Home & Garden Vermont – Accessing the garden on the lower level, a gravel path lined with planting beds leads to a small terrace.
The land rises steeply behind the houses in this quiet residential area close to town. The lot is small; this one is only 80 feet wide and 150 feet deep.
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The project involved completely remodeling the entire space above the house (originally overgrown with sea buckthorn) to create a beautiful tiered garden.
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Clients are closely involved in every stage of design and implementation. In fact, the conceptual design was created while sitting at his dining table looking up at the raw garden space.
The spatial design uses four distinct levels, maintained by stone retaining walls that span the entire width of the property. The floors are connected by short stone steps.
The lowest level is adjacent to the house and contains a gravel path and small terraces with the lowest level of plants. Above the courtyard level, a narrow planting bed rests on the existing wall.
A new wall supports the wider third level, crossed by a wide gravel path and plantings on either side. Finally, at the top of the hill, two existing apple trees shade an upper courtyard.
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There is almost no lawn in this garden. Hardscapes delineate beds, which in turn are homes to a variety of plants, from small trees and shrubs to perennials. Throughout the garden, a variety of ornamental grasses provide textural contrast and movement. To keep Vermont gardens filled with color year-round, landscape architects employ layered planting, filling flower beds with a variety of annuals and perennials. Over the years, her friendship with the adventurous, hands-on owners has grown and grown.
If gardens are a reflection of the people who nurture them, the vibrant, carefree plants on Rita Ramirez’s property are a reflection of her partnership with landscape architect Helen O’Donnell Friendships cultivated. O’Donnell, co-owner of Bunker Farm, a family-run business that includes a nursery of hard-to-source annuals and perennials, lives just down the road in Damerston, Vermont, and oversees The land has a relaxed and natural look for eight years.
Although largely self-taught, O’Donnell immersed herself in the garden a few years ago by doing an internship at the East Sussex estate of the late Christopher Lloyd, a famous gardener and author such as Hidcote and Great Dixter in English Gardens. in the classic. At Great Dixter, O’Donnell met renowned horticulturist Fergus Garrett, the property’s current superintendent, and learned to grow unusual plants from seed. Back home, her passion for England’s vibrant, densely packed craft style never waned: “My beds were filled with perennials, planted side by side, with crossed stems, annuals mixed together, with no soil in sight, and from there Later,” she said with a laugh.
The sexy look resonated with Ramirez, a social worker who lives in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest with her husband, author and NPR humorist Tom Bodett , and in 2003 they settled on 50 acres in Damerston. “We installed a geothermal saltwater pool in 2013 and two natural ponds,” she said. “But we needed to visually connect the water to the house, so I reached out to Helen.” They gave O’Donnell complete freedom, save for one major request: Ramirez wanted the garden to be a revolving door for all seasons.
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“The house was plopped down in the middle of a huge field of hay,” said O’Donnell, who had to use a pickaxe to loosen the already compacted soil before he could start work on the site. To anchor it to land, she surrounds it with robust shrubs such as hydrangea, burgundy “Summer Wine” bovine tree, purple smoke bush, and “Miss Kim” lilac. She planted tall grasses, such as Moliniacaerulea ‘Windspiel’, and perennials of various heights, textures and colors. About 90 percent of O’Donnell’s annuals are also grown from seed. It’s a win-win for both women: Ramirez gets plants no one else has ever seen, and O’Donnell gets to try out new varieties in real time. “Layering annuals and perennials helps us extend the season. When a plant collapses, it doesn’t level the bed,” O’Donnell points out.
As the garden grows, so does the female bond. Ramirez still clears her schedule every Wednesday, digging dirt with O’Donnell, while local gardener friend Laurie Merrigan often joins them in planting, watering and weeding. Certain moments still wow the dynamic couple, like when the flame grass turns orange in autumn along with the maple trees in the distance. “I’m still taking risks here because I know that anything that doesn’t work can be fixed,” O’Donnell said. “It’s a special thing when someone really trusts you to make their garden great.”
To soften the edges of the natural pond near Rita Ramirez and Tom Bodette’s home, garden designer Helen O’Donnell added tall, transparent grasses and loose perennials, such as the feathery orange flamegrass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Purpurascens’); fanning golden Molinia caerulea ‘Windspiel’; and bellows ‘summer wine’, a nine-bark with deep burgundy leaves.
The property’s wisteria-covered pergola sits just beyond three locust trees, overlooking Putney Hill. It was built by owner Rita Ramirez’s husband, Tom Bodett, who recently started Hatch, a nonprofit woodworking cooperative in Brattleboro, Vermont Space. “Rita gets all the praises of the wisteria,” says landscape architect Helen O’Donnell of Ramirez’s two-pronged approach to pruning (she cuts hard in the fall and cuts again in early spring ). “Her regimen makes it bloom every summer, which is a big deal in Vermont.” The couple’s neighbor, Jared Flynn, is one of the few master drystone wall builders in the country. One, he built walls and garden paths using Goshen and Ashfield stone quarried in Massachusetts.
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“To me, a garden looks best when it’s vibrant throughout the season and has multiple layers of plants,” says O’Donnell. In garden beds along the front driveway, purple begonias unfold in fall; Actea ‘Hillside Black Beauty’, with black leaves and spiers of purple seed heads; tall pink Cleome; mauve flowers of Sedum ‘Matrona’; purple red pompom ‘Diva’ dahlias; and slow-growing ‘heavy metal’ switchgrass. Although its flowers have faded, the leaves of ‘Fuji Pink’ balloon flower turn a bright golden yellow in autumn.
O’Donnell mixes Gaura lindheimeri ‘The Bride’ with grasses and other perennials in the garden’s grass-like borders. The delicate white flowers add a subtle sparkle in fall, she says.
Fall-blooming ‘Quick Fire’ hydrangeas line the front porch: “The leaves are thick and gnarled, and they bloom white, fade to pink, and then turn a deeper rust red in late fall,” says O’Donnell.
While O’Donnell inherited many of the plants in this bed from Siena McFarland, the talented gardener who cared for the space before her, she reshaped the plot and weaved in tender perennials and annuals in pink and purple up the color. These include red-leaved ‘Mahogany Splendor’ hibiscus, magenta ‘Fascination’ dahlias with near-black leaves, and ‘Benary’s Giant’ zinnias, a 19th-century German heirloom that can grow up to five feet tall.
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“Euphorium is only a foot tall, but its small flowers and gray-green foliage provide great color and texture throughout the season,” she says.
The dwarf shrub Deutzia gracilis ‘Nikko’ is charming from April, when it produces small white buds, and by October its leaves turn purple.
A few years after moving to their property, the couple re-clad the exterior of the all-white Federal-style home with cedar clapboards and painted the trim a reddish maroon. Later they built a porch overlooking one of the ponds and beyond. At the water’s edge, O’Donnell blended homegrown white Ga
ura and purple Verbena bonariensis into the grass. “Sometimes you have to be ruthless with self-sowers,” she admits, removing some of them when they start to take over an area. “The gardener’s responsibility is to find the balance and not let nature take over completely; we have to control it and then manage it.”
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