By Christina Hennessy

Even with a thick canopy of clouds overhead, Suzanne Bellehumeur had managed to find a sunny spot at Stamford’s Bartlett Arboretum on a recent weekday morning.

“I just love the theme of this show house,” she said, as she carefully crafted another leaf with the bristles of her paintbrush. “Bringing the outdoors in.”

Bellehumeur, a Stamford-based wall mural artist, is one of more than two dozen designers and artisans who are coming together to transform the historic Bartlett homestead into an elegant showcase of architectural design and artistic elements. “Garden Rooms by Design — Bringing the Outdoors In” begins with a gala fundraiser, “Spring Fling in the Garden Party,” on Thursday, June 7, and continues Friday, June 8, to Friday, June 15, at the Bartlett Arboretum and Gardens, a 91-acre site that features woodland trails, gardens and education programs at its new Silver Educational Center.

The showcase coincides with the Bartlett’s Spring Garden Tour, which serves as one of the main fundraisers for this nonprofit organization. The tour, which includes several local gardens as well as the gardens at the arboretum, will run Sunday, June 10, to Monday, June 11.

On this morning, with the warm yellow tones of the foyer walls emanating a sunshiny glow, Bellehumeur worked to create the trees and other botanical elements — in the style of chinoiserie — that will be featured throughout the entry space and up along the walls of the spiraling staircase.

“It is one of my favorite motifs,” she said, as she described the flowers and the birds that would soon appear. Once the walls bloom, so to speak, she said she will begin work on the original oil paintings that will be featured on the walls of the home’s second floor.

“It’s like being a kid in a candy store,” she said of the designer showcase experience. “We get to do what we love to do.”

“We gave a lot of artistic leeway,” said Peter Saverine, the Bartlett’s executive director.

The only guiding principle was attention to the show’s botanical theme. As such, Victoria Vandamm, who is co-chair of the designer showcase along with Helen White of Home Resource Guide.com, said the interior designers, landscape designers and artists who signed on to the project have brought a distinct, yet complementary approach to the home and adjacent grounds.

“This really is a great celebration of the Bartlett Arboretum,” said Vandamm, who runs the interior design firm Vandamm Interiors in Stamford.

In addition to her s co-chair role, Vandamm also is collaborating with Bellehumeur for the entry and staircase work, and Hoffman Landscapes for a unique presentation in the home’s library. Though the library was empty on a recent morning, Vandamm painted a clear picture of what was to come — a collection of fauna to complement the collection of garden books that will soon be on the shelves.

“It’s a different kind of designer showcase because it doesn’t feature the typical mansion or showroom,” she said. “This is an older, real house circa 1900 that has been lived in and will continue to function as an administrative building, historical museum and visitor service center.”

The home served as the residence for Francis A. Bartlett, the founder of the F.A. Bartlett Tree Expert Co., from 1913 to 1965. The state bought the property and home in 1965, and the public arboretum opened a year later. In 2002, the city of Stamford gained ownership of the site, which is managed by the Bartlett Arboretum Association.

Given the age of the home, it needed some attention even before the designers and artists could get to work, the organizers said. In fact, the home had recently undergone renovations to install a new heating system.

Accepting the challenge was another co-chairman of the event, Robert Knorr of Pound Ridge, N.Y.-based Nordic Construction, Inc., who also donated his skills to the project.

“I’m not a designer, but I am a builder,” he said during a recent interview.

As such, he focused on creating a clean canvas for the designers, which meant a new paint job, new flooring in some areas, fixes to the plaster and other restorative work. He worked with a number of vendors, including Reclamation Lumber in New Haven, to ensure that any new elements would not compromise the historic look of the house.

“Some of it was challenging,” he said. “But, to bring it back and watch it be reborn, that was really my motivation.”

This is the first designer showcase at Bartlett, which is a source of pride and anticipation for the organizers. Vandamm said it has been a great experience, aided largely by the philanthropic nature of many people who have donated time, talents, supplies and assistance to the effort. For many of the designers and artists, who more typically have their work displayed in private settings, this project will be a way to have their talents seen by the public. Once the showcase ends, the home will be ready to serve as an administrative space and place for the public to gather.

“One of the wonderful things along the way has been this sense of community,” Vandamm said. “So many people have reached out. It’s really been a pleasure.”

