Garden of David Culp and Michael Alderfer
Article originally appeared in Horticulture

One way to get to the beautiful garden of David Culp and Michael Alderfer, about thirty miles outside Philadelphia, is to take a four-lane limited-access “bypass” designed to carry harried commuters past congested towns as they race to and from their jobs. Such roads often seem to me a modern perversion of evolution, a test of human stamina and nerves that could be considered “survival of the fastest.” I am always relieved when I survive the drive to Culp and Alderfer's exit, decelerate down the ramp, and turn up into a little valley, dotted with old farmhouses and an old mill beside a tumbling creek that seems part of a bygone world.

On my first visit a few years ago I missed the garden and came immediately to a typical lawnscaped suburban development, planted on a former farm, that adjoins their property on the upper edge. This juxtaposition with sterile suburbia only makes the garden of Culp and Alderfer garden seem more special, and important. Great gardens such as this one are the “ambassadors” of horticulture, announcing with their simple existence: This is what is possible. When such a garden also has an eloquent and impassioned spokesperson, this message of hope for the American landscape gets carried that much further.

But suddenly Culp dropped to his knees on the gravel path. Looking down, I saw the diminutive object of his adoration: a clump of snowdrops, one of 42 different species and forms to be found in this two-acre garden. I have never been a great fan of snowdrops, but Culp's enthusiasms are infectious, and I soon found myself kneeling beside him, peering into one of the flowers, trying to discern what made this specimen of the genus unique besides its name: Galanthus nivalis reginae olgae ssp. reginae olgae corcyrensis -- a cumbersome appellation which seems longer than the plant is tall.

This is Culp's favorite way to share the garden with visitors: on the ground, faces pressed close to the plants as he tries to explain their oh-so-subtle botanical differences. In others this would be mere pedantry, but Culp approaches his garden with such a breathless air of childlike wonder that visitors can only smile, and try their best to love what he loves. “I want people who come here to react to the garden emotionally,” he says. “It's not just a little cerebral game. I want them to feel it, touch it, smell it -- like I do.”

Besides the Galanthus (the earliest of which bloom in September and the latest in March), the garden includes collections of Rosa, Hepatica, Geranium, Kniphofia, Cyclamen, Euphorbia, Arum, Paeonia. The “signature genus” is Helleborus, which Culp has been growing for more than 20 years and breeding for more than a dozen. One result of this obsession has just been unveiled, with plants from his “Brandywine” seed strain of hellebores now being sold to the wholesale trade by North Creek Nurseries, in Landenberg, Pa. They should start appearing in retail nurseries over the next few years. “If I like a genus I indulge myself in it completely. When it comes to gardening and plants, I've always been irrepressible. I lived in apartments where you couldn't walk out on the balconies, where all the windowsills were full. I look into the future and I see Michael and I – we may be using walkers, but we'll still be gardening. I don't see that it will ever end.”

Alderfer works for a company that installs and maintains indoor plantscapes, while Culp works for Sunny Border Nurseries, a Connecticut wholesale grower, in both sales and research and development. In the latter position, Culp spends from four to six weeks a year traveling around the world, looking for new plants that the nursery might acquire and bring to market. These trips also afford him a perfect opportunity to feed his and Alderfer's plant passions. In Italy a number of years ago he saw how Arum italicum grew wild in the dry hillsides around Rome, and has since been buying unusual specimens for his own dry hillside. He fell in love with the multitude of Hepatica hybrids at a nursery in England, recalling, “I had my camera around my neck, but I was so stunned by the plants that I forgot to take any pictures.” Last year he spent two weeks in Japan at the peak of iris season. “I went to a Buddhist temple where the monks had been cultivating Iris ensata [Japanese iris] for 500 years,” he says. “Talk about a religious experience! The forms, the colors! I've got to find a way to get them to the US”

Culp's hellebore collection numbers in the hundreds, with 50 double-flowered forms alone, and he is constantly adding to it with his own new hybrids and those of other breeders here and abroad. Besides their wide range of flower colors – from near-black to white and with many shades between (except for blue and red, which have so far eluded hybridizers), Culp admires hellebores for their evergreen foliage, and for their ability to grow almost anywhere except in standing water and full, baking sun.

