Keep it Simple

photo by Jane Billings

Last week a friend and I took a day trip to Lenox MA to visit "The Mount". http://www.edithwharton.org/index.php?catId=8&subCatId=21 This summer home and the surrounding gardens were designed and built back in 1901by Edith Wharton, the author of The House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence. She also wrote books on the design of houses and gardens.

The whole estate is extremely simple. The rooms in the house are light and airy and well ordered. First looking at the map of the gardens, I thought they resembled a barbell with a long path connecting squares at both ends. However, strolling through the real garden reminded me of the power of simplicity. It's very easy to make something complicated, but to create something simple and elegant takes a great deal of thought and effort.

The walled "Italian" garden is my favorite area. The Italians have distilled the garden form to its essence. (See my page, "Favorite Gardens".) They make use of a few repeated elements, and a limited plant palette to great effect. The geometric box parterres in front of the villas consist of three colors, green clipped hedges, brown mulch, and gray stone dust paths. The more extensive gardens out back are usually a series of allees of similar clipped trees (Cypress or hornbeam) with a statue at the end as focal point drawing one down the garden path. Add a fountain or two, and there you are, the best of the Renaissance!

At "The Mount" The walled garden is slightly sunken with stone walls on three sides. The path that leads to the garden goes down a series of terraces with chamecyparis hedges and pointy clipped arborvitae. The shape itself is a simple square with a stone fountain in the center. There are cruciform paths and a square path flanked by perennial borders around the perimeter. The white astilbe in the inside border must have been stunning earlier in the summer, but by the time I visited, it was the outside border of Hosta "Royal Standard" that took the spotlight. You may say, "One kind of hosta! how boring!" Oh no! anything but boring! Serene, refreshing, incredibly fragrant, those are the descriptors I would use.

I have to admit that it takes a lot more confidence than I posess to create a border of one perennial variety! So I set down the challenge: see if you can keep your plant choices limited to one variety somewhere in your garden. It may become your favorite space.