-year plant sleeps the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps which means it takes three years for perennials really to strut their stuff and to look beautiful it's hard because most gardeners are not patient we really enjoy being in the garden together but in general i'd say the lines come down to matt doing all the hard work and i get to do the fun pretty work we make a good garden team we usually spend a lot of energy in the spring in the fall when we mulch and we add new plants and we prune and we trim back in spring you'll start to see little weeds come up it's so much easier to dig up the weeds when they're just coming up than to wait for them to get three feet tall with deep root systems so one of the best things to do in spring is to actually get out there look for your ground ivy and your hen bits and different weeds that you know far too well and dig it up and it will be gone i've studied botany in college but i'd like to say that i'm a self-taught ethnobotanist there's something incredibly rewarding about growing your own food if you plant something that you absolutely love or you absolutely love to cook with or just smell then you're always going to want to go outside and look at your plants and be involved with your garden kentucky has five different species of hibiscus that are native and they're under planted in gardens and they give such a phenomenal show they flower for anywhere from two to three months they're large plants with gigantic flowers and they're gorgeous hibiscus plants are perennials they're easy to grow there are some that love moisture and others love dry area what's neat about the hibiscus flower too is in the deep cup of the flower it's usually a couple of degrees warmer so it's a spot where you'll find bees and beetles sleeping at night it's really fun to see because in the heat of the summer when so many plants are wilting with the heat and the humidity the hibiscus plants are just loving it and they're showing off their flowers and they become the stars of the garden in the summer another favorite in our garden is the fox glove our fox gloves love the sun or the shade so we grow them in both locations and they're real striking plants they get rather tall and they have flowers all the way up the spike the flowers are spotted in the middle they attract bumblebees now be careful the gene is named for foxglove is digitalis and it actually is used in heart medicine so it is poisonous just don't eat the plant but otherwise it is a stunning plant it can turn a garden into what we call a cottage garden it looks like a garden that might be in england it just gives it a wild look beautiful if you can grow fox gloves it will transform your garden cardinal flower is a native wildflower and in its normal habitat it grows along the stream side it loves moisture but it does fine even if you ignore it it's one of my favorite wildflowers that i grow in both the sunny section and also even shade it grows really well in part shade my husband and i call our garden astra belle's secret garden astro bell was the name of my grandmother it's a tribute to her love of zinnias and at the same time my husband loves zinnias and so does his family we adore zenitz we grow them in all different heights and colors and we never get tired of them our main patch of zinnias is all thrown down seed we'll throw down seed with the ground warms up to over 55 degrees usually buy about 20 packages of seeds and we mix them all up we throw the seeds down and within a matter of seven to fourteen days we start to have little zinnia plants coming up so it's a very inexpensive way to add a lot of beauty and color to a garden nature is very humbling she's always teaching us things did you know that the worldwide population of monarch butterflies has plummeted by 90 percent since 1992 monarch butterflies are not only beautiful but they're important pollinators if you want to help them survive plant milkweeds milkweeds are the only plants that monarch caterpillars eat in fact there's a substance in milkweed that makes the monarch butterflies less tasty to hungry birds so try adding more native milkweeds in your garden and watch the butterflies arrive mary startsman has loved gardening since childhood when starting her own garden in berea she found inspiration in a gate she saw in the movie barry lyndon today her backyard garden is an explosion of colors and textures with surprises around every corner here we are at the very heart of mary's garden in fact here's the gate that started it all 28 years ago this is the entry to the heart or the hearth in this case of this garden the fireplace is the center point and all the rooms come out like spokes to a wheel my garden is pretty much divided into different i would call them vistas and they all have their own little special plans or they're all special effects they're all different but they're all part of the one that unites it from one room to the next to the next the connecting element there is the fact that of course it's all the garden plants but it's like going from one little microclimate to another little microclimate it's all a nice little vista that you walk into and get to explore the main start of practically the bulk of my garden was mail order because you couldn't you couldn't get hostas or you couldn't get hydrangeas or you couldn't get they didn't carry them and and now of course you can find them in any store when we bought this property here it was all a blank slate more or less [Music] i wanted you to feel when you came down the path and into the garden that you were coming into a courtyard and to have a courtyard you got to have walls around it i didn't want the typical fans so i came up with the idea of using the cedar boards and making it curving but then i didn't like the solidity of it and i had those rings i love rings they come off a half barrel that had rotted and so i you know i would take chalk and we would play with where to put them i love the way it just sort of hugs the interior of the garden i already had a small in-ground pond which is not very deep it's only maybe 16 inches deep i went to our local store and they had little baby coys and sure enough i bought some and had read about them and they said the koi will grow in proportion to their environment they didn't read that page they just kept growing and all of a sudden i knew that there were not going to be able to winter in 16 inches of water so that's how the koi pond got to be it's made a nice a nice addition it's got an arbor on top of it with flowering honeysuckle and can put pots around it and so it's just enriched the garden being above ground actually is easier to maintain the filters that you have to clean out you only clean them out twice a year it's got a skimmer box and the skimmer box does have to be cleaned up maybe every two or three weeks depends on how much food they're getting and what season it is [Music] even the main filters in the coil pond are not that hard to deal with just take them out and rinse them and put it back in so i'll put out little metal tables on the hosta bed and put the bags of filter media on them and then rinse them so that the water and the nutrients get used to me they're kind of like the water type butterflies you have the butterflies that go in and out of the garden through the gates and around and you see them floating around everywhere and the koi do the same thing but they do it in water from the small fish pond you wander around to the side and go up to the tree house it's just a lovely area to spend time up there or if you want to go up there and