“But what first captured me was their spirit, their gumption for blooming in February, or even January some years,” he says. Large sweeps of hellebores -- in the beds around to the house, on the hillside, and elsewhere in the garden -- now form the core of the garden's winter show. Strong supporting roles are played by Galanthus, Adonis, winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), and the tiny but graceful Narcissus 'Cedric Morris', which blooms on and off from September to March. Providing the backdrop for these flowers are the golden russet foliage of several forms of Carex, the black strappy leaves of Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens' (Black mondo grass), the shiny dark green Arum foliage and various evergreen ferns such as Dryopteris australis (Dixie wood fern), one of Culp's favorites. These flowers and greenery work to shift the sense of the seasons, easing the catalogue-flipping tedium of the usual gardener's winter. “It took time, it was a challenge,” Culp says, “but we've managed to do away with the dormant season here.”

An incorrigible optimist, Culp saw only potential when he bought this slightly-rundown 1790 farmhouse and adjoining two acres in 1990. (Alderfer joined him there in 1993.) The house sits on a relatively flat rectangular acre below a steep hillside of roughly equal size. The gardens closest to the house were developed first. These include the “Jewel Box,” a raised bed which became home to a number of small rarities that might have been lost in a larger setting, and the walled ruin, or rock garden, which first had to be cleared of tires, automobile fenders and other accumulated junk left behind by the previous owner. The transformation of the overgrown hillside, begun about five years ago, is still underway. The understory on the hill was a six-foot-high tangle of invasive vines and shrubs, and Alderfer had to cut it over twice by hand before any planting could begin. They also limbed up the trees, to give a clear view to the hilltop from the flat area below.

A few of the dead trees on the hillside were left standing, to provide habitat for wildlife. Alderfer cut out most of the poison ivy, but left a few of the oldest vines alone, as their berries are a rich source of food for birds, which both he and Culp love. Inside the house, Christopher the canary sings and whistles incessantly, while outside, the garden is home to a dozen Old English Bantam chickens. Small enough not to trample the plants as the scratch in the beds in search of insects and grubs, Culp sees them as living garden ornaments, adding a moving, feathery, gently-clucking presence to the beds.

Part of the genius of this place is that the gardeners have managed to blend their many plant collections seamlessly into the whole. It helps that, instead of single specimens, the collections contain dozens, even hundreds of forms of various genera, and that the plants have been intermingled in various beds (rather than grouped together by genus as in a botanical garden), which provides a continuity of form throughout the garden.

The addition of more common plants with upright forms is another unifying theme. Some of Culp's favorite combinations – those that he says “get me drunk in the garden without drinking” -- include these spiky plants: the foxgloves, pillar roses and Siberian irises of late May; and around Fourth of July, Acanthus mollis, Lilium regale and Thalictrum rochebruneanum 'Lavender Mist'. Another similar moment happens in early May, in the rock garden. With the foliage of the evergreens fresh and new, the wall awash in the pink cascades of Saponaria ocimoides, and the Nepeta in full bloom on the ground, the black locust tree above drops its flowers over everything, like fragrant white snow.
It certainly doesn't hurt that the garden has great “bones”—the old house and trees, solid hedges and stone walls, the setting of the ruin for the rock garden, the hillside's dramatic changes in elevation. “Bones are important,” Culp says. “But what we're trying to do is breathe life into those bones.” One way they do this is by allowing plants, such as hawkweed (Hieraceum sp.) and several Corydalis species, to naturalize in the garden, leaving the plants they want and editing out the rest. These self-sowers, along with plants (such as Geranium 'Ann Folkard' and Campanula poscharskyana) that weave and wind among their neighbors, help loosen up the design, filling in gaps and making the garden look older and more established that it is.

“I love gardens that have a mind of their own,” Culp says. “The idea isn't to duplicate Mother Nature, because that's impossible, but we want to try to catch her spirit. People sometimes forget this spirit. They get hung up on rules. They think that this color can't go with that one; they're always thinking, 'What am I doing wrong?' When you start out you need rules, but after a while you can put them away in a drawer . And if you dare to break some of those rules, you begin to realize that this isn't a cure for cancer, this isn't nuclear war. It's a garden, it's fun.”

Hedgleigh Spring, Garden of Charles Cresson, Swarthmore, Pa.
Article originally appeared in Martha Stewart Living, May 2002

At Hedgleigh Spring, Charles Cresson’s garden in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, what visitors see from the front seems barely out of the ordinary for this quiet, tree-lined avenue of pre-World War II houses. Yews, rhododendrons, and Japanese hollies flank Cresson's entry porch. An ancient white oak towers over the house and the adjacent spring house, which shelters the pure water source that gave the property its name. A cutleaf Japanese maple, more than one hundred years old, leads the eye to the left of the house, where the entrance to the garden—a stone path between old azaleas—lies almost hidden from view.