“Garden Rooms By Design — Bringing the Outdoors In,” will kick off with a gala reception and fundraiser, “Spring Fling in the Garden Party,” Thursday, June 7, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. $100 nonmember, $85 member. The showcase runs daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday, June 8, to Friday, June 15. Entry to the showcase is $20, with a $10 discount with purchase of a garden tour ticket. The Spring Garden Tour runs Sunday, June 10, noon to 4 p.m. and Monday, June 11, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets: $50 nonmember; $40 member. Monday’s luncheon and vendor boutique is an additional $20.

The Bartlett Arboretum and Gardens is located at 151 Brookdale Road, Stamford. Visit www.stamfordshowhouse.com or www.bartlettarboretum.org, or call 914-934-1685 or 203-322-6971.

christina.hennessy@scni.com; 203-964-2241; http://twitter.com/xtinahennessy/

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Business World photo/Mike Bonnicksen

Alphabet Garden co-owners Camilla Rose and Jenn West stand in front of some of the different items they produce.

Rank usually has its privileges, but sometimes even royalty is outranked by a child who needs to see mom when he gets home from school.

So the next time the personal representative of Sultan Majed Alnasser, Prince of Qatar, calls Alphabet Garden Designs to place an order, as he did last spring, he’d better do it before 3 p.m. That’s Pacific time.

“Our main priority is motherhood,” said Camilla Rose, co-owner of Alphabet Garden Designs, at 606 N. Chelan Ave. “We’re still 100 percent moms, so at 3 we close up and go home for our kids.”

Rose’s business partner is Jenn West. They also happen to be best friends.

The women began their friendship in 2006. Both had young daughters the same age, and during a casual conversation discovered they both had a burning desire to start a business. They seemed the perfect match. Rose has a background in graphic design and marketing, and West has a teaching degree and enjoys writing.

In spite of their different backgrounds, the business partners learned they have similar design tastes.

“We are uni-brain when it comes to style,” West said.

With young kids, the future business partners quickly discovered how difficult it was to find colorful decorations to put on their kids’ bedroom walls. They did some research on the Internet and realized there was nothing available in what they were looking for – simple vinyl transfer designs.

“We knew nobody else was doing it, so the opportunity was there,” West said.

The friends did their homework. They researched vinyl suppliers, vinyl transfer techniques and general business “how-to’s.”

It was Super Bowl weekend in 2007 when they announced to their friends and families they were starting a new business. That weekend has been celebrated by the entrepreneurs each year since.

Business World photo/Mike Bonnicksen

Karen Wilson grabs a roll of vinyl that will be used to cut a design at the Wenatchee business.

“My father is a lawyer, and he guided us through the whole process of starting our business,” West said. “He told us we needed to decide from the start what kind of business we wanted to be — a BMW or a Honda. We wanted to be a BMW.”

The business plan for the brand new Alphabet Garden Designs included these non-negotiables:

• Be a mom-based company

• Work on their own schedule

• Have a big Internet presence

• Be high-end, high quality

• Offer superior customer service

The women created their own website (alphabetgarden designs.com) and still maintain it.

“We started out really small, working out of our kitchens,” West said. “The first vinyl machine we bought was on eBay for $800 — a lot of money for us at that time — and it turned out to be a horrible machine. All the instructions were printed in Chinese. We still have the first piece of vinyl we cut with it — a simple blue square.”

The first two years the partners did everything themselves, and it was a tough time, Rose said. Working out of their kitchens, they would design the orders then process and package them. Then West would pile her three small children into her car and deliver the orders to the post office every day.

But the partners persevered.

“We quickly found our niche — children’s designs,” Rose said. “People love that we can do custom designs — anything they want.”

After identifying a niche, the fledging company grew quickly. That second year, the sales grew by 40 percent.

The decisions the partners made over the years, such as focusing on custom work and going wholesale (to 250 stores), have resulted in improved sales and consistent annual growth.

Business World photo/Mike Bonnicksen

Jamie Kershner uses tweezers to help remove excess vinyl from detail areas. Owners Camilla Rose and Jenn West decided from the start to emphasize high quality in their work.

One of their best decisions, West said, was to hire Tom Sauvageau of Sauvageau Company three years ago for bookkeeping and consulting services.

“That decision saved the business,” she said. “It freed us up to focus on what we love to do — create.”