survey and get a different feel for the garden to see it from a different perspective [Music] you need to have a sitting area so there is a sitting there right at the center of the garden that has a table and benches and a very nice stone fireplace i love fire i think fire is so it's a fascination i think since the creation of time you know the caveman discovering it there are paths that wind around away from the fireplace and then circle back to the center of the garden and there's also from the rose garden near the house there's a boardwalk that leads you into a nice science secluded i call it the side garden it faces mostly northeast so it's very shaded it doesn't get a lot of sunlight but there's enough light that you can grow some flowering shrubs like hydrangeas or viburnums [Music] the art elements in the garden are kind of a anchoring focus point that helps the eye to rest on something that is not green that is not flowering and yet it adds another dimension of mystery or intrigue or beauty to the garden i try to you know just keep it simple and have just a couple here and there but i think all those things are important it raises up the level of the garden the water the statues the fireplace i was at the rehab store one day i thought i'll go in there and see just what they have and i was walking through the store and they had these two very old bed springs and they still had horse hair on them i didn't even know they used horsehair on them and i thought what lovely coils that mattress is it's near the treehouse so it sorts a barrier between the the wilderness and the maintained garden i love it in the evening when the sun is set in in the west and it shines through it and lights up some of those coils those calls are wonderful they're really lovely i think they're lovely i think they're interesting nothing was pre-planned it was just a matter of feeling the flow don't do things in a straight line try to keep an air of mystery don't see everything at once because if you sit in one place and you can see the whole thing all right you saw it you move on but if you have a curving path or you have a tree or that's blocking it or something that's overflowing on a path and it beckons you and it's mystery you want to see what's on the other side it wasn't a conscious effort of making rooms it was just trying to make it interesting mysterious exciting [Music] you want to go and investigate plants are very forgiving they're going to come back you can't kill them unless you you really really have to try hard to kill them prune whenever you have time or transplant whenever you have time don't be afraid to try trial and error it's your best teacher more so than any book i think you'll remember it if you do it and to me that's probably the best secret of all we are in mary startsman's beautiful backyard garden now mostly it's shade but as you can see right here this is a beautiful sunshiny spot and she's taken advantage of it she has beautiful asiatic lilies she's got day lilies she's even got cone flower that's just about ready to flower stunning roses this in fact she calls her rose garden blended in with the roses or black eyed susans she's even got the climbing flowers that are native the trumpet honeysuckle beloved by hummingbirds so if you have even the smallest spot of sunshine in your garden take advantage of it plant day lilies or black-eyed susans even roses plant something that loves sun that will bring you joy and color to your garden [Music] starting with just a patch of bad grass emery schmidt and jim swearingen have transformed their newport urban environment into a pocket garden showing that big design ideas can work in small spaces i started in the toy business in the 70s and got a job with kenner toys my claim to fame is i was the first designer star wars toys being a toy designer and i guess being a garden designer is similar in we're looking for how you uh how you interact with what you're doing so if it's a toy it's the toy feature the aesthetics of it in the garden it's similar growing up on our farm in north dakota i all of us children would help in the garden not only would we plant we would help with the weeding but we also were given a packet of our favorite flower seeds that we could plant it and we make sure we watered it and nature was going fine people are coming into our garden we take into affect how they're going to see it for the first time we paved the garden path to be kind of a forced perspective it makes it look longer than it really is to find other ideas would be mainly from traveling and seeing gardens from friends gardens we had a blank canvas there was very little to worry about so it was a process of you know step by step first the fence then the paved area and then the backyard where it's more the relaxing in the garden area the design things just happened by accident [Music] as far as the maintenance it would be a couple hours a week mainly you're watering your and your weeding where you need to we are using a lot of perennials so we don't have to continually plant the entire garden we just add annuals for color i do get up early in the morning and water and the maintenance i'm not so much of a leader so it's probably good we have our preferences i look at it aesthetically memories down there in the detail in the weeds overall we enjoy working in the garden together yes but it's also a good time for each person to have their own space [Music] the plants change from time to time and we've changed the way we use it a little bit one of the themes of the garden that i always wanted was to have a space that i could garden but also entertain [Music] we've been looking at different ways to put plants on trellises we're trying to get some color up high we have hostas and the textures they provide you know big broad leaf hostas and the ferns have very fine looks to them coral bells come in an amazing array of things and we've got different colors and different veining and things and we look at that when we're putting it together the different textures and the colors and trying to balance things out the structures in the garden are really some of it's from practical point of view like the fence it's very economical material wise it's all done with two by fours we've actually thought about where we place pedestals to make sure that we have structure for things to stand on we use ornaments in the garden and they're really to draw your eye from one place to another so the higher plants the things on pedestals draw your eye up from looking down the sculptures tucked behind the plants allow you to look around and see something they kind of give you some relief from just green and color we don't have a lot of room so we have to think about every little part of it when you are working in a smaller space garden the main challenge i feel is to keep it balanced and a space that you can use the walls they're not big they just provide a visual breakthrough between the paved area to the more natural area the japanese maple was planted about 20 years ago and it was only a quarter of the size that it is now and i really like the idea of putting in the corner just to balance the corner [Music] some of the interesting elements we love about our garden for one thing would be the mirrors that we put onto the sides and the rear portion of the garden not only does it make this base look larger i can look into the mirror and see the whole length emery's more of a flower person and i'm probably more the cactus and succulents so and i'm experimenting i'm learning more about them how to propagate them how to re-route them the