Even when visitors follow this path to the back, most of the garden still remains to be discovered. The waterfall on the creek can be heard, but not seen; the fern dell and pond garden are still just numbers on the homemade map that Cresson gives to guests. Well-placed plantings, hundreds of feet of stone walls, and several changes in grade break the garden into a series of ten distinct “rooms,” each one mostly hidden from the others, although some are only a few feet apart. Carefully sited evergreens block most of the houses that, in this densely settled suburban neighborhood, would otherwise be visible from the property. As a result, the garden feels much larger than it is. Hedgleigh Spring, a name that implies a grand scale, covers only two acres, but this space is so intensively planted, so meticulously maintained, and so cleverly designed that it has more to see and enjoy than many gardens several times its size.

The garden’s framework was the creation of Cresson’s grandfather, William J. Cresson Sr. He built the house in 1911 on land that was part of his father’s gentleman’s farm and spent the rest of his life fashioning a garden from the open fields. After William Sr.’s death, in 1959, Charles’ father, William Jr., moved his family into the house. He continued to maintain the garden just as his father had left it and passed along his love of the property to his son. Charles took over care of the place in 1979, after studying horticulture in the United States and in England and honing his skills in various gardens, including those maintained at Wisley, in Surrey, by the Royal Horticultural Society.

Cresson preserved his grandfather’s design, but time had taken its toll. He rebuilt many of the walls and renovated most of the beds—lifting all of the plants, rejuvenating the soil, replanting some of the original specimens, and replacing others with plants of similar character. During the restoration process, Cresson also added a rich layer of herbaceous species that was previously lacking in many areas of the garden because his grandfather’s scheme had focused mainly on trees and shrubs. “I’m refining his design, finishing off the picture,” Cresson says.

One example of this refining is the wildflower meadow, where Cresson planted thousands of heirloom daffodils, such as Narcissus ‘White Lady’ and N. ‘Barri Conspicuus.’ These bulbs, along with sweeps of snowdrops (Galanthus) and several varieties of Camassia, provide flowers from February through May. For summer bloom, he added native plants, including cup plant (Sylphium perfoliatum) and Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium maculatum). Both have towering eight-foot blooms that add drama to a walk through the meadow and provide a backdrop for other areas of the garden.

During his more than twenty-year tenure as steward, Cresson has transformed Hedgleigh Spring into a consummate plantsman’s garden, with more than two thousand species and varieties. Some of these are common—such as the white rose, Rosa ‘Silver Moon’ and cottage pinks (Dianthus plumarius), which were both first planted by his grandfather around the sunken garden. Others are more unusual, such as a small, rarely seen gesneriad, Haberlea rhodopensis, growing happily in the wall adjacent to the pond, and Chinese persimmon (Diospyros kaki ‘Great Wall’), which bears so many small orange fruits each fall that Cresson refers to it as "the pumpkin tree.”

For some people, confining their garden to a late-relative’s design would be frustrating, but for Cresson, an avid plant collector, it has helped him learn when enough is enough. “If I get interested in a particular genus I’ll collect cultivars and specimens until the garden is saturated with them, until there are no more appropriate niches. Then I'll stop, unless I find something very unusual,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s impossible to maintain the integrity of the design.”

These layers of gardening, laid down by three generations over the past ninety years, give the garden a beauty and maturity—a richness both in history and horticulture­—that is rare in such a middle-class residential setting. It is a garden that, like great music, can be appreciated on many different levels. “People without musical training might like a piece of music simply because it sounds good, or makes them feel good,” Cresson says. “But a musician will hear it with a whole different level of understanding. My hope is that this garden is worthy of being appreciated on that deeper level, by those who can."

Chanticleer: A Pleasure Garden, Wayne, Pa.
Article originally appeared in Horticulture, May 2004

I visited Chanticleer, a public garden in Wayne, Pa., on its opening day this year, a damp, cloudy last day of March, with the breath of winter still lingering over the place. The garden is known for its innovative, sometimes extravagant plant combinations and its bold use of color, but on this day the 32-acre former estate was bursting with nothing more than potential. While a sweep of early daffodils stood tall against the cold, and a smattering of blossoms adorned the branches of a few trees and shrubs, the buds on most everything else were clamped shut. In some ways gardens are at their most exciting this time of year, because before anything happens, everything has a chance to be perfect. When the garden is as familiar as Chanticleer is to me, it is possible to walk around and populate the bare beds with the past season's glories, which are always more glorious in memory.

