Each year, hundreds of area gardeners throw open the gates to their growing spaces and let the public take a peek. Garden clubs, neighborhood associations, civic groups and non-profit agencies sponsor these walks, which usually raise money for good causes. This year, the Home&Garden staff and a few other Tribune colleagues hit as many garden walks as we could to pick up ideas to share. We saw a garden entrance that invited us in and big bold hostas that made a statement in the shade and other striking touches to try at home.
— Marjorie David, Gardening editor
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– Wicker Park Garden Club Garden Social in historic Wicker Park, June 11: This tour featured five home gardens and the gardens of Wicker Park, 1425 N. Damen Ave. It was the first of four tours offered from June to September (the final walk is Sept. 24). Visitors are escorted by guides. At the homes, the homeowner-gardeners were on hand to explain their goals and answer questions about their gardens. After the tour, everyone was invited to a Victorian-style garden social, with refreshments and more opportunities to chat about gardening (and historic houses).
Best idea from the tour: You can give your containers real punch by planting them generously with a mix of flowers, herbs, grasses and vegetables, colors and textures. Gardener Susan Fontana thinks of her pots as theatrical stages. Her combinations play with color, foliage, layers and height. She also selects pots that work well together (i.e., all terra cotta but of different sizes) and she groups them, usually in threes, around the courtyard garden. I was inspired to see the playfulness in the plant choices (peek-a-boo plant and fiber optic grass) too.
–Marjorie David
– Dearborn Garden Walk and Heritage Festival, presented by the North Dearborn Association, July 16:
On a desperately hot day, I joined the walk of about 20 gardens in the Gold Coast area. My favorite was a beautifully planted small courtyard garden, very harmonious. You enter along a passageway defined by cedar fencing under a vine-covered pergola. It creates a sense of mystery and ceremony about entering the garden.
Straight ahead is a corner arrangement of planters filled with white tuberous begonias, chartreuse lysimachia and variegated porcelain berry vine. They invite your eye, leading it toward the stairs to the deck and the nearby garden entrance and brightening the passage. Not an inch of space is wasted; tucked in a little corner by the stairs are tiny dwarf conifers. If you climb the stairs you find a small deck in the treetops, with beautifully planted boxes on the railing including English ivy, springerei ferns and torenia.
If you enter the ground-floor garden you face, at the far end, a flat trellis against the fence covered by a climbing hydrangea, creating a green arch and a sense of depth. The garden is a shady refuge with a couple of mature small trees. Ferns, white impatiens, astilbe, lamiastrum, sweet woodruff, heuchera and variegated Solomon’s seal are thriving (I have all this stuff in my garden and it doesn’t look anywhere near this good!).
Against the gray cedar fence is a zigzag-trained weeping juniper. It’s the first time I have ever seen that kind of trained dwarf evergreen work — because it is subtle: silvery gray-green tendrils of needles against the gray fence. It’s an added texture and shape in the background, instead of shouting “Look at me! I’m such a weird tree! How did they make me do that?”
There is nothing really unusual about the plant choices in this garden, but it is all put together just beautifully. I’m green with envy.
–Beth Botts
– East Village Garden Walk, Aug. 6
The East Village Garden Club in tandem with East Village Artists presented “Find Art in Gardens” in this Near West Side neighborhood. The two-day event featured art, artists at work, private gardens and boldly planted parkways.
At one home, a small garden boasted a 20-year-old rose of sharon In another yard, a lovely little spot was created in an English basement well. The homeowners trellised a wall and hung baskets of impatiens, creating a nice serene space. And in their parkway, they had planted hollyhocks that came from seeds from India.
–Elaine Matsushita
– “The View from the Terrace,” hosted by Twin Oaks Shelter for the Homeless of Walworth County, Aug. 13: The walk featured six gardens in Lake Geneva, Wis.
By far the best garden was that of Nancy Neshek. She designed a sprawling 1-acre garden, marking off the exact shape and curve of the garden on what was a subpar lawn before she got started.
The black walnut trees that pepper the property made the soil unsuitable for gardening, so she brought in a variety of organic compost, topsoil, peat moss and sand to prepare her property. Deer also make their home throughout the community, so she uses Milorganite for fertilizer as well as to minimize deer problems. (Milorganite is sanitized stuff from the Milwaukee sewer system; humans can’t smell it, but the deer don’t like it.)
The garden is striking from the road with its swaths of colorful tall plants and flowers, accented by towering zebra grasses. The effect also is meant to offer privacy to the rest of the yard and the back side of the gardens.
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When a developer was about to plow down a stand of red lobelias (Lobelia cardinalis, a native plant loved by hummingbirds) on a nearby property, a friend alerted Neshek. She rescued them, adding them to her growing assortment of native prairie plants and grasses. She planted blue spruce in 1998 to attract birds to the property.
–Pat Kampert
– Pottawatomie Garden Club, six town and country gardens in and around St. Charles, July 15. The garden of David Hunt and Doug Bella offers examples of three great ideas. First, an arbor with bright red geraniums at its feet on either side of a flagstone path, draws visitors into the garden. Second, raised beds at the far end of the yard provide easy-to-reach space for growing flowers and herbs — and an attractive way to grow herbs. Third, they have lights in the trees. The nighttime illumination is probably spectacular.
–Bill Hageman
– “Keep Geneva’s Charm,” Geneva Garden Club, June 16 to 17: The tour featured seven gardens and the Natural Gardens at RiverPark in Geneva. For sheer wow, Bruce and Kristie Dienst’s garden, with its massive yard, flowered terraces and tiered flagstone walk, swept me away. They have an in-ground pool with a manmade stream running along the perimeter and waterfalls. I could live in that yard.
–Bill Hageman
– “A Century of Gardens and Porches,” West Chicago Garden Club, West Chicago, June 24: Best idea from the tour: Giant hostas. Lou Horton, president of the Northern Illinois Hosta Society, is my new god. He has more than 200 varieties on his property, probably a thousand total. There are also mature trees, hydrangeas and other bushes. He also has a beautiful bottlebrush buckeye out front and a little one out back. He’s got many large, mature hostas more than 3 feet tall and 6 feet wide that are inspiring me to get rid of some scraggly bushes and replace them with something like these.
–Bill Hageman