water features that we have really do add a nice element to the garden the water fountains provide a relaxing sound gives us a little bit of natural sound against all the hard sounds of the city i wanted a raised bed for vegetables because in a small garden you don't have room for it so for the salad bowl is what i call it this raised bed on the side of the house gets very hot afternoon sun from 1 pm until the sun goes down and the brick wall really bounces the heat back so it really gives it a microclimate out front we had just another grassy slope which was dangerous to cut because it was so steep so we've decided to terrace the garden put the walls up when i finally could sell the last lawnmower at the yard sale it was like being released from torture from way back we have sedums out front that are 40 years old they were a gift to a former resident here and they've been planted for 40 years and we've been moving them around and it's amazing that after 40 years you're still dealing with the same plants there's no magic to gardening it just happens so just relax and have fun with it also in newport just a few blocks away west and scott ledger have used found items art and a unique fountain to construct a colorful extension of their home the garden right now i would i would describe as pleasantly busy so there are a number of things and uh one of my favorite parts is to come out here and discover something new that my wife had planted that i didn't realize was there we moved here in december of uh 2007 and so the spring of 2008 was my first start well it was basically kind of just a recess pit a lot of the backyards in newport we're known to have outhouses so the soil is very sandy you can't just put water on it all day long it just goes right through it i think we maximized our space by creating levels taking advantage of the fence using a lot of vines raising flower pots up on you know some kind of a stand or level and then just adding a lot of decor along with the flowers and plants i have done some paintings in the garden i painted the cellar doors with the birds on them kind of lovingly ripped off from charlie harper the pluses and minuses of planting in containers i think you can have more levels when you plant in containers you can actually have more variety when you plant in containers than in the ground you can move them around if they need sunlight that they're not getting my favorite plant i have to say is one that i eat so the herbs in the garden allow me to to to cook which is one of my favorite pastimes is to use them to make dinner breakfast you name it i use impatience because they're so reliable they they never let me down they will tolerate sun and shade there's always flowers and i love flowers i love color the division of labor in the garden is pretty clear if it involves hanging something that was my job so there are a number of items that are hung up on the walls and i put them there with nails screws and whatnot the hardest part was confining my garden to a small space but the easiest part was maintaining it it's very manageable because of the size i didn't really try to create a theme a couple times when we've been on the garden walk they would ask you what is your theme so one year i said it was birds hence we have a lot of birdhouses and some rusty birds sitting around but there's not really a theme anymore somebody gave me the idea of putting a watering can with ice cubes in it and hanging it out on a crook or a tree so that's what we call my poor man's water feature one thing that we have that's unique in our garden is a fountain made out of a fire hydrant and we give the credit to my husband scott for installing that we have a water fountain that we made out of a fire hydrant my son corey and i were able to plummet and pour concrete so that the concrete kind of looks like a city curb and with an old grate that we had had in the front of our house underneath that we had to construct basically hidden wheelbarrow handles so if we ever need to do any maintenance on it we grab those handles and lift it up and the whole thing will tilt up so we can get under there and fix it the whole thing ended up weighing hundreds of pounds and i got to pay a chiropractor for a couple of weeks thereafter to to get my back back in shape the things around here are just things i've picked up they're for my own interest the stained glass windows we were we were on a bike ride in new orleans and it was shortly after the hurricane so we call them our katrina windows they've got lights behind them so we can light them up at night the frames came from a secondhand shop we hung them up and put the flower pots in the middle of them most of it is stuff we've collected mostly from goodwill or yard sales or just walking down the alley [Music] to a novice gardener i would probably say just experiment read the tags on the plants so you you know don't make any you know real big mistakes but if you see something you like try it i think in newport here we're kind of in a little climate zone and we can get away with some things that maybe you can't if you're on the top of a hill in cincinnati look into a local garden club for example here in newport we have the east row garden club and there are people there that know way more than i do and i encourage people to go to a club like that and they'll learn a lot it's nice having a little garden in the backyard someplace where you can go and get away from the urban situation the buildings the sidewalks it kind of kind of has a colonial feeling like the old spanish cities where everything from the street looks like buildings but when you go in there's like a beautiful little garden in the middle [Music] we have a weekly wednesday night dinner with we have eight children we have nine grandchildren and there's various other people friends and so on they come to uh to visit us so it's very nice to be able to have the garden area so that people can come out here and and have a little bit of breathing room and just step to kind of enjoy this uh small oasis-like feeling that we have in our garden [Music] here's an easy way to attract more birds to your garden grow plants that produce seeds that birds love plants in the aster family are all good choices for example this mexican sunflower other options are purple cone flower black-eyed susans zinnias and many more and in late summer and early fall don't cut back the dead flower heads instead let your flowers go to seed and sit back and grab your binoculars dr marilyn mcmillan of eubank knew what she wanted in a garden but didn't know how to bring her ideas to life so she enlisted the help of landscape professional gary chettister and the result is a series of garden rooms with inviting views and distinctive southern charm we wanted a formal area and an informal area and just kind of arbitrarily put the formal area to the very back of the house and the informal area more to the side uh part of that was the way the land lays this was open and the part that's to the side uh has bigger trees and there was a wet weather stream that ran through it that was kind of a necessity the whole farm is 435 acres what we call the yard is about 20 to 25 acres gary chadister he does the design work and then his crew comes down and does the maintenance and we have another maintenance guy who comes once a week in the summer and mows we were smart enough to know that we needed to keep the confusion separated and that was keep the rustic part the rustic part and the formal part the formal part people ask me all the time how much time you spend pulling weeds and we don't we spray