13 Thursday Aug 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver
Don’t forget the High Street Hustle, a 5K and 8K run and walk sponsored by Gallagher’s Fitness is this coming Saturday morning and the Gaiety Hollow Garden will be open to the public from 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. See you then!
10 Monday Aug 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized, Vintage Photos
Tags
Bush Gardens, Deepwood Gardens, Gaiety Hollow, garden, garden benches, Garden Tours, gardens, historic fence rebuilding, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, vintage garden photos
In case you missed the first open garden event today, you still have two more chances. Thinking of doing the “High Street Hustle” on August 15? The garden will be open that day from 7:30 to 10:00 a.m. Sunday, September 13th the garden will be open again from 2-5 p.m….so if you went today you might want to come back as the season begins to change. (As one who has been in the garden in every season, I know for sure it is always fascinating and always beautiful.)
Here’s what it looked like today: Board member Susan Miller greeted people at the gate with information on the garden…
The day was perfect, warm and sunny, cool in the shade…perfect for strolling and straw hats…
and chatting…
Board members were scattered around the garden to give helpful information, and they had set up fantastic vintage photos of the garden so you could juxtapose what had been, what is, and what will be again…
These two plants by the front door are gone, but plans are to replant…
The west side fountain garden…and the allee north and south
the grape arbor…
and the parterres…
this year filled with zinnias…
and the new fence…
The very beautiful “hardscape” in this garden is, of course, wooden. Things decay over time…
but luckily for Gaiety Hollow there is a crew of talented and dedicated volunteers who are willing and able to replicate these benches and fences…Woody Dukes rebuilt the bench last year, and Christopher Hackett and his crew of Tom McMullen and Jack Fisher rebuilt the fence this summer…with Don Roberts standing by to paint the items as cut and before being assembled…touch up still required. HOURS of work and planning…for love of the garden. Thank you so much.
So…mark your calendar and make a point of taking a walk through this peaceful place right in the heart of Salem. We are so lucky here in Salem to have this “garden trifecta” within a half mile…Bush Gardens, Deepwood Gardens and Gaiety Hollow…maybe a visit to all three is in your near future??
25 Saturday Jul 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
The Lord and Schryver Conservancy is inviting you to come see the Garden at Gaiety Hollow! There will be three upcoming tour dates to come see what we’ve been up to. The tours will be FREE, no reservations needed and no guided tours, though there will be people on site to answer your questions…mark your calendar and come see…
Sunday August 9th from 2-5- p.m.
Saturday August 15th from 7:30-10:00 a.m.
Sunday September 13th from 2-5 p.m.
Wander, absorb, reflect. Garden only…the house will be closed. Please enter from Mission Street…(545 Mission Street…right across from Bush’s Pasture Park.)
See you very soon!
17 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Tags
Gaiety Hollow, garden, Garden Club of America, garden preservation, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, Lord & Schryver Conservancy, Portland Garden Club
It has been a banner month here at Gaiety Hollow. First came the announcement that the Portland Garden Club had recommended Gaiety Hollow for a special commendation for outstanding work in garden restoration…(a nice connection since Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver had close ties with the Portland Garden Club, giving their first lantern slide lecture on European gardens at the Portland Garden Club in 1929.)
We were very pleased to have something like this come along to “put us on the map”…especially right now.
The Kingery family (the Kingery’s grew up in an L&S garden in Portland, which they loved) purchased Gaiety Hollow from the Strand family in 2013 (the Strands had bought the garden at 545 Mission Street from Edith Schryver in the mid 1980’s and taken exceptional care of house and garden for nearly 3 decades, keeping the work and spirit of L&S alive…). The Kingerys did this to help the L&S Conservancy bring the garden into public domain, and gave the Conservancy 5 years to raise the money to purchase the property. In just two years, thanks to our many loyal donors, the money was raised, and Monday Liz Kingery Warren…
turned the keys over to L&S Board president Bobbie Dolp. It’s OURS!!
