Charlotte Peters and Jo Anna Duensing like to get down and dirty. The Chicago-area women are landscape designers, gardeners extraordinaire who transform average yards into plant-filled paradises.
From early spring to late fall, Peters and Duensing work 10- to 16-hour days in their individual businesses, plotting out tiny to grand lots and filling them with blooms. Their designs range from charming Victorian flower patches to Southwest-look landscapes to formal, European-styled gardens.
They also plan and oversee installation of patios, walkways, fencing, stone ornaments and water features, and may follow up with garden maintenance. As busy as these women are with other people`s gardens from first crocus to last chrysanthemum, one might mistakenly think they`d take a pass on puttering around a plot at home.
Duensing`s home in Cary in McHenry County sits on 2 1/2 acres, most of which she has turned into garden and filled with literally thousands of perennial plants. Her clients often visit her home gardens to browse for ideas within what she calls her ”living library.”
”I just love gardening so much that I don`t want to do anything else from spring through the fall,” Duensing explains. ”Besides, I have the winter to rest.”
Peters shares Duensing`s enthusiasm. The Evanston designer also runs her business from her home office and says whenever she needs a break she just opens the back door and works on her own charming, cottage-look garden.
”It`s refreshing-and it`s right here,” Peters says. ”My involvement with my garden never stops.”
In these special spaces, they feel free to experiment and escape. Although it`s impossible to put a price on the patience it took to make their gardens grow, the designers estimate that it would cost $20,000 to $30,000 to replicate their gardens in labor and materials alone.
Here they share their stories, along with some secrets for gardening success.
Charlotte Peters` paradise
As a young child growing up in Australia, Peters remembers tending her mother`s hydrangeas and asters outside their mountain bungalow in the Victorian Alps. Later, when they moved to Melbourne, she tended a patch of her very own, with happy results.
”I was fascinated, enthralled with anything that grew,” recalls Peters, who came to the United States in 1955.
Yet she never considered gardening as anything but a hobby for many years. Her first profession was that of lawyer. During the year she took off after the birth of her daughter in 1981, she read all she could about gardening and spent a lot of time experimenting with plants in her back yard. ”My experience as an attorney taught me how to research. I`d go to the library and come home with stacks of garden books,” Peters recalls. ”I also taught myself by walking around gardens and trying to figure out what things were.”
By 1982, she was ready to open her own part-time garden consulting business from her Evanston home. It quickly evolved into a full-time operation, Charlotte Peters Gardens Inc., which she runs with partner Daniel Ward, a former curator of perennial plants at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.
Peters says her home garden has as been a laboratory for ideas. This beautiful lab is filled with hundreds of plants, shrubs and trees, combined to create an inviting, old-fashioned ”cottage garden” that ”looks like it`s been here forever.”
Of course, it has taken a great deal of time, thought and hard work to create. Peters` home, built in 1906 and remodeled extensively in the 1950s by a student of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, has a slightly modernistic stucco-and- frame facade.
When she moved to the house in 1978, she was drawn to the perennial garden created by the previous owner. By the mid-1980s, she expanded upon this original design.
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First, the designer removed a rotting wood deck at the front of the house that led to a sidewalk and a small rock wall where mostly annuals had been grown. In its place she created a brick path ”with the help of wonderful old Italian stone mason” and started a rock garden featuring allium, ornamental grasses, asters and baby`s breath.
Junipers and flowering shrubs have been planted in the former front porches. Beneath them pop up spring bulbs such as crocuses, grape hyacinths and small tulips. When these die back, Peters plants pansies or violas, sometimes in containers grouped together.
Because the front garden is in full sun, it`s a showcase for summer plants. Peters enjoys experimenting with both subtle and strong color combinations, including Sunny Red cosmos, purple petunias, yellow Dahlberg daisies and Meidiland roses, which she says are disease-resistant and low-maintenance.
The back garden, which started as a large expanse of lawn rimmed by scaled-back flower beds, now has plants packed into it. There`s a smaller lawn, a multilevel deck, fruit trees, shrubs and bed after bed of perennials and annuals.
Turning the corner, there are patches for vegetables, herbs, currants, blueberries and alpine strawberries.
”In every part of my garden, there`s a continuous sequence of bloom,”
Peters says. ”Things overlap, grow into each other. I like it that way because there`s always something happening. I like plants competing with each other.”