it you can't have something this big and be pulling weeds constantly it just doesn't work that way the first thing that you generally notice is the la it's maples it's been here seven or eight years they've made a beautiful canopy that you can walk up we thank god for the marmo maples they are a very fast-growing maple neither dr mcmillan or myself or spring chickens and if we planned on seeing these trees touch it was going to have to be something that was going to have to grow pretty quick [Music] because they grow so fast the roots are on top of the ground and that's part of the reason why we put the gravel path in here we didn't want mowers and equipment running over those routes [Music] we have a lot of open space and it could be almost intimidating the the amount of completely open space have to give credit for gary for the idea of garden rooms each garden can stand on its own or be part of the other garden i hope it gives you the feel of wanting to walk around the corner and see what's next there's a statue of a pan boy with a flute in the back garden it's just situated perfectly so i enjoy boxwood a lot it's evergreen but it's not needled it's a broad leaf and it has a shape that you can sculpt or leave naturally either one i'd always wanted a garden that you descended to i'm not sure why particularly just always united appeal to me gary came up with the idea for the fountain when we got to the point where we realized that we had found the fountain these folks negotiated i asked will you bring this fountain to eubank kentucky they said yeah sure the day i met him here they drove up and down liberty road five or six times thinking okay where's the park that this thing is going in it was the first time they'd ever built that fountain in somebody's backyard the walkway up is designed to make you consciously slow down it has curves and it's slanted enough that you have to walk it fairly slowly it is very important to me that we direct people as to where we want them and how we want them to get there but we want you to walk through that room that we have made to go up the hill we had a nursery call us and say gary we've got 300 foot rows of whips of uh density taxes and burning bushes we give them to you we don't want to bulldoze them over in two or three years a burning bush can grow to be four foot tall we kindly serpentined it around to kindly conform with the hill to where you weren't going straight up the hill you can look back and see the sunken garden at spots or you can walk up to the pergola that's been here about 10 years and it walks up to the cemetery which is where my father is where we were able to put him he can see his health and ease cattle [Music] i tried to save the flowers for the pots the colors for the pots because there is such a big area here i try to do as much as i can with bushes and trees and evergreens just simply because that stays we have a fountain bought it with the intent of it being a water fountain because of budgetary constraints it was going to cost way too much money to run electricity and water to it in all essence it's a glorified flower pot and i think it turned out beautifully i absolutely love it typically we plant and we design around a structure we will sit things around for a while until we feel comfortable that that's where they need to be i have a lot of connection to gary's famous earn from hell because it's a kentucky piece it was built in the louisville foundry about 1840 and has been in the lexington cemetery at one point it weighs 850 pounds i enjoyed watching him move it she's got a barn full of antiques and hardscape and she likes for that to get rotated i've collected antiques since i literally was a child i've always been sort of fascinated by history garden antiques are really nice because something that's even 10 or 15 years old gets a patination out in the garden pretty quickly so it can be a little hard to tell age gary had the idea of making a secret garden the idea is that you walk through then the space opens up and there's this place to sit we designed the secret garden around the family the fountain in the secret garden i feel like we rescued it from katrina we got it out the spring before katrina hit it in the fall it's french and was in new orleans for years it's probably from about 1750. i use the secret garden mostly just to kind of walk through even in the wintertime you can sit back there if the sun is out we go back there and just kind of enjoy being secluded a little bit i hope that people realize that it was a labor of love not just on my part there have been a lot of people that have put a lot of effort and time into it and i'm very very lucky to be able to enjoy their work alan bush gave his mercer county farmland a second life by planting a natural meadow as a haven for animals and insects and a place of understated beauty the the planning of of a meadow or prairie is is important it can't be done on a very small scale and homeowners can do it i i would really encourage them to try in in the initial planning stages i i first wanted to test the soil to find out what the ph was so you can get a ph test from the county extension agent in any county in kentucky and then i wanted to to to work with local kentucky species i knew i wanted blackout sushi i knew that iron weed would work their way in i knew the golden rod would work their way in then prepare the soil actually kill down the weeds either you know you can't cover a two acre plot with a tarp but you either have to burn it down or kill down the the existing growth the turf that had been there the drilling process the seeding process drilling the seeds into just sort of a very shallow groove and and then it takes off slowly and first year you have to kind of mow a couple of times four or five times at a at a height of about 15 inches or so just to kind of kill down the annual weeds and then the next year one high moat in about the middle of may just and then let it go and as a gardener it was hard to sort of agree to those terms of letting it go after the third year it built up enough leaf litter that that we thought it would be interesting to burn and it probably induces germination on some things that are just sort of lingering there that might require fire to actually germinate or maybe even smoke ash we had enough grass around the perimeter that the fire wasn't going to spread and the the woodlands were some distance away what our meadow wants to do is just to go back to woodlawn so they're alders coming up they're walnuts and so it just wants to go back to forest so the fire doesn't kill those so that's interesting i mean they're power resistant so you know you have to kind of deal with those and dig them out if need be it it might be useful to wait uh at least until maybe november early december before mowing or burning because of nesting birds and other wildlife that might be in there this year i've done very little maintenance except for sort of some spot pulling of a few weeds the advantage for putting in a meadow whether it's a five by five space or two acres or 25 acres is that you're you're you're giving your soil a break and giving the land a break because you know the land has been disturbed most everywhere certainly in suburban neighborhoods and on our farm where it was farmed pretty intensively one terrific benefit of a meadow or prairie is on the switch grass and the big blue stem have very extensive roots that go down many feet into the soil so they actually sequester carbon and i i think with global warming being a huge concern i mean it's it's it's certainly a helpful product