Memories, however, are not always reliable predictors of the future at Chanticleer, because this is a garden that never stands on past laurels. New beds crop up yearly, sometimes even mid-season; mistakes of one year disappear by the next; and even favorite garden sections receive frequent makeovers. This dynamism is partly due to the property's continuing transformation from private estate to public garden, which began less than fifteen years ago. But credit also is due to a board of directors that allows its staff, at every level, to dream up new ideas and implement them. The garden has no bureaucracy to bog down creativity, no committees to review suggestions other than the board as a whole, which in turn delegates most of those decisions to the director. Changes can be made quickly, often after a single conversation between director and gardener, which means that at Chanticleer, nothing is ever cast in stone—as it turns out, not even a stone house.

"Gardens come and go, beds come and go, as your taste changes, or as conditions change, as the woody canopy matures and creates shade where there was sun," says Joe Henderson, a Chanticleer gardener and one of fourteen full time staff members. "I always encourage people to free themselves from the idea that once they plant something, it has to stay there forever. Here we have the freedom to experiment. If what we do comes across, that's great. If it doesn't, we whack it out and try again next year."

Adolph G. Rosengarten Jr., the last private owner of Chanticleer, was an heir to a fortune consolidated when his family's firm merged with Merck & Co. in 1927, creating what was then the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. After his death in 1990, Rosengarten left a generous endowment to preserve the property as open space, but what this bequest omitted has proved to be the garden's biggest blessing.

“In his will, Mr. Rosengarten was loose in his instructions; he didn't say things had to be preserved in any particular way,” says Bill Thomas, the garden's current Executive Director. “Other horticultural organizations have extremely tight restrictions in their charters which tie their hands, but here, because of the looseness of the will, there's definitely a dynamic feel that has allowed us to evolve.”

From 1990 to 2003, Chris Woods, the garden's first director, served as impresario of this evolution. He worked first as a horticulturist for Mr. Rosengarten, and after the owner's death was chosen by the board to prepare the garden for its public opening in 1993. The property, purchased and developed by Adolph G. Rosengarten Sr. beginning in 1912, was beautiful when Woods took over, with three houses set amid rolling hills, wide sweeps of lawns, old trees, and a stream running through the bottom section. But the horticulture in many ways was uninspired, typical of the staid estates that can still be found tucked away in Wayne and other Main Line suburbs outside Philadelphia.

During his tenure, Woods gained the trust of the board and began exercising the freedom granted by Rosengarten's will. He worked to instill the garden with a sense of humor and drama, seeing the property as a stage set and the staff as the backstage crew, with all their work geared for the pleasure of the visitor. “Chris used to walk around on opening day and announce to us, 'Two hours to showtime!'” recalls gardener Dan Benarcik. “It was a little annoying, when we were racing to get all the last minute things done, but that's really what it is. We throw back the curtain and let people in.”

Besides dreaming up some unusual projects of his own, Woods hired a talented staff of gardeners who, more than just implementing the director's ideas, have been encouraged to act as the de facto curators and designers of their assigned garden sections. "With the freedom we're given in our own areas," says gardener Przemyslaw Walczak, "you can actually leave your mark on it and develop it over the years." Besides this autonomy, another advantage is that, while the gardeners work year-round, the garden is open only from the end of March to the end of October. "When we're not worried about looking good for the public," says gardener Laurel Voran, "we have time to do creative things." Besides designing next year's new beds and ordering new plants, in this extended off-season the gardeners can undertake major construction projects without having to worry about inconveniencing the visiting public.

Many of the staff are also skilled craftspeople, and use the winter months to build the wonderful, sometimes wildly-painted furniture, bridges, tables, trellises, arbors, fences and other accessories that ornament the garden. Gardener Doug Randolph's work is particularly notable, especially his carved stone sofa and easy chair, complete with TV remote control, in which any couch-potato caveperson would feel right at home.

“People come here looking for the hidden seating areas, the new treasures that the gardeners create every year, the new walkways and paths, the new plants in the beds,” says gardener Lisa Roper. “Children look for the little nooks and crannies they can hide in. The garden is so full of routes off the beaten path that each visit can be a new adventure.”

I usually begin my tour of the garden at the Tropical Teacup, a pair of connected sunken courtyards behind the house that now serves as the garden's administration building. Since these beds are almost wholly planted with tropical specimens trucked north from nurseries in Florida, it tends to be the most variable section of the garden. In past years the Teacup, which is not fully planted until the warm weather of May, has featured both lush, colorful plants with bold foliage, and a more spare look using hundreds of bromeliads.