The last three years have seen a 50 percent increase in sales each year for the company. Projections this year are for sales to top half a million dollars.

Although Alphabet Garden Designs does 99 percent of its business worldwide via the Internet, it does do some business locally. Wenatchee resident Carrie Warner was looking for something to spice up her daughters’ rooms when she contacted Alphabet Garden Designs.

“I ordered some custom vinyl decals for my girls’ rooms and they were exactly what I wanted,” Warner said. “The colors, details and quality of the designs are amazing, and I was surprised at how easy they adhere to the wall. They add so much personality to the rooms and I will definitely be ordering more.”

Designs by Rose and West also grace the walls of local businesses like Tyler B. Gundersen, DDS.

“When I remodeled my office, I wanted my staff to have their personalities reflected in the treatment rooms they worked in,” Gundersen said.  “So I had each of them pick the paint color for the walls, and then come up with a quote that means something to them.”

Rose and West suggested the color of vinyl that would complement the room color, then designed the letter font and orientation to match the saying.

“They are true artists and I couldn’t be happier with the result,” Gundersen said. “I get compliments from patients on a daily basis on the work.”

Orders typically range from $189 to $2,000, and can be made in any size and pieced together. In a typical month, the business’s six employees handle 800 orders from all around the world. As for the Prince of Qatar, his kids are having fun playing hopscotch on their bedroom floor — on a pattern designed and made here in Wenatchee.

The work of Rose and West has had national exposure in People Magazine, Arthritis Today and Women’s World. The business has also been contacted (twice, in fact) by Extreme Home Makeover, but the television show’s short turnaround time prohibited Alphabet Garden Designs’ participation in the project.

“We’re still on their ‘to call’ list,” West said. “We hope we can work within their tight time constraints the next time they call.”

The business also has celebrity clients, including television personality Mark McGrath. He picked one of Alphabet Garden Designs’ patterns as one of his favorites on the television show Project Nursery.

Always striving for continued success, the partners focus on keeping up with current design trends.

“We try to anticipate the market and be one step ahead of what customers may be looking for,” Rose said. “For example, we visit stores and look at the latest colors and patterns of bed sheets. Then we design new patterns and colors to complement a specific line.”

Rose and West recently also determined they needed to create a giftable product — one a customer could purchase that is ready to hang in a room — so they researched the possibility of putting their designs on canvas.

They purchased a canvas machine, perfected the process through trial and error, and hired a new employee to build custom wooden frames for the new line of art. Now any of their designs can also be printed on canvas.

“Our canvas product now allows a grandparent, for example, to order a custom design for their grandkids and ship it directly to them, ready to hang in their rooms,” Rose said. “This is turning out to be a very popular product and should be good for our bottom line.”

Rose and West also understand the value of attending national shows to advertise their products, such as the ABC Kids show in Kentucky and the New York International Gift Fair.

“Those two shows are huge for our business,” West said. “We even had talks with Fisher-Price at the ABC Kids show about some of our designs, and although it didn’t result in any sales, it may have planted a seed for future business.”

The immediate future for Alphabet Garden Designs may include a move.

“We’ve been in our current location for three years,” West said. “We’re getting cramped and are starting to look for a bigger space.”

The best friends often have to pinch themselves when discussing the success of their business, but seem to be able to take it all in stride.

“We’re just having a great time on the adventure,” West said. “We love to make something and watch it grow. We want to keep growing and keep doing what we’re doing. We love our jobs.”

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EXETER — Water Street Bookstore, 125 Water St., and garden center Pick of the Planet, are pleased to be hosting an expert garden panel with several authors of gardening books on Tuesday, June 5 at 7 p.m.

The panel will consist of Ellen Richmond, Roanne Robbins, Penelope O’Sullivan, and Ron and Jennifer Kujawski. Pick of the Planet, a retail garden center in Greenland, will be providing plants for demonstrations.

O’Sullivan is a local garden writer, author of The Homeowner’s Complete Tree Shrub Handbook: The Essential Guide to Choosing, Planting, and Maintaining Perfect Landscape Plants, co-author of The Pruning Answer Book, and owns her own garden design business.

Robbins is the author of The Continuous Container Garden: Swap in the Plants of the Season to Create Fresh Designs Year-Round is a design consultant who specializes in creative plant and floral designs for small-space gardens, containers, and special occasions.