to sort of suggest to homeowners that they try on a very small scale well if you're thinking about planting a little meadow or prairie i would encourage you to start small i mean you don't need acreage i think you'll really enjoy seeing the the butterflies wander in the bees the birds i mean it really is phenomenal one of the best ways to get ideas for your garden is to see what others have done and one of the best ways to do that is to go on a garden tour like this one from the lexington council garden clubs tours are opportunities to see wide varieties of gardens large and small formal and whimsical and to meet other garden enthusiasts clubs across the state sponsor tours every year and most gardeners are happy to share what they know so check them out and see what's going on in your area you'd never know that joe dietz and tim brooks's elegant lexington garden is just feet away from a major expressway through the use of plantings art and stonework they've managed to create an urban oasis around them these beautiful old trees are one of the reasons why tim and joe selected this site the majestic silver maples and the elms anchor this beautiful garden we purchased the property in 92 and when we got it there was really not much of a garden here the people that had it before us had done a few things but not much so everything that you see here today is a lot different than it was 25 years ago through those 25 years the gardens changed drastically due to our desires of different plant material and mother nature's desires for weather as a gardener we all know we like to change things move plants and the mother nature part is something you deal with and you embrace it because you can't do anything but when you look at the house and the garden it's sort of an eclectic mix of frank lloyd wright's life from the front that is more bungalow to the back with all the glass it is more mid-century modern and that sort of moves on into the garden with some of the statuary and then like the fire bowls or some of the bowls of plantings we are very close to new circle road the basic thing that protects us from all the noise is a berm was placed there years ago and there's quite a few trees on it now in shrubs so that helps some we have lots of plants in the front yard and the backyard [Music] those plantings help to suppress the noise that comes from new circle and as you go into the backyard even more plants and with the barrier of the house you really don't hear it very much we have our own oasis here as we like to say in the middle of the city the garden is more of a formal front yard with some eclectic aspects of stone walls evergreen trees lots of boxwood the soil is very shallow out there because of the underlying bedrock so we look for trees that have fibrous root systems not large taproots so we've got some of the green giant arbor vitas that really do well add a nice evergreen touch to the landscapes here in the bluegrass the side garden along the driveway has really changed over the years we basically opened it up to more of a sun garden planting more bulbs so in march april there's thousands of daffodils and various other spring bulbs that bloom in that area it transitions then into later spring with the spring and summer perennials and then toward the fall you get the grasses and late summer flowers such as rebecca and such that bloom so you've got a three season various flowers that bloom in that area we like to have a vegetable garden we tilled it up and put in a lot of nutrients and leaves and grasses and everything to enhance the soil we've got lots of tomatoes and peppers and sugar snap peas a lot of fresh herbs then we walk into the courtyard and the temperature drops about 10 degrees as you go in there from there then you come into the bonsai display area i started playing with bonsai 20-some years ago and just got intrigued with it and liked working with them when you start working on one of these trees your mind loses everything else you just want to work on that tree and try and make it look better i've got a wide variety of evergreens and party trees and deciduous i think i've got somewhere in the vicinity of about 40 to 45 pots and in those pots i've probably got somewhere around 100 trees there is a tremendous amount of maintenance in taking care of them many of them will need to be repotted taken out of the pots they're in the root systems clipped off and cleaned up then re-situated in a new pot along with that there's a lot of trimming on the top to get everything the shape you want the branches need to be wired so they look the way that you want them look these pots have very little soil in them and they can dry out very quickly and you can lose your tree if you're not paying very close attention to that they've got to be watered you let them dry out they're gone there's also some trimming and pruning all year long just so things look their best it's not hard to get into you can buy a boxwood or a taxis or something from one of the local garden centers and start playing with it and get a book and read up on it and get some ideas on what it entails and practice with it we have a decided to add on a conservatory and we made it two stories accessed from both levels it's mainly for orchids and other tropical plants i've always loved the epiphytic nature of orchids and bromeliads we also have some of the hardy pitcher plants we located it on the west side of the house which normally you wouldn't do because of the heat of the summer but because of our large trees they shaded and it stays fairly cool there's over 25 000 species of orchids no one can know how to grow every one of them so i'm pulling my books out i'm going to the internet i've probably got 300 or 400 orchids here probably 50 different varieties so you've got to be careful that one that might like to stay dry versus one that needs a little mist every day aren't sitting next to each other or in the same part of the conservatory you'll kill your orchids quicker keeping them too wet then you will too dry in the winter there's much less maintenance because you've closed it up and it just basically recycles itself some days out here it'll actually rain in the conservatory because of just the humidity that builds up on the roof and you need to be a little more careful because the high humidity if you don't have enough air movement then you'll get mold mildew starting to grow we've got some birds and cannolis and chameleons and there's a lot of life out here the house sits above the floodplain instead of doing grass on the bank we did stone walls and terraced at various types of plantings spring bulbs again underlying the plantings and it was basically a way to keep from having a lot of maintenance on a hillside but it also added different layers in the garden and a different visual from when you're in the back of the garden looking up toward the home itself and from there we'll walk down into the yard we have a lot of different elements in the backyard from the plants to the walkways to the walls to the statuaries and one of the things we tried to do here was make it appear like there's many different rooms here as you make one turn you're in one room and you go a few more steps and make another turn you're in another room we've got a sort of kidney shaped grass area basically that lets your eye calm down as you move from room to room or vista de vista in the garden seeing what's new or what you want to find out what's going on in this garden it allows you just to have a moment to collect yourself before you move on and from there we'll meander on down along the creek