By
Steve Stephens
GAMBIER, Ohio — Garden lovers will soon have a rare opportunity to tour one of the finest private gardens in the Midwest.
Two miles from the village of Gambier, the 75-acre Schnormeier
Gardens opens for a short time each year — this year, June 6-10.
The couple who created the horticulture showplace — and happily live amid the gardens full time — are Ted and Ann Schnormeier, both 77.
Their open house, initiated three years ago, drew 20,000 visitors last year.
The Schnormeiers are gracious and welcoming hosts.
“It’s just the landscaping surrounding our home,” Mr. Schnormeier told me this month during a private tour.
The gardens date from the mid-1990s, after the Schnormeiers built their 4,600-square-foot home and took a trip to China, where they were inspired by the gardens they saw.
“We thought, ‘We need to do a little landscaping,’” said Mr. Schnormeier, a Mount Vernon businessman who made his fortune with the window and door company Jeld-Wen.
They started small, with a formal Japanese-style garden just behind their house — itself a gorgeous homage to Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style homes with a low, long terraced roof and porch lines as well as large windows, opening like picture frames onto the garden.
Mr. Schnormeier remembers the beginning precisely.
“We worked flat-out on this project for a dozen years, (beginning) July 6, 1996, at 9:30 a.m. when the first load of rocks arrived.”
Since then, Schnormeier Gardens has grown to nine distinct areas, including a waterfall garden, serenity garden, stream garden, hosta garden, meadow garden and woodland garden.
One of my favorite spots was the Chinese cup gardens, set in two hollows and gracefully adorned with boulders and a pagoda-topped Chinese-style pavilion. Children especially will want to keep an eye out for the resident dragons (sculptures).
The last of the garden areas, the quarry garden, was completed in 2008 with 1,200 tons of limestone simulating an abandoned quarry and plantings of rare conifers watered by a well-fed manmade waterfall.
The laborious and often-frustrating 12-year process of building Schnormeier Gardens is a story — perhaps a cautionary tale — that can be found on the extensive website www.schnormeier gardens.org. The Schnormeiers say they can’t say — nor do they want to know — what the total project cost.
Schnormeier Gardens is now in “maintenance mode,” Mr. Schnormeier said. And maintenance is a priority for the couple, with the grounds kept in tip-top shape with the help of several hired gardeners.
The Schnormeiers say they like the natural look but also the definition and clean edges, which are apparent during a visit. Each individual garden area is defined by planted screens, water features or some of the more than 5,000 tons of stone moved to the garden during construction.
The result is a series of intricately planned vistas that open up like works of art.
“There’s no place you can stand and not see a perfect picture,” Mr. Schnormeier said with understandable pride.
As befits a garden heavily influenced by Asian styles, Schnormeier Gardens emphasizes form and structure. Visitors will find no annual plants and few blooming perennials.
Instead, the garden has a top-notch collection of rare conifers, deciduous trees with richly colored foliage, and water, water everywhere.
“I like water — it adds life to the garden,” Mr. Schnormeier said.
The garden features 10 lakes or ponds with many streams and waterfalls, produced by pumping 3 million gallons a day (the same as the city of Delaware, noted Mr. Schnormeier) from recirculating ponds or wells.
Visitors might also find themselves enchanted by a Chinese-style arch bridge and traditional Japanese-style teahouses and garden houses.
Also enhancing the garden are almost 50 pieces of sculpture and art, mostly commissioned pieces.
For a garden that is relatively young, the plantings look remarkably mature.
Visitors will see several plants that are rare or unique in Ohio — especially conifers and including several others that aren’t supposed to grow here.
“I have the advantage of knowing nothing about horticulture,” Mr. Schnormeier said.
But the Schnormeiers do know about leaving a gracious legacy: They have formed a foundation and an endowment that will someday operate Schnormeier Gardens and open it to the public year-round.
sstephens@dispatch.com
@SteveStephens
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