Sousa is the author of The Green Garden: A New England Guide to Planning, Planting, and Maintaining the Eco-Friendly Habitat Garden, which is a practical, comprehensive and inspirational guidebook for New Englanders looking for low-cost, beautiful and earth-friendly ways to green their landscapes and outdoor spaces and supply habitat for a variety of declining species, including birds, native pollinators, honey bees, amphibians and turtles.

Ron and Jennifer Kujawski are the father-daughter team responsible for the Week-By-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook: Perfectly Timed Gardening for Your Most Bountiful Harvest Ever.

For more, visit www.waterstreetbooks.com or call 603-778-9731.

When the tide of spring is high and we’re awash in roses, the autumn garden may seem far away.

But now is a perfect time to get out your spyglass and peer into the future. Why go to all the trouble of shopping and planting only for the fleeting blooms of May and June? With some forethought in the spring, your garden can offer interest and delight well into the fall and even winter.

Mary Saba of the design team at The Growing Place in Naperville (thegrowingplace.com) likes to look for plants that have interest in all seasons.

Sedum “Autumn Fire,” for example, has distinctive sculptural foliage that complements spring and summer bloomers, and then develops deep pink flowers in late summer that dry out and last to stand brown and handsome under a snowfall.

Green-leafed cultivars of Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) offer the structure of a delicate small tree through most of the growing season and then burst into spectacular red and gold fall color. “It’s just glorious,” Saba says. “And because they are at eye level, you really get to see it.”

Swaying in the wind, grasses are always in motion in the summer garden until they turn rich shades of gold and red in the autumn. “And you’re not going to get much more low-maintenance than ornamental grasses, because you only have to cut them back once a year” in early spring, says Sandy Remijas of Rainbow Garden Designs in Lemont (rainbowgardendesigns.com).

The potted chrysanthemums that will be for sale in late August or early September may be a good way to refresh annual containers whose petunias and impatiens look dated as the trees turn. But they’re throwaways. For mums or asters to survive in the garden from year to year, you need to buy and plant them in spring and give them a whole season to get their roots established before winter. “If you plant them now, they’re a true perennial,” Saba says.

Here are some autumn-interest plants to seek out in garden centers now. Choose those that are suitable for your sunlight, soil and other conditions, plant them properly and water them attentively through their first summer — and you’ll be rewarded this fall and in autumns to come.

Perennial flowers

Goldenrod: No, it doesn’t cause hay fever. But various species of this native plant have spectacular, fluffy spikes of yellow bloom in late summer and early fall. Goldenrods can be 3 or 4 feet tall, but some compact cultivars for smaller gardens include Solidago “Golden Baby,” S. sphacelata “Golden Fleece” and S. rugosa “Fireworks.”

Asters: Several species are native to the Midwest, though they too can be tall and ungainly in gardens. Remijas likes “Purple Dome,” a cultivar of New England aster (Aster novae-angliae “Purple Dome”), because it has lots of flowers on a compact, bushy plant. She suggests planting it surrounded by lower perennials because it tends to brown out at the bottom of the stalks.

Turtlehead: Upright stalks with glossy foliage early in the season are topped by tight bundles of oval blossoms in late summer and fall that stand up well to wind and rain. White turtlehead (Chelone glabra) and red turtlehead (C. obliqua), whose blooms are really pink) are both native.

Salvia: Like many perennial species, perennial salvias will rebloom in fall if you cut them back after their first bloom in early summer, according to Tim Pollak, outdoor floriculturist at the Chicago Botanic garden in Glencoe (chicagobotanic.org).

In fact, assiduous deadheading will prolong the bloom of many plants, including reblooming roses. “The point is not to let the plant made a seed,” Saba says. “If it makes a seed it will shut down for the year.”

Grasses

Prairie dropseed: This relatively short native grass (Sporobolus heterolepis) has a “roundy moundy” shape, a beautiful golden-orange fall color and a lovely herbal fragrance, Remijas says. She plants it by a walkway where her passing dachshunds brush against it. “The dogs come in smelling like the herb garden,” she says.

Switchgrass: With steel-blue summer stalks, a cloud of wispy seed heads and golden fall color, this native prairie grass (Panicum virgatum) makes an excellent background plant or hedge. “Northwind” is an especially upright selection that Remijas likes.