and the temperature will drop another 10 degrees so the great variations in temperatures as you go from the different micro climbs in our backyard from that point you can view the back garden nearly in its entirety seeing the lake in the distance the creek that runs along the property i've utilized native limestone and built numerous walls paths it just adds another layer another texture to the garden or some people say during the winter it provides you the winter bones for the garden it's something to view while everything's asleep i love art in the garden i think you have to be careful on how much you use you can get too busy i think that the art needs to blend in with the garden most of the garden here i see it in my head and i get out and start doing the installation or the preparation with what i envision in the yard i do a lot of the cutting and weeding and clipping and he does a lot of the planting and designing and making sure that things are put in the right place with his force degrees he knows trees i've got a horticultural degree and landscape design degree we both utilize our education in the garden along with many decades of experience because of the shade because of all the leaf mold leaf debris that breaks down it can transform your soil to an acidic soil very quickly and with that you get moss growing you can get the wild violets growing i use a lot of pelletized limestone apply it with a broadcast spreader like if you're going out doing fertilizer for your grass or whatever you just buy the 30 or 40 pound bags of pelletized limestone that works better you can buy the limestone powder but i find that the pellets work better you can get it out into the garden without having it clump up a lot and having to deal with places where it might just want to make a white mess some of the things that we've incorporated from around kentucky is a lot of millstones we've collected several of those in our travels and brought them back here and in the backyard we have one place where we've got three bubblers where the millstones are laid flat on rock and then the hole in the center which is the center piece is water bubbling up it's basically the dry bubble method where it bubbles out of the grindstone into a gravel area so you don't have really open water but you still have the water sound for a lot of people if they're going to start doing a design like this i think one of the critical things is getting some professional advice someone that knows exactly how plants go together how things should be laid out know what type of home you're planning is this going to be your starter home and you're there a few years i'm going to move on or could this possibly be your life home plan accordingly think of the plants that you like that may take a while to grow get those started then think of how you will use the garden be prepared to always have your garden in flux and change that's part of the joy susan bradley and buzz doherty turned an open pasture into a lush and peaceful garden that beckons you to stroll its pathways and make discoveries at every turn from the multi-tiered waterfall to the miniature gardens that susan creates this rural hideaway is a beautiful experience on every scale [Music] when we first moved here everything was pastured we have about two and a half acres under landscape the property was fairly flat i'd say we took some liberties with the with the ground it creates more of what we wanted than what would have been just here if we could just use the flat landscape buzz and i are totally different in the way we look at things i see the big picture i can see what it should look like eventually buzz can do anything that's possible to be building it when we got the pergola he built the model and then he went and built the actual thing but underneath the pergola is the best spot in the garden to really get the sounds and the views some areas are raised and some areas are lowered and there's some undulation in the topography it enhances the view we've gone to a lot of botanical gardens around the united states and we love the asian ones so we'll bring elements back but not try to copy it we're not nearly as formal as most japanese gardens are as far as keeping some of the trees pruned a certain way and into certain shapes and forms right now the fish swimming through the grass bed is my favorite just because it's new and it was a lot of fun to create and it is fish that are swimming in grass but then of course to go along with that is a tree that buzz cut down most of it and then with leaves from home shows we built a palm tree we don't do anything invasive if it's an invasive species we won't plant it we started off wanting to have a conifer based garden we buy them as little sprigs and start them off in the greenhouse and then when they get big enough we move them up into the garden see how they do and that worked well until we got too much shade in this garden and then we've had problems with some of them drying out others having to be moved somewhere else we have a sink or swim attitude if it dies it dies if something's struggling i will take it out and take it to the greenhouse and then put it somewhere else but if it dies we have a great compost pile i think susan managed to come up with a lot of good different colors different textures that have done fairly well here we do use as much color as possible i almost always have a red and a yellow and a blue in every bed i use it with conifers we don't really have perennials the only thing we have perennial-wise are hostas you don't design the bed you design the grass around it [Music] the beds have not changed as far as shape but what's gone into them has changed a lot when things have died or the trees have gone from full sun to full shade it's amazing that some of them that we have that are fairly good size now started out as small as they did and for at least three or four years all it was was getting the ponds together getting the boulders around it that's a 100 foot liner from the top to bottom so that was put in place and then putting the rocks in it and then the next step was putting the dirt around it so that you could actually firm the beds and then the putting the trees in this place wasn't anything to look at for at least 12 years the pond is the main feature of our landscape everything kind of revolves around that as we moved out and you get away from the pond it became a little bit different type of landscape it's a moving living thing the waterfall itself we don't do much with it we'll get moss on it periodically as far as the placement of the waterfall that waterfall comes down the retaining wall of the existing property so it has a three feet or four foot natural drop but the stream itself that shifts quite a bit we put the rocks in first then we go back and move them to make the most noise the farmer who lived next door to us was kind enough to let us collect almost all the rocks that you see around the pond and it takes several attempts to place the rocks where you think they should be and when we finally get it right then move on to the next rock we had feeder fish that we bought at one of the local stores unknowns to me i thought they were all goldfish and one of them turned out to be a koi and he's very distinctive he's not pretty but he's at least 25 years old and he has a black spot on his side and he's completely white but he's the original koi for us the size of your pond determines how many fish you can really keep and we've pretty much established the size of their population having a big pond has definitely helped in the clean up of it and