Taking a cue from English tradition, there are iron and stone benches spread about the garden, plus patio furniture on the deck. ”The English always provide places to sit,” Peters says. ”We move our chairs and benches around a lot, even in our little garden, to follow the sun and to enjoy what`s blooming at a particular time.”
Also woven into the landscape are all manner of decorative containers, some with mythological motifs. There`s also an arbor built from electrical conduit that bears buckets of the Niagara, Concord, Stensen and Canadis grapes.
Peters replaced a crumbling stone fence at the back of the yard with a wood stockade fence and planted vines. In summer, it is covered in
bittersweet, flowering clematis, grapevines and climbing roses.
The designer also has removed several decaying trees from the back yard, gaining more sun. She replaced one tree in the center of the yard with a white-flesh peach tree and ”gives a few absolutely wonderful peaches each year.”
Her plans? ”Now that I`ve achieved the overall cottage garden look, I`m going to try to create several separate components within the garden, each focused on a beautiful lead, terra cotta or stone garden ornament.”
Jo Anna Duensing`s joy
Duensing says she knew she wanted to be a landscape designer ”from Day 1.” She comes from a family of gardeners and has been learning about flowers and vegetables as long as she can remember.
”It started with my grandparents, who lived in the Missouri Ozarks and gardened as a source of food,” recalls Duensing, a native of southern Illinois.
She also was inspired by an aunt who was an avid gardener. ”When I was a child, Aunt Eunice, who was particularly interested in wildflowers, used to walk us around her garden. I knew all the names of the plants.”
Hooked on horticulture, Duensing spent her summers from junior high school onward doing garden and landscape work, and went on to earn a bachelor`s degree in plant and soil science from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
She started her own company, Perennial Passions, out of her home five years ago and often collaborates with her husband, David, whose own landscaping business specializes in stone, brick, timber and water-garden features.
Unlike Peters, who inherited part of her garden from previous owners, Duensing had the ”luxury” of starting from scratch on her patch of paradise. The Duensings built their A-frame cedar home on an unimproved parcel of 2 1/2 acres in rural Cary. ”You couldn`t take one step without getting hit in the face by a branch or getting scratched by a bramble,” she recalls. ”The lot was a mess, but there were nice hickories and oaks on it. There was potential.”
Excavation began in August 1989, and the Duensings moved in a year later. ”I planted bulbs before there was even a roof. Before I had a kitchen, I had daffodils.”
She began her landscape design by planting flower beds, then expanded. Along the driveway, there are planting beds of wildflowers, daylilies, daisies, phlox, dianthus, flax and clematis. A stone wall lines the edge.
A wraparound deck leads down a set of stairs to the back lot, where a stepping-stone path outlines the flower beds, which are everywhere.
There are multiple patches near the house, along the perimeter of the property and in the middle of the yard. The center beds surround a water garden, home to hybrid water lilies, water hyacinths (which bloom all summer) and a pair of goldfish.
As young as her plantings are, Duensing is well on her way to a first-class ”collector`s garden.” It looks mature because she used the largest, most established plants she could find.
”I have groupings of just about everything there is,” she explains.
”There`s not direct sun, but it`s not real shady, either, so I can put just about anything in.
”I have lots of spring bulbs. In the summer I have salvia, butterfly weed with bright orange flowers, daylilies of different varieties, coreopsis, purple cone flowers, Japanese anemones, phlox and one of my favorites, a butterfly bush with a cascading pile of purple spikes.
”In the fall I love the sedum Autumn Joy, which is real showy. Its heads turn chocolate-brown and stay on during the winter, so when the snow rests on them it`s a pretty sight. My golden ornamental grasses kind of carry the color through. I don`t cut them back until February.”
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Duensing put more formal, neater-looking beds toward the front of the property; then she made the transition to more natural-looking plantings, such as black-eyed Susans, at the back of the lot, toward the woods.
She minimized her lawn-care time. ”We put in just enough grass to play badminton or volleyball. I didn`t want to go any bigger than that. With a riding mower I can cut the grass in 10 minutes, and all the curves are edged so I don`t have to do any trim work,” she explains. ”The lawn is just there to connect the garden.”
This year Duensing plans to add flowers and to put in ”a big-time vegetable patch” and help David build a stone-and-wood back-yard gazebo.
Despite her hectic seasonal work schedule, she says she never tires of spending time in her gardens. ”I get a thrill out of just walking around in them,” Duensing says. ”It`s rewarding to see things grow. . . . Gardening is a warm, uplifting experience.”