Category Archives: Tours

Changes are afoot at Gaiety Hollow

21 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in annual flowers, Flower Garden, Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Summer, Tours, Uncategorized, Vintage Photos

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This weekend are the last tours of the 2017 season. We have a garden tour at Deepwood Museum & Gardens at 9am. It is followed by a tour of the gardens at Gaiety Hollow at 10:30am. This is your last opportunity to see the Flower Garden at Gaiety Hollow before big changes take place!

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Come Monday morning, I will be in the garden digging (almost) everything up. The annuals will go to the great compost pile in the sky and the perennials and roses will find new homes with our volunteers. By Wednesday, the Flower Garden will look like a blank slate.

Wednesday evening, we are welcoming a crew of youth from the LDS church in south Salem. They will pull up the bricks from the paths in the Flower Garden, clean them, and stack them. I am so grateful to have their offer of help!

The following week, our contractor will come in with his crew and work will commence on the rehabilitation of the brick pathways. If you have been to Gaiety Hollow this season, you know that the paths are uneven, water pools in various sections, and the edging brick is spawling in places or leaning right and left.

September in the Flower Garden

When you come back to the gardens next spring, this will no longer be the case! We cannot wait to have the paths fixed so that they look as they did when Edith and Elizabeth gardened at Gaiety Hollow. The bricks will be clean, the path lines sharp and crisp, the pedestal at the center of the garden reconstructed, and grass will be reintroduced in two sections (including the path to the Pergola).

Cat and pedestal
Edith, 1968

It is a very exciting time for the Lord & Schryver Conservancy. Many thanks to our grant partners, the Oregon Cultural Trust and the State Historic Preservation Office, to our donors, and to our volunteers, for making this project possible.

Evening in the Garden

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Deepwood, Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, landscape architecture, Lord & Schryver, Open Garden, Summer, Tours

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We took a twilight tour of the gardens at Gaiety Hollow this evening and as usual found the garden beautiful and restorative.

If you want to ease into the Salem Art Fair this weekend let me suggest the Lord and Schryver tours which are Saturday the 22nd at 9:00 at Deepwood Museum & Gardens and at Gaiety Hollow beginning at 10:30.  The cost is $5 for those 16 and up.

So why do this?  Why go visit gardens planted in the 1930’s by people long gone?  Well in Garden Curator Lindsey Kerr’s absence I’ll suggest a few reasons.

These women, Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, lived here in Salem.  They designed cutting-edge gardens of great beauty for Salemites and for others across the Northwest.  They were rigorous, talented and interesting, and if you live in Salem they are a part of your history!  Come see the garden and learn their story, your back-story.

Walk through these garden gates and step back in time.  For the most part people don’t design or maintain gardens like this anymore. We are now into efficient, low water, low maintenance gardens. Here is a chance to see a house and garden designed and now maintained from another world altogether…and it is a captivating garden and a captivating world.

Come and see plant varieties and combinations that are “old fashioned” and yet totally up to date. Giant white hydrangeas, Nicotiana alata spilling out of beds, delphinium, grapes…ideas abound in this historic garden for modern gardeners.

Escape.  And this garden has been providing a breathing space for me and many others for years…always delightful, ALWAYS ALIVE, always a balm.

See you Saturday!

 

 

The Garden is READY!

20 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Open Garden, Summer, Tours

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Garden manager and curator Lindsey Kerr is away this week so I’m jumping back in for a quick post.  The garden will be open this Saturday at 10:30 for touring ($5.00 per adult) and if you haven’t been in a while it is worth the trip.  Lindsey Kerr has worked miracles in the garden along with the team of volunteers who trim and weed and tidy…not to mention to the volunteers who are replacing the hard-scape in the garden…i.e. the rotting wooden fences, benches and gates. But first…the garden.   I stepped in the gate this morning and was just delighted…

Fresh, organized and the smells…yum.   Lindsey has been working with the many garden plans and lists that Lord and Schryver made for  their own garden over the years, and has replanted many of the old-fashioned favorites they often used.  Noticable this summer are the Canterbury Bells…the bells are back!

and this morning I sat briefly in my favorite shady benches for views of the garden…

And the pergola and bench under the grape arbor are COMPLETE!  (I spent a whole week here a few years ago drawing!)

