Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Beautiful Day to “Hard Prune”

17 Friday Apr 2015

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Friday is volunteer day at Gaiety Hollow so I headed over there this morning…

view from the gate

view from gate 2

tulips

tulips detail

The volunteers were taking their coffee break and “talking gardens”…

coffee groupvolunteers having coffee

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)…

coffee cake

Judith Tankard's book

Gretchen had been searching for evidence that Shipman had ever used a white Lutyen’s-type bench in any of her gardens…and…

bench 3

bench 2

bench 1

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!

Nan's bench

But the talk turned to soil and compost and less glamorous topics…because every garden has less glamorous topics…

ugh

which make the more glamorous things possible…

blooming

clematis

 

 

 

Spring in the House and Garden!!

07 Saturday Mar 2015

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While the rest of the country has been suffering a severe winter, here in the Pacific Northwest we have been happily in the “spring-time” mood for a month or so, brought on by sunshine and warm temperatures.  Gaiety Hollow is coming back to life and beautifully so…I was in the garden very early Tuesday morning, all alone, and it was lovely…even though a tiny bit frosty…

GH 1

Friday, though, I was back to check-in with the cadre of volunteers that keep this place looking good.  I wonder if even our most committed readers realize that this beautiful garden would not have been saved, and would not be thriving, without the continued and total commitment of people who love the place and believe in the mission.  Of course they don’t want to be mentioned…but sometimes I can sneak a photo or two…

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GH 4

This week they added forget-me-not and pansies to the tulips…”place holders” in the perennial beds for the time being…

GH 2GH3

And inside the house things are looking good.  Many many thanks to neighbor Marian Milligan who recently donated these two little art pieces that she purchased back in the 1980’s from the estate sale at the house…they are the only things we have that are original to the house…(anybody else out there have something they bought from that sale????  Donations happily accepted…)

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GH12

GH 18

The intention of the conservancy is NOT to run the house as a house museum, but to have it be a working place, a place for meetings, seminars, etc.  But it is nice to have a few civilizing touches and many thanks this week to Ethan Allen, NW rugs and Spencer’s Antigues for keeping our recent purchases well within budget.   An alabaster lamp, a new rug, and the little graceful game table that now warm the entry of the house are nice touches…

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The garden sparkles outside the windows…calling us back out…

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Once outside we notice the terrific laminated garden plan that gardeners can use and mark on with erasable markers…

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a final look around…

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and we’re off…stay tuned for the coming story of recreating the front gate…Happy Gardening!!

GH16

 

Spring is Near!

12 Thursday Feb 2015

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The early spring things are popping up at Gaiety Hollow this week……outside things were green in the warm sunshine…a perfect afternoon to be in the garden…

FAIRY CIRCLE

hellebores

brick path to bench

M

SNOWDROPS AND CYCLAMEN

and inside the archives committee was having fun (l. to r. Ruth Roberts, Bobbie Dolp, Valerie McIntosh, Gayle Meaders…missing from this photo were Ross Sutherland and David Lichter)

Part of archives

Inside the new chairs and tables have arrived, so watch the website for the rental information…the house will be a wonderful place for a variety of community meetings and events…

tables

charis 2

The garden from inside looking out was beckoning,

VERBENA 2

verbena

camellia

so off I went…into the sunny day.

 

 

Aegopodium

07 Thursday Aug 2014

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Eek…a nasty word that…aegopodium.  A native of Europe and Asia, often called Bishop’s weed/ground elder/goutweed…this plant is regarded as an ecological threat.  It is AGGRESSIVE and INVASIVE, and reduces species diversity in the ground layer.  In other words, you don’t want it in your garden.  It has long white branching rhizomes underground that go everywhere.  EVERYWHERE.  When I was in the garden early in the summer it looked like this…

aegopodium

 

You might almost think it was pretty, with the little white flowers…until you began to notice it was EVERYWHERE…

augopodium 2

with the volunteer gardeners bravely waging war against it…

weeder

gairty Hollow weeds 1

The other day I was in the garden and was amazed to see that MUCH aegopodium had been removed, with newspaper put down and mulch on top to keep it down…

mulch 1

mulch 3mulch 4

mulch 2

fingers crossed!  But on the brighter side…the boxwood is back!!

return of the boxwood

and the new bench looks great!

the new bench

 

 

Blueberries!!

05 Saturday Jul 2014

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If you’re thinking of picking some berries this month, why not help the garden and go on out to Minto Island Growers? This summer they are generously donating half of the proceeds of U-PICK blueberries to Gaiety Hollow. BIG thank you to Rob and Sally Miller and Minto Island Growers!!