the funnest of the fish for whatever reason and we're not the cause of it there are fish in the upper pond when there didn't start to be they went up through the filtration system we can see them growing up there and then there's five or six giant koi up there that we didn't put there susan's miniature gardens are something that she's taken up in the last couple years the only thing that i do is construct the pots for her to put her gardens in one of the big problems with the miniatures is moving them you have to have a large type of pot so that you can have a scene but so you don't want that much dirt so what buzz did is he took styrofoam blue board or insulation board and he built a cross piece and then he went up higher so that there's only five inches of dirt in those pots you want to hamper the growth of all your miniatures so when you don't let them have all that room for their roots then you have the tree that you have that's two feet tall and has been there for three or four years i used to use styrofoam peanuts i didn't know they had gone to biodegradable peanuts so the first three or four miniatures kind of shunk every time i watered they just kept going down and down so it finally dawned on us that okay these must not be working right and it took us forever to figure out what was wrong with those the last thing we had done before the miniature gardens is what we call the zoo it's back on the other side of the property and we had a tree that came down it was a weeping willow and it was huge and i asked my husband leave the trunk there so it has about a 25 foot trunk and we put a life-sized lion in the top of the tree and that led to other zoo animals and now it was a joke to see how many different ones we can get in there and hide from people there is a six foot long panther that took my husband six weeks to find when we put that in the garden because you didn't see it it was well hidden and now there's a lot of different fun stuff in there and we have people coming back just to see what's in the zoo now i walked the dogs at night that was part of my job so i would be out there at night with the flashlight and i would be thinking oh this is what i should do here that should go this way so i would end up creating the actual beds and the structure of the bed in the middle of the night this is a garden that we have done completely on our own susan designed everything we planted everything we moved almost all the rocks ourselves all the work is worth the effort when you get a chance to stand and look at it or share it with other people it's also very exciting to see how everything grows can't believe how stuff grows it's a shame to not share it with somebody no garden is ever finished they're all changing that's one thing about a garden is a living breathing thing it always changes i think my favorite quote ever is to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow [Music] as we've seen you don't have to have a large crew of landscapers to create an amazing and impressive landscape for the novice gardener move one rock at a time plant one tree shrub or flower and before you know it you'll have a backyard paradise all your own when steve humphrey and his wife novelist sue grafton found their louisville estate lindcliff the gardens had long been neglected but they saw the potential that was hidden behind the weeds and over a decade lovingly restored the property to its original grandeur adding new treasures along the way [Music] when we bought this property which was probably 1999 it took us six months to work out the details the gardens had been neglected for 17 or 18 years so the first thing i wanted to do when i finally ended up moving into the place and started working on it was try to find what the gardens must have looked like the site plan and some of the big trees and the hardscape was designed by john olmstead frederick law olmsted's nephew and a member of the olmstead group and then in the late 30s the crawford family hired a very highly regarded well-known landscape architect named bryant fleming then he i think built the fountain and he put in the boxwood garden what i tried to do is carve into the stuff that had been overgrown and allowed to go to disarray and to see what it would have looked like and bring it back to at least that original design originally in the front we had these overgrown bushes i don't even remember what they were called but it was just clumpy and obnoxious and clearing that out was a big help if there is a theme it would be man's dominion over nature i like to show that i can plant and grow things to suit me rather than to suit somebody else or something else it's nice to have a garden that looks like it was there all along you don't want your effort to show too much if you do it cleverly it looks like it's always been that way the best part of the garden from my perspective is watching it develop at first it's just a mess you know it's hardscaping and digging and clearing and so the little plants go in and they're so tiny you know and they look so pitiful next thing you know they're growing they're developing they're relating to one another and they have to get in trim it all up so it'll look civilized most formal gardens traditionally have statuary i've got the statue of david in the style of bernini it's made out of italian limestone it dates back to about 1880. it was allegedly in the garden of sir john gilgood and was sold when his estate was disposed of things like that require a large space so you can see it from a good distance and it was in three pieces and we could only get as close as the driveway a guy with a crane had to come in so we had to take this crane and send it out 70 feet and then set it down in place and then put the next one on top of that we were very nervous about that because we could just see david toppling and breaking i created that arbor and it's got plants growing over it so you can't really see until you get to the end of the arbor and then your eye is drawn to the right and there's the fountain [Music] over the years a lot of trees stuff had fallen into leaves and needles and stuff it was 12 inches deep of dirt and i got out there with my shovel and wheelbarrow and cleaned it out one course of the fountain at a time the fountain which probably had not worked for 20 years they dismantled it labeled all the stones laid them out on the grass we re-plumbed we did new electrical and then they put it all back together again and then there's a pond with water plants and stuff in that fountain and then i've got some other plants and hedges and azaleas and things around there and then i've got a furniture in front of that it's lovely to have it up and running you know i'm a big believer if you've got a fountain that ought to be pushing water out whereas the fountain garden is shady the boxwood garden is very sunny and it's got statuary in there it's got very formal hedges the boxwood garden was all grown together you could scarcely walk single file and everything was dead everything was neglected [Music] in the boxwood garden there's a statue of pan and a little nymph and that was here when i got here but having seen that i thought aha statuary so then i got the four statues in the boxwood garden representing spring summer winter and fall and under each one i've planted things that will flower in the appropriate colors so i've got oranges and yellows under autumn and reds and bright yellows under summer and pastels under spring and then all white flowers under winter they're fairly old they're very heavy and it was funny when we put them in there we had to dig