(Photos courtesy of the Statesman Journal, Danielle Peterson)
This morning it was on the front page!! Yay! Thank you Kingerys…from our whole community…what a gift.
I wanted to take a few shots in the garden today…and I usually go in the morning, so it was fun to be there on a warm afternoon and smell the fragrant roses everywhere in the garden…
hydrangeas in bloom…
and inside a very happy board meeting, with much to celebrate…
05 Friday Jun 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver
Today was zinnia day in the garden. Lord and Schryver loved zinnias and used them a lot…densely planted in sunny parterres, drifts among the roses, and over bulbs. When the tulips are finished out they come, and in go the zinnias…which are immediately dead-headed…only the youngest buds are allowed to remain…
Luckily I arrived just as the crew was taking a break for coffee…
but they were quickly back to work planting the few remaining zinnia plants…
The hole is dug fairly deep and the process involves adding a pinch of bone meal and a pinch of organic fertilizer…
and it goes like this (thank you Joyce)…
and then soak them good…and wait…
Just in time for summer!
30 Saturday May 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
May was a busy time for Gaiety Hollow and the Lord and Schryver Conservancy. The laurel hedges on the north side were pruned even lower with lots of the work done by Jay and Ann…
The Conservancy had a 3-day work session to continue on with the strategic plan that will carry the Conservancy and the garden to the next phase of ownership and management of the site…the goal here is sustainability. The L&S Board, the garden committee, and the advisory group met at the house to start the discussion…
and were soon joined by Bill Noble (here with Marilyn Kingery and Bobbie Dolp
Bill is the former Director of Preservation with the National Garden Conservancy, and has worked with L&S since day one. It was Bill who affirmed that the L&S garden at Gaiety Hollow was a garden and a legacy well worth preserving and bringing into the public domain. And Bill worked with the assembled group for three intensive days. Thank you Bill Noble for believing in this garden and this story…and for inspiring us to get the property into the public domain. A small miracle!
And tonight, on a dusk walk through the garden, I felt the privilege of being involved in this endeavor. Come join us…we need you!
NEWS BULLETIN…on Thursday June 4, at 12:00 noon, Board president Bobbie Dolp and Landscape designer Gretchen Carnaby will be heard on Salem History Matter on KMUZ…88.5 on your radio dial. (If you somehow miss it, you can get it off the web site the following week under the Archives Section.)
On we go into June!
08 Friday May 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, Lord & Schryver, Vintage Photos
Tags
Gaiety Hollow, garden, gates, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, Lord & Schryver Conservancy, pruning
Gaiety Hollow was a busy place this week…both the house and the garden. George Crandall’s beautifully crafted gate (built from the original L&S design) was installed this morning, symbolic of the huge progress the Conservancy has made in this last year at Gaiety Hollow.