Shrubs

Hardy hydrangeas: There has been a recent boom in breeding and selecting new cultivars of the hardy Hydrangea paniculata, such as the quite large pink-blooming Quick Fire (H. paniculata “Bulk”) and smaller Mystical Flame (H. paniculata “Bokratorch”). They bloom in late summer with large, long flower heads that persist into winter. Another good bet, Saba says: dwarf cultivars of oakleaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia).

Dwarf fothergilla: This native of the Southeast (Fothergilla gardenii) has fragrant, fluffy white spring flowers and leaves that turn orange-red in fall. Remijas likes to plant it near patios for the scent.

Viburnums: Most species in this hardy genus have richly colored fall foliage. Remijas recommends Blue Muffin, a cultivar of arrowwood viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) because it is a little more compact than the towering native species and has an especially rich crop of the blue berries much loved by birds.

sunday@tribune.com

Dorset garden design duo create a buzz at Chelsea Fringe

3:30pm Thursday 31st May 2012 in News

By Emma Walker

BLOOMING GOOD: Wendy Cartwright, garden designer, and Caroline Perget, landscape architect

TWO Dorset-based garden designers have been creating a buzz at a new London event.

Caroline Perget and Wendy Cartwright teamed up for The Chelsea Fringe – a festival of flowers, gardens and gardening.

Their event, named The Big Buzz and Flutter in Archbishop’s Park, aims to raise awareness of the decline of the bees, birds and butterflies.

The dedicated duo received no funding for the event which started on May 19 and will be held each weekend until June 10.

Miss Perget, 33, of Weymouth, said: “We are organising a series of great workshops and craft activities for children to have fun and learn about bees, birds and butterflies. Our first weekend was a
success.

“It is a great opportunity to pass a message to the younger generation.

“By planting wildlife-friendly plants near their playground we hope children will care about their environment and learn about the role and benefits of insects.”

Miss Perget, a landscape architect and garden designer, added: “We would like to spread the word to encourage everyone to create a matrix of trees, shrubs and climbers. “These are all good nectar
sources. If everyone can do something towards that, we will have done some good.”

Mother-of-three Mrs Cartwright, of South Holworth, said: “I’ve been practising gardening for nearly 25 years.” Mrs Cartwright, 56, added: “We think, most people would like the wildlife – such as
the bees, birds and butterflies into their garden. It is them that choose to come to us so we get a big buzz when the flutters come in.”

The event, which will next be in Archbishop’s Park next weekend, is hoped to be held in Dorset next year.

Many companies from Weymouth have supported the duo such as Weyprint, Baloogi Studio and Bill Crumblehome.

For information visit thebigbuzz andflutter.co.uk

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Large water features such as this one designed by Tom Hoblyn for the Chelsea Flower Show in 2009 look great, but can they be translated to a small town garden? Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Water has always played a huge role in gardens, out of necessity as much as simply for beauty. The elaborate water features of old were undoubtedly things of beauty, created to be show-stopping, showoff pieces that cared not a jot for the environment around them. It was not unheard of for a stately home to divert a stream or river to fill a decorative lake in their grounds, leaving the population outside of its walls literally high and dry.

The cascade and grottos at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli or the 4,000 litres a minute required to punch the Emperor Fountain at Chatsworth in Derbyshire a dizzying 260 feet into the air are prime examples, both well beyond the scope and budget of even the most well-heeled gardener today.

The Chelsea Flower Show opened its doors for a few days earlier this month and there were water features aplenty there to gain inspiration from. Whether your preference is for water jets, still calm reflective pools, coloured rills or burbling brooks there is much to inspire, and although these are in the main large scale installations, many can be compressed to suit the size and scope of a small town garden.

The key to a successful water feature in a small garden is in the planning. Site and situation are important factors to consider:

Where will the feature be sited? Full sun and eddying winds can have a dramatically negative effect on maintaining regular water levels in a pond or water feature. A site not too hot and one where the wind doesn’t billow are ideal.

Is it possible to get electricity and water to that point easily? These are two things that should never be taken for granted, especially when combined, so always employ a skilled tradesperson to undertake the installation for you or opt for a solar powered feature.

Will the feature be a stand-alone creation? A bold keystone of the garden as a whole, or will it gently enhance the scheme in a more naturalistic manner?

What will the material be? Can you take any reference for this from the immediate surroundings? Metal, slate, stone or simply just water?