The nearby Tennis Court garden, as its name suggest, is a former court dug up and transformed into a sunken four-square garden, backed by a rose- and vine-covered pergola, with colorful mixed plantings of shrubs, grasses and various perennial and tender herbaceous plants overflowing the beds by midsummer. Across an open lawn below the Tennis Court is a cutting and vegetable garden, and beyond that, a peaceful streamside garden, a new section of which is now under development. This area peaks in the spring, but all year it provides a cool respite from the horticultural extravagance of the rest of the place.

A series of gravel beds, with a beautiful collection of herbs, succulents and other dry-loving plants, covers a wide slope that overlooks a series of artificial ponds, each encircled with a colorful border. The largest pond is home to a variety of aquatic plants, including the fast-spreading lotus, Nelumbo 'Mrs. Perry Slocum,' which needs to be whacked back two or three times a year to keep it from overspreading the entire pond. The Asian Woods, adjoining the ponds, features a collection of mostly-Asian plants beneath a very American setting: a canopy of mostly native trees, including tulip poplar and beech. Past the woods, back out in the sun, is a nod to the garden's agricultural past: a swirling, decorative bed of agricultural grains that looks beautiful in its many stages of growth.

From there, up a steep, wide expanse of lawn, at the property's highest point, sits the main house, Chanticleer. In the front courtyard a circular driveway, no longer used, is now paved with red gravel, carefully raked, Japanese-style, in patterns that change from day to day. Around the back is a sunny terrace that, in past years, has been home to hundreds of planted containers. At the far end of the terrace water pours out of a lion-head fountain, into a soothing rill that mimics, in Moorish style, Bell's Run, the real stream on the backside property. A nearby swimming pool, frustratingly inviting on a midsummer midday, is not open to the public, but a comfortably-furnished covered porch at the end of the house is. Visitors can often be found lounging there in the shade, perhaps pretending, as I sometimes do, that they are guests of the Rosengartens; or, if they have high self-esteem, that they are one of the owners themselves.

Chanticleer calls itself a “pleasure garden,” and with this designation has geared itself more toward an aesthetic, rather than scientific, appreciation of horticulture. While a map is provided at the entrance, there is almost a complete lack of the “signage” that clutters up so many other gardens. Very few of the plants are labeled, which, since so many of them are new and unusual, some visitors find frustrating. “We're asking people to pay attention in a different way, letting it be delightful to the senses rather than hitting you over the head with information,” says Voran. “And since at least two members of the horticultural staff are in the garden whenever we're open, the information is still there, if you ask for it.” Adds gardener Doug Croft: “People tell me that they enjoy being able to come to a garden and enjoy the beauty of it and appreciate the different combinations, without all the 'sticks.'”

From the covered porch at the end of Chanticleer, partly hidden behind a border of shrubs and trees, is what could perhaps be considered the most extravagant part of Chris Woods' legacy to the garden: the Minder Ruin. From a designer's standpoint, Woods had practical reasons to want to tear down Minder House, which had been the home of Adolph Jr. and his wife until the latter moved off the property in the mid-1990s. The stone house stood on a prominent knoll and, being off limits to visitors, created a dead spot at the center of the evolving garden. Woods' first planned to “ruin” the stone house, but when that proved impractical he convinced the board to let him tear it down completely and build a new ruin on its footprint.

Completed in 2000, the ruin provides the garden with its central feature, “a hub for the wheel,” as Walczak calls it. In its several walled spaces are a dining room with a sarcophagus-like water-filled table, made of black marble; a library littered with slate books titled with silly puns; and a bath-like fountain with eerie, thick-lipped submerged marble faces, carved by Berkeley, California artist Marcia Donahue based on an idea that to Woods in a recurring dream.

Made of shiny local stone called Wissahickon schist, this massive garden ornament seems, from several viewpoints, a bit too spanking-new for something supposed to be ruined. But Woods never cared if other people failed to appreciate his creation, because he loved it. Maybe this is his real legacy to the garden: not the ruin, not even his overall scheme for the garden, but the free-thinking spirit he cultivated in his board and his staff. There is a pride of place in the staff, to be sure, but also a brashness, a confidence, that has freed the new director and gardeners to take risks, challenging visitors to appreciate more than just the pretty plants, pushing past the edge of conventional taste, even at the risk of falling flat.

“Whether what I do here delights or disturbs, that's not really the point,” says Benarcik. “I just want to instill that emotion.”

Gardening Mentors
Article originally appeared in Green Scene, 1998

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