a big hole and fill it with concrete and rebar so that we could have a base for those statues to stand on and not tip over then we start planting and designing the not gardens around the statuary steve developed all of the knot gardens on his computer so we planted them so they look like they grow in and out i can see the history in it and i can see how it's been redeemed and brought back to life and that's always lovely when people come out that path and turn and look at the boxwood garden they're always astonished i started thinking okay i've gotten it back to what it might have looked like and what the original bones were now it's time to start adding things and i started designing elements so i'm always looking for things to work into my design when we travel now we always go to gardens and look and see what others have done steve always takes a camera he always comes away with some new scheme of foot it keeps it moving so that it doesn't get static and i think every time you come up here there's something new to appreciate i've never had any formal training but a lot of information is available online the only design principle that i've ever really learned is to try to create rooms in the garden so that each section of the garden is complete unto itself and also i try to make it a surprise so when you travel from one garden to another all of a sudden you turn a corner and you go wow look at that it's a simple idea but you'd have to have some space in order to do it and so this has been a real joy to have the kind of space and the kind of room and the kind of structure that was here all the hardscape was here all i had to do was fill in the gaps my husband steve is very passionate about this property and his love is the whole process i'm a perfect audience for a good garden as it grows and changes and that i feel is my role as you turn right out of the boxwood garden along the wall is what i call my english border garden and i've seen this in many places where you have a staggered planting of flowers that flower at various times during the year and it's very densely planted and it's often butterfly attractants and stuff and then you go through that and then it's a completely different garden it's just all zoysia grass and in the middle of the zoysia grass i've done an in-ground sculpture a design where we've carved out channels and lined them with aluminum and then we put different colored rocks in there we had to get my laser level out we had to make sure that everything was exactly square because it was slightly off you'd see it so everything had to be exactly centered exactly square what i like here is the simplicity there's a nice open space of this zoysia grass i wanted something i could keep fairly low and keep those channels and those designs visible and the zoysia has done really well it goes dormant in the fall and winter but boy in the summer time it cranks and then below that there's a hedge of blue point juniper and so you can't really see over it but then you go down the steps and around it and what used to be the tennis court i've turned it into my fragrance garden which everything in there is fragrant easier to touch or but bloom i love the popcorn plant that they put in you run your fingers along the leaves and it smells like buttered popcorn i mean how can that be out in nature it's amazing and it's a garden unto itself when you're in it you can't really see any of the other gardens you explore things you try things you hear about things you see things you think i wonder could i grow that here is there any reason why i couldn't let me try i experiment with things and try things and if something doesn't work i'll try moving it and if that doesn't work then i'll pitch it try something else but you know i give it at least two chances it's just fun to see new things go in and watch them struggle and watch them prevail i built a maze every boy needs a maze but i designed it on my computer and we planted 525 blue point junipers and i had lined everything up with paint lines on the ground again with my lasers and stuff so everything's perfectly square and as i went down i had dots where i wanted to plant these things and i would drop my auger bit down in there dig a hole someone come after me take a plant out of the pot put it in there somebody come after him and put the dirt in we planted this in about a day and a half and then after they grew up i realized that it made a mistake with the design and i had altered the design some of it involved moving or taking plants out but some of it required adding something i had a section of the garden where it was natural to go one way and you would skip a third of the maze no one would ever go to that part of the maze so i had an old door that came off one of the cottages here and i painted it bright colors interesting colors and i just stuck it in the ground attached to some posts and it's got a window in it people get to the door and they realize they want to go through it but it won't open so they're sitting rattling at the door trying to get through it and they can't get through and then when you come on the other side we see where the door is and it's actually there so that people can't take a shortcut through the maze i also put a lot of little tchotchkes in there skeletons and bigfoot and a little statuary in my garden so you come around the corner there's a chicken or a rusty horse you know and so i put a lot of stuff like that in there that's kind of fun i'm trying to make this garden as low maintenance as possible i can't claim to be an organic gardener so i rely on chemicals quite a bit we found a lot of pre-emergent weed control that we put down in areas just to try to keep the weeds down because if we had to hand weed this place we would never get it done there are all kinds of plants that they claim are deer resistant that aren't the dairy a lot of things that i'm thinking why are you eating that all it does is motivate us to have secure areas that the deer can't get in the previous owners they had a dozen people working on the grounds we have three myself and two people but we have hydraulic machinery we have gas engines and we have chemicals between those things we're able to kind of keep things under control the fragrance garden is last garden i've created and i think we're done creating gardens because i think we've reached the limit of what we can maintain it was a slow process along with the interior of the house it we took 10 years to put this together i'm concerned about my legacy i've never had a canvas like this upon which to express myself with my lust and for gardening and for plants the idea that somebody come along subdivide the house and bulldoze all my gardens just drives me insane my challenge is to figure out how i can keep this place intact there are couple ways to do that and i'm going to explore some of those to see if there's a way that i can take this work of art that i've tried to create and see if i can't preserve it for the future [Music] thank you for joining me as we visited some of kentucky's amazing secret gardens as you've seen gardens come in many sizes and styles i hope you've come away with a few exciting ideas to apply in your own garden spot to get started use your imagination and just dig in but keep in mind gardens are more than living works of art they're meant to be lived in enjoyed and shared with others happy gardening [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Frank Simkonis

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Length: 80min 52sec (4852 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020