How much maintenance is involved? Unfortunately this is usually more that you think – water is not maintenance-free and often not even low maintenance, but an automated top-up that regulates the water level over the pump is a useful item, and means that manual topping up of water levels isn’t required quite so often. A small recirculating feature in a warm town garden could need topping up every day in summer, and with an imposed hosepipe ban this would have to be done manually with watering cans.

Is the water feature child-proof or can it be made so? Recirculating features where there is no access to open water are safer. Open areas of water can be protected with a metal grid immediately below the surface.

There are vast numbers of companies selling water features on the internet from the traditional stone forms of Haddonstone to the contemporary metal designs of David Harber and everything in between to suit taste and budget. Companies such as Oak Barrel offer an almost bewildering array of water features in every material, shape, size, form and cost. There is always the bespoke option to consider as well. A tailor-made feature to suit your specific requirements and situation, either commissioned through a garden designer as part of a scheme, or via a company such as Fairwater Ltd who can transform your vision into a watery wonderland.

Hostas such as this variegated variety ‘Sagae’ look great planted next to water. Photograph: Plantography/Alamy. Photograph: Plantography/Alamy

The plants

Sometimes a water feature looks amazing simply as a feature in itself, but to my eye a water feature needs plants: and plants that associate naturally around water are best, think leafy and lush:

Hosta, ligularia, gunnera (if you are lucky to have some space – although I am probably pushing my luck offering this as a plant for a small town garden but I have seen it successfully ‘bonsaied’ in a pot where the expanse of its spiky leaves are somewhat curtailed), Iris pseudacorus and Zantedeschia aethiopica all look fabulous near a water feature of any style (that’s if you can keep marauding slugs and snails at bay). So do ornamental grasses: if contained in a pot of its own, consider the prehistorically gorgeous Equisetum hyemale but be warned it is a survivor from a family of plants that dinosaurs would have seen as they roamed the earth. It is invasive and spreads very quickly – keep it containerised at all costs.

Kate Gould is an award-winning garden designer and a regular exhibitor at the Chelsea Flower Show. This is the latest in her series of monthly posts on design tips for transforming small gardens: read the rest here.

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What is a garden? Is it flower beds neatly tended, filled with colorful blooms? Is it composed of trees and shrubs, teased into shapes that nature never intended? Is it a man-made construct, with rocks and flowers and ferns carefully composed to create an artful whole?

All of these and more can be found on the 70-acre property that surrounds the Cornwall home of Bruce and Debbie Bennett, successful entrepreneurs whose Kent Greenhouse and Gardens provides full-service design and gardening services for homeowners throughout the region. The Bennetts have focused their considerable abilities on their own land over the past decade, creating a verdant landscape, more natural than contrived, around their elegant home—itself a representation of the traditional New England landscape.

The property is one of four on the Saturday, June 23, garden tour to benefit the Cornwall Library. Also included on the June 23 tour are the gardens of author Roxanna Robinson; Jane Garmey, author of “Private Gardens of Connecticut,” and garden designer Alexa Venturini.

The tour will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., followed by a cocktail party with getaway raffle tickets for sale. Tickets to the garden tour are $25 per person; $50 per person for tour and cocktail party, and $80 for two people with the cocktail party. For more information, contact Amy Cady at 860-672-6874 or by e-mail at acady@biblio.org.

As with many Baby Boomers, the Bennetts found their way into their ultimate occupation without design. He had been a pre-med student; she studied English lit. He dropped out, much to his father’s annoyance. “My father wanted to know what I was going to do now,” said Mr. Bennett as the early spring sun dappled through the trees on his beautifully landscaped lawn. “I said, ‘I don’t know—get a job I guess. I always believed that if you work hard enough, things work out.”

They have worked hard and things have worked out. Today, their Kent Greenhouse and Gardens provides design-build services for sophisticated and discerning clients, as well as extensive nursery plant and gardening equipment sales.

For a few years, the Bennetts lived in a small house on Great Hollow Road, but that was simply a way station on their way to their ultimate home. “We wanted some land,” he explained. “I spent 10 years going out every single weekend to look at property—eventually my realtor refused to even get out of the car. I couldn’t find something we could afford that was nice enough to meet our needs.”

Finally, a 75-acre parcel—five acres have been peeled off and sold to a neighbor—came on the market in Cornwall. Just as in “Goldilocks,” the Bennetts had found a place that was “just right.”

