In this blog post I have attempted to provide a retrospective survey of the garden’s evolution during the first five months of 2020. To make the navigation of the year less daunting, the photos are separated into a chronological sequence of four slideshows, each with a short introduction:
#1: The Garden in January
#2: The Garden in March
#3: The Garden in April
#4: The Garden in May (divided into the first two weeks and the second two weeks)
Although many photos have short captions, I hope most photos adequately demonstrate the garden’s diversity and rapid changes during this five-month stretch. I do, however, recognize the images profoundly misrepresent what on-site visitors to the garden would likely experience. For example, the photos tend to concentrate on flowers in bloom and thus ignore the broad sweeps of foliage throughout the garden, the space’s fragrances and sounds and movement of the wind, the flight of the birds, the appearance of the first pollinators, the weeds in the gravel walkways, the compost bins filled with last year’s vegetation, etc. Gardens are complex spaces. These photos flatten that experience, reducing it primarily to a progression of colorful petals.
Before beginning the first slideshow, allow me to offer a brief comment on the title “From Hellebores to Husker Reds.” The Alumni House Garden was originally designed to replicate an 18th-century English flower garden: a large, open, grass lawn (with a fountain in the middle), surrounded by symmetrically organized perennial flower beds accessible by walking on gravel walkways, everything in turn framed by permanent shrubs (mostly yews and viburnum) within brick and wooden walls. It’s a classic design with many desirable attributes, but there is a significant challenge to maintaining such a garden in Iowa: the climate is quite different from what one finds in England. Our summers are hotter and drier, our winters are colder and windier. Our spring-time thunderstorms and floods will often be followed by long, hot dry spells. Maintaining an English-style garden in Iowa presents some challenges.
Since I began working in this garden in the spring of 2014, my approach has been to develop an Anglo-American garden. I try to integrate plants commonly encountered in a classic English garden (such as the hellebores) with North American natives that feel at home in east-central Iowa, such as the ‘Husker Red” penstemons bred at the University of Nebraska. The Alumni House Garden is primarily a perennial flower garden, assisted by several annuals that are skilled self-seeders. The goal is a garden of tough, resilient plants that can handle the Iowa climate without requiring much special coddling. There are a few exceptions: for example, we do have several beds where we plant dahlias and peacock orchids in the spring and dig them up for safe storage in the fall. But these are the exceptions, and the photos in this series of slideshows will focus on the plants and structures of this garden that tend to take care of themselves.
Slideshow #1: Garden in January 2020
Although the British Isles are located much closer than Iowa to the Arctic Circle, their winters are distinctly milder, and it’s possible to create diverse plantings with year-around appeal. An attractive Iowa garden in the middle of January can be more challenging when the temperatures remain below zero and everything is covered with a thick layer of ice and snow. Those conditions have their appeal, but it may be hard to think of them as ideal gardening conditions. For Coe’s garden, the perennial flower beds prime appeal comes during the late spring and summer months, ironically a time in the year when relatively few people are on campus. So one of my first commitments was to find ways to enhance the garden’s winter appeal. The primary strategy has been the acquisition of permanent wooden and metal structures. One of the first major additions was the construction of the gazebo in the summer of 2016. Although the gazebo is not enclosed, it is positioned to catch the early morning sun and provides protection from a west or north wind so that even on chilly days it can be quite warm and cozy. As for the sculptures, in the last five years we have added almost 100 pieces to the garden, including:
• 4 sundials
• 3 mobiles
• a gazing ball
• a staddle stone (looks like a stone mushroom)
• 3 large lawn sculptures (one of which can be easily moved)
• 3 metal sculptures for the rain garden
• 1 lead Pegasus (which long ago resided in Dean Phifer’s office)
• a replica of The Little Gardener statue by the sculptor Sylvia Shaw-Judson,
• several garden wall decorative metal pieces and a reflective mirror
• over 25 metal plant supports
• 7 plexiglass panels with quotes on gardens
• 6 wood and metal flower trellises (and another large trellis will be installed later this summer)
• 7 wooden bird and butterfly houses
• a fake hippo that now resides under a forsythia
• 20 ornamental stepping stones
• 2 large sculpture pieces by Cara Briggs Farmer (pieces purchased last summer)
• 2 Little Free Libraries and a message center.
Later this summer we will be installing a group of metal planters and create a vertical garden on a wall north of the patio. ~Bob Marrs, Alumni House Gardener
This first slide show attempts to convey some of the ways in which the garden, even in the middle of the winter, can be an attractive space. These photos were all shot on a January morning in 2020, using a Canon PowerShort G3X. In these slides you should be able to spot some of the items listed above.
These 45 photos were shot on several days in March, revealing how the garden combines remnants from last summer’s plants (such as the seed heads of the purple coneflowers, hydrangea, ironweed, river oats, and love-in-a-mist), the foliage of some plants enduring through the winter (notably plants in the rock and crevice gardens), and the emergence of early spring flowers (snowdrops, winter aconites, crocus ‘Tommies,” and the stunning little flowers of the Iris reticulata ‘Katharine Hodgkin’). This is the garden’s Janus month, the garden holding on to the past while announcing the arrival of a new spring.
April is an exciting month in the garden because of the explosion of color that comes with the emergence of the yellow daffodils, typically in full bloom by the first week in April. Supplementing the daffodils are two large forsythia shrubs, which this year were both covered in yellow blossoms for almost two weeks. More modest are the hellebores’ flowers hidden in the southeast corner of the garden. The blooms face toward the ground, and visitors can easily walk by the hellebores without noticing these marvelous flowers. Other notable bloomers during the month include the moss phlox in the rock garden and the small Grecian windflowers and glory-of-the-snow popping up in the beds near the patio. Toward the end of the month, the dominant daffodils shift from the yellows to the whites. This is also a time when we see the emergence of the fritillary (most notably the large Fritillaria imperialis) and tulips. Throughout the month are wonderful examples of fresh foliage in a diverse assortment of colors, including the beguiling leaves of the columbine and lady’s mantle.
These slides are divided into two groups: one set of photos shot during the first two weeks of May, the second set showing the garden during the last two weeks of the month. Perhaps the sequence of slides will convey how dramatically the garden changes. Every day one enters a different garden.