George Crandall crafted the new gate and David Lichter did all the research turning up many historic photos including these (please excuse the bad “screen shot” images)…here’s a drawing of the gate Elizabeth/Edith did on a table cloth back in the day…
The house in 1934 with a gate which was the original one…
and in the garden, the mulch arrived…
and in the house, the reprints of some of the many original drawings now in the collection of the Knight Library at the University of Oregon arrived and were hung in the living room and dining room…adding a wonderful resonance to the rooms…(and keep in mind here, this is NOT a house museum but it a working space devoted to gardens)
This was Schryver’s thesis project at the Lowthorpe School in 1923, an imagined garden called Wynndie-Lea…
and Thursday night we all trekked to Portland for a delightful party honoring the work of Lord and Schryver in an L&S garden of the 1930’s. The garden has been cared for beautifully for 30 years by Thayer and Jon Willis, though was originally designed for Mary and Gerald Beebe in 1932. L&S Board member Marilyn Kingery asked the Willises to open their garden so that the many Portland people who have L&S gardens, or garden remnants, could come see, enjoy and get solid information about Lord and Schryver and their work. Marilyn gave thoughtful and touching remarks about the L&S garden she once enjoyed, and Landscape architect Steven Koch talked about the interest and importance of the design work of the team. (Koch now owns the Wallace Kay Huntington house near Champoeg…Landscape architect Huntington was mentored by his life long friends Lord and Schryver and worked with them several times)
But, of course the real star was the beautiful garden with allees, views, focal points and plants of particular interest…this garden has it all…and Steven Koch’s remark about the L&S tendency to “compression” was immediately apparent on entering the house and looking through to the garden and the exceptional crabtree allee…OLD but very small crabtrees, boxwood and Yew hedges, nothing else…
and the view back toward the house…
and now you are free to roam the garden…(psst..this brick feature is not a shed…it’s gate to the side yard…)
through the gate to the parterre garden…
and the espaliered pear…
By this morning though, back in Salem, our intrepid Board president Bobbie Dolp was hard at work pruning the overgrown laurel hedges on the back alley…with help from Jay Raney…
and Ann…who I have often photographed quietly working away…
The Lord and Schryver Conservancy is so VERY grateful for all the hard work and thought and devotion that the many volunteers put into furthering the legacy of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver and their gardens. Thank you Thayer and Jon Willis, Marilyn Kingery, Ruth and Don Roberts, David Lichter, Ross Sutherland, Brandy O’Bannon, Bobbie Dolp and Gretchen Carnaby, Valerie McIntosh, George Crandall, Woody Dukes, the Raneys, and many many more. This is good work. Come join us.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
I had a moment alone in the garden this morning…it was blooming…
and while I was waiting for David and George to arrive with the new gate, I found this well-worn plan for the new sprinkler/drip system on the garage floor…
But let’s do some gate recap. Last week I saw the old gate…
and these (to me) mysterious “new” gate posts…(“how are they going to put a wooden gate on these?,” I thought…)
But today I found out when David and George arrived with these ingenious and beautifully crafted wooden posts engineered to slip over the metal ones…
The gate had to go back in the shop today for some final adjustments and some paint, but you can see how beautiful it will be!! Amazing skilled volunteers to the rescue.
25 Saturday Apr 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized, Vintage Photos
Tags
camellias, Clarence Smith Architect, Gaiety Hollow, garden, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, pruning, vintage garden photos
It was cold and overcast when I checked in this morning at Gaiety Hollow. Undaunted, Woody was on a ladder putting the finishing pruning touches on the sasanqua camellia for this season…
He explained about opening the interior of the plant this season and waiting for the new buds to form before he can prune front to back next year…
There were tools everywhere…
evidence of pruning…
David showed me the old gate that had been stored in the Deepwood coach house…this one designed by L&S about 10 years after the house was built…they replaced the architect Clarence Smith’s gate with one of their own design.
…similar in feel to this one they designed for a client in the 1930’s…
After about 60 years of service, it was replaced with this metal gate….
but now David and George have made a new wooden gate which will soon go here…
The allee and the flowering shrubs were in bloom…
but I thought you might like to see some of the vintage photos of the garden at this time of year…here it was in 1950…
and more…
1952…(the garden was 20 years old)
and the tulips…
See you next week!
17 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Friday is volunteer day at Gaiety Hollow so I headed over there this morning…
The volunteers were taking their coffee break and “talking gardens”…
Along with the blueberry banana bread, Gretchen had Judith Tankard’s excellent book on the early and influential garden designer Ellen Biddle Shipman (for whom Edith Schryver worked in New York for City 5 years in the 1920’s)…
Gretchen had been searching for evidence that Shipman had ever used a white Lutyen’s-type bench in any of her gardens…and…
This is good news because we have such a bench, thanks to Nan and George Happ (kindly donated when they moved to an urban loft last year), look for it later this season!
But the talk turned to soil and compost and less glamorous topics…because every garden has less glamorous topics…
which make the more glamorous things possible…
Lord & Schryver Conservancy blog 