“It was incredible,” said Mr. Bennett. “There were no invasives.” And that is a state they have since worked hard to maintain.

“The woods were very dense,” he went on, “but we wanted to develop the property in a natural and organic way.” He gestured toward a huge sweep of ferns growing under the trees at the edge of their lawn. “Those ferns were here,” he said. “We just let them go and expand.” Continued…

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — Folks who oversee the Cleveland Cultural Gardens and have their sights set on making it an even more beautiful, fun-filled and educational destination can’t emphasize this enough:

“Cleveland is the only city in the world with anything of its kind.”

So reminds Sheila Murphy Crawford, the new president of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation, a nonprofit nexus for the 29 established nationality-inspired gardens in sprawling Rockefeller Park and new gardens in the making there.

Bill Jones, vice president of the federation, puts it this way: “It is fair to say that many dignitaries and ambassadors travel here to see the gardens, yet many people right here in Cleveland don’t know anything about them.”

Rockefeller Park, minus the gardens, was established in 1897, when oil baron John D. Rockefeller donated 200 acres for the park named for him. The gardens, formally launched in the mid-1920s, dot about 1.5 miles of Rockefeller Park along both East Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, from Superior Avenue to the Shoreway. The gardens are owned by the city, and organizations representing various nationalities maintain them.

A garden dedicated to Shakespeare (now the British Garden) was launched in 1916, followed by the Hebrew Garden in 1926. Those two were followed by gardens dedicated to the city’s Italian, German, Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech and Yugoslav populations. Other early plots include Greek, Irish, Lithuanian and Polish. Since then, the number of gardens has grown to more than two dozen.

The federation’s website, culturalgardens.org, has the most recent map of the gardens. The interactive diagram shows the location of each garden. Clicking on “News” brings up the gardens in alphabetical order. There’s more information on the site clevelandculturalgardens.org. Clicking on the particular garden brings up a design description and contents of some of the gardens.

In 2008, Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt noted that although Rockefeller Park “was conceived as a romantic swath of greenery in the tradition of New York’s Central Park, it has been reduced primarily to a parkway for automobiles, and many of the Cultural Gardens have slid into squalor.”

But at about that same time, ethnic groups belonging to the federation were intent on bringing new life to their gardens, erecting monuments and staging public events. Says Crawford, “About five years ago, we realized we can get this going if we all work together.”

A few years ago, the American Garden was adopted by Hawken School seventh-graders, who continue to perform spring cleaning and other activities, including engaging the Rockefeller Park-area community to get involved. Coincidentally, the gardens were originally started with the help of schoolchildren who raised pennies, says Jones.

“So now we have school kids involved again,” he adds.

The Azerbaijan Garden was completed in 2008. The same year, the Italian Garden group kicked off that plot’s restoration, and so far, organizers have completed $465,000 of the $1.2 million project.

Late last year, a design was unveiled for the African-American Garden, and backers are hoping to inaugurate the spot in 2013.

Cleveland’s Albanian community is teaming up with the Asian-Indian community to erect a statue of Mother Teresa in a soon-to-be Albanian Garden, near University Circle. The late Mother Teresa was born in Albania and worked with the poor in the slums of Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India. The two groups have been working together to raise $80,000, the initial cost of landscaping and molding a 1-ton bronze statue of the nun.

Phase I of the Croatian Garden will be dedicated on Sunday. It features Croatian sculptor Joseph Turkaly’s “Immigrant Mother” statue in a heart-shaped plaza wreathed with red roses and white flowers, and benches of intensely white stone from the island of Brac in Croatia.

For the most part, the gardens don’t pop with a lot showy, colorful flowers that would likely require lots of watering, pinching back and constant care. Instead, they’re seas of green that incorporate statues, busts and plaques honoring poets, philosophers, artists, composers and writers that the ethnic groups chose to honor.

The Italian Garden is designed on two levels. The upper level begins with a walkway leading to a large Renaissance fountain that stands in front of a balustrade, from which two winding stone staircases lead down to the lower level. On the lower level, a tall wall fountain graces a courtyard with circular seating. On either side of the fountain are the faces of famous Italians Giotto, Michelangelo, Petrarca, Verdi and da Vinci.

The Irish Garden mimics the shape of a Celtic cross, with stone walks and plantings. The fountain is a replica of one in Dublin, Crawford says.