Mark your calendar…Saturday June 24th!

Gardens–and trees!–in bloom

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Deepwood, Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Tours, trees, Uncategorized

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The Tea House garden at Deepwood Museum & Gardens is already putting on a beautiful show. Poppies, iris, roses, foxglove, allium, and many more flowers were in bloom this afternoon. Most of the summer annuals have been planted and are ready to flower. The heat earlier this week made many of the plants grow quickly.

Foxglove
Iris
Rose
Poppy
Allium

An exciting bit of news for the historic garden nerds among us:

A few years ago, the much loved hawthorn tree next to the Tea House was removed.  In searching through records, volunteers discovered that Lord & Schryver purchased a white hawthorn for Deepwood in 1932.  They were perplexed as the tree blooming by the Tea House had a pink double flower. They contacted nurseries and searched online to find a replacement but there appeared to be none available in the US.

When the tree was removed, however, two shoots coming up from the roots were saved. One was left at Deepwood–to hopefully thrive and replace the historic tree–and one was taken to Gaiety Hollow to serve as a back-up . The volunteers waited to see what the young hawthorns would turn out to be. Would they come true to the historic tree? Or was the old tree grafted and the shoots would be from the root stock?

Well, this week the volunteers got a beautiful surprise. The young trees both bloomed masses of fluffy white double flowers–matching Lord & Schryver’s records–and then faded to pink–just as our volunteers remembered.

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Not the most beautiful photo, but it’s double and pink!

As photos were shared by email and text, you might have heard a few cheers echoing across the Valley.

Unfortunately, the intense heat made the hawthorn flowers fade and disappear all too quickly. But, the gardens at Deepwood are full of flowers and more than enough reason to visit. There will be a tour of the gardens this Saturday at 9am for those interested in hearing more stories about their creation and rehabilitation.

A second tour will take place at Gaiety Hollow at 10:30. The old hawthorns at the front gate are in full bloom and simply covered in clusters of white flowers. It is no wonder why Lord and Schryver chose to plant these trees with a view from their bedrooms and studio!

Hawthorn
Looking out the front door
View from Elizabeth’s bedroom

The annual display in the Flower Garden is also taking off, with campanula, roses, peonies, petunias, ageratum, alyssum, and daisies all blooming together. Come for a visit!

Spring tours

19 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Spring, Tours

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Today was the perfect day for a tour of the gardens. After all the rain last night, the gardens looked clean and new.

We had a lively group of folks come from the Willamalane Park and Recreation District for tours of both Deepwood and Gaiety Hollow and a catered lunch in the gardens at Gaiety Hollow. Everyone had a wonderful time. We hope to share the gardens with more groups throughout the season. Know someone interested in a private tour? Have them contact Bobbie.

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We have two tours open to the public this coming Saturday. Join us at 9am at Deepwood Museum and Gardens. Tours will leave from the kiosk near the parking lot. At 10:30am, there will be a tour at Gaiety Hollow. Meet at the front door.

 

 

First tour of the season

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Spring, Tours

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This past week was a whirlwind of activity at Gaiety Hollow. We had our first tour scheduled for Saturday and we wanted the gardens to look their best. Many, many thanks to the volunteers who put in over 60 hours of work to make the gardens shine.  Carpenters worked on the Pergola and cut plywood for guests and volunteers to walk on to avoid damaging the lawn. Garden volunteers filled up four large City compost bins with debris and needed to stash extra in the Service Yard.

Every day, we clean up more Camellia blossoms. You finish raking and turn around and there’s another one!
The morning of the tour, the gardens looked fresh and clean.

3_25 morning

Bobbie placed photos around the gardens so that guests could view the gardens in different seasons or years past.

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A sampling of camellias float in the pool.

3_25 camellia blossoms

And daffodils and grape hyacinths were at their finest.

3_28 grape hyacinths

We have more Garden Tours and Open Gardens coming up! The first Open Garden is April 9th, 1-4pm. More information on the website. We hope to see you in the gardens.