Parking, or lack thereof, has always been the biggest impediment for people who want to meander through the gardens, but that’s about to change. There’s limited parking on East Boulevard, but Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, from Chester Avenue to Interstate 90, is being repaved this summer, and with that, nearly 130 parking spaces grouped in pockets eventually will be installed. Crosswalks are also being installed along King Drive.

Crawford says the federation is striving for more activities, such as concerts featuring the music of various nationalities. And she hopes the gardens will become more of an educational destination. With busts, plaques and the like, the gardens already reveal a lot about the poets, philosophers, writers, composers and artists representing each nationality. The garden’s motto is “Our paths are our peace.”

Says Crawford, “We try to maintain that idea.”

When the organizers of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair imagined the future, they probably didn’t envision, among the jet packs and routine space travel, tomatoes growing on the roof of a parking garage.

But 50 years later, that’s exactly what’s about to happen a few blocks from the Space Needle, where residents are building a 30,000-square-foot community garden atop a two-story structure once intended for fair visitors’ cars.

“As far as we can tell it’s the first community-managed food production garden on a rooftop” in the country, says Eric Higbee, a landscape architect working on the project. This project, dubbed the UpGarden, will have space for about 120 gardeners. There are a few rooftop farms, such as Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn. But a commercial operation like that runs around $10 per square foot to construct, while the UpGarden has shoestring budget of $4 per square foot—and it’s designed to be built and maintained almost entirely by volunteers.

The project came about because Seattle’s P-Patch community gardening program was looking for space to build a new garden in the neighborhood. “We were really struggling, because the neighborhood is really dense,” says P-Patch coordinator Laura Raymond.

But building a rooftop garden isn’t straightforward. “You’d think that cars are really heavy, and you could put anything on top of a garage,” says Nicole Kistler, a landscape designer and artist also on the design team. In fact, soil is much heavier—12 inches of water-saturated soil can weigh over 100 pounds per square foot, but the garage is only designed to support 40 pounds per square foot.

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“We had to find a way to get enough soil up there to grow vegetables, but also not exceed the weight capacity of the garage,” Higbee says. “That really drove a lot of the design decisions.”

Typical green roof technologies were too expensive, so they settled on a series of wooden raised beds 12 to 18 inches deep, which will be filled with potting soil. It’s lighter than topsoil. Higbee and Kistler also left wide paths between the garden beds.

At $150,000, designing and building the UpGarden will cost about 10 percent more than a ground-level community garden of similar size, Raymond estimates. The increased costs come mainly from a longer, more elaborate design process, the need for a structural engineer, and a contractor to drill into the garage deck. In addition, the low clearance of the garage means that materials like potting soil and wood chips will have to be blown in, rather than a large load being dumped by a truck and wheelbarrowed into place by volunteers.

Courtesy: Nicole Kistler

An unexpected splurge was craning in the vintage Airstream trailer acquired on the cheap that will serve as a toolshed. The decorative 1963 Ford Galaxy painted iridescent purple was procured entirely free of charge. The interior has been stripped out, and the group envisions transforming this “relic of car culture,” as they call it, into a kind of glasshouse for planting pumpkins and corn. (The only downside: squash vines could obscure the Jimi Hendrix quotes painted on the windows.)

Learning to grow these and other vegetables successfully on a rooftop will be the next challenge. On the plus side, roofs are bright and hot, which should make it easier to grow hot-weather crops like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. But rooftops are also windy and the soil will dry out faster, a problem magnified by the lightweight soil and shallow garden beds. To prevent that fate, the team is considering a drip irrigation system.

Whatever the group decides on, the setup is likely to be a temporary one: the Mercer Garage is slated to be torn down in 3 to 5 years, and the garden will have to move. But the knowledge developed in the meantime may aid in the development of other rooftop gardens in Seattle and elsewhere.

Already, Raymond has been contacted by a group in the nearby city of Bellingham planning a similar project. And familiarity with rooftop weight limits helped P-Patch quickly pull together a smaller rooftop garden for Chancery Place Apartments, a low-income senior housing facility, earlier this spring.

“Rooftop gardens are complicated, and they aren’t the right fit for all places,” Raymond says. “But I think in areas where there are rooftops that can support a garden, and there isn’t land at ground level, then it makes a lot of sense.”