It’s pretty easy..for every pound of berries you pick at $2.00 per pound, MIG will donate $1 to The Lord and Schryver Garden Conservancy….just tell them at check-out you want to participate in this program!!! There might be a blueberry pie in your future…!!!

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“The Reveal”…Almost…

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Well tomorrow Woody has to move on to other projects…the bench is reconstructed and looking good.  Here’s how it finished up…it turned out the top, like the seat and the rest of the bench, was rotten and had to also be rebuilt.

bench 2

the back is in place, as are the brackets…

bench Woody

It looks pretty good!

bench 1

ch aerial view

flipped garden image

So Woody had to try it out…what a LOT of work.

bench---itworks

Caulking and painting will be the final touches…

 

and then maybe garden neighbors Jon and Irene will come back for a photo op, like they did last summer?

Jon & Irene

The caulk and paint crew are on their way…

 

 

The Lattice Comes Together

29 Sunday Jun 2014

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I seem to decide I won’t post any more construction photos until the reveal, and then Woody sends me some more that are interesting.  I thought you might like to see how he is constructing this lattice…remember these?

lattice

Yesterday they began to make the grid…

lattice 1

and all of the painted strips will be condensed to make JUST the back of the bench…a section just about 5 feet by 5 feet.

lattice 2

which will go here…

bench

Working with Wood (continued….)

26 Thursday Jun 2014

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READERS…many apologies!  I was trying to cut and paste Woody Dukes’ excellent emails about the recent repairs of gates and fences and arbors at the garden.  Unfortunately all the visuals failed, so here, in my own words is what happened.  As Woody began to examine the arbor and several gates, he found the rotten members were in worse shape than he originally imagined.  He had to remove the arbor completely to rebuild it, he had to rebuild the gate to the service area, he had to reset posts and cut decorative motifs…i.e. A LOT OF WORK!  With the excellent assistance of Christopher Hackett, David Lichter and Don Roberts, the work is coming along nicely.  Woody chose not to use pressure-treated posts as they have a modern look, instead to set them in gravel to wick the water away from the posts.  He was also able to reuse historic segments froom earlier repairs.  In the interest of time (mine AND yours!) I’m just going to include here a long series of process photos without captions, but I think you can readily see what happened!  (Sorry for the snafu!!)

Woody 3 woody 4 woody 5

Woody 6

gate repair diagram

gate repair 2

Woody...gate almost done

Don painting

gate repair complete

The arbor was found to have so much rot that repair would be difficult…

Arbor Bench Post

and has he worked along Woody soon discovered that the wood was filled with ants…

Woody Ants

the arbor was going to have to be totally rebuilt.

arbor frame B 1

Arbor 1

arbor 2

Arbor seat frame

arbor 3

arbor frame B 2

new joists

new scroll piecesdecorative joists fit into plaCE

and now it starts to rain for a few days…see you next week!

 

 

Working with Wood

26 Thursday Jun 2014

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Let me share with you a remarkable series of emails I’ve gotten from our arborist, and master carpenter, Woody Dukes…While I was away Woody and a crew of volunteers have been working on the wooden hardscape in the Gaiety Hollow Garden.  Woody’s photos and descriptions are fascinating and fun to follow…the discourse begins in early May as follows:

“Christopher Hackett and I have been working on a couple of projects including yesterday (Tuesday 5/3) morning measuring and cutting pieces of a new gate to replace the rotting one that opens into the Reserve Area.”

woody 1
“Rot was pervasive in the bottom part of the gate that threatened it’s ability to stay in it’s jamb. The wood around the lower hinge was soft enough for the screws to let go.”
-5
“So I increased the number of pixels which cleared up the image a bit from the original. Something that I notice is that there is not a full bench there. It has no depth in the center. I only see the seats in the two back corners. This tells me the original structure was shallower than the current one. There is also a center post in back which leads me to believe that this bench was intentionally and originally a part of the fence. The panel widths are equal with the center one split evenly in two.”

flipped garden image

bench empty

“It only changed when I had to do a major repair because the support for the bench, which was sitting on concrete blocks, and attach anchoring cables to the rear posts (around 2010) because the whole structure was tilting into the garden and was approaching structural failure. I had to modify the design by adding a rectangle of 4x4s add more stability to a major portion of the north fence.”

Woody on blocks

Woody diagram

Woody bench gone

Tour Week…

19 Monday May 2014

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The Garden was looking beautiful today with waves of visitors enjoying a guided tour.

Tour 0

tour 3

Today’s group was the St. Anne’s Guild from St. Paul’s church…

tour 5

tour 4

and they seemed to be enjoying it…

tour 6

Here’s L&S Conservancy president Bobbie Dolp talking about garden-to-house-proximity and Lord and Schryver’s advanced thoughts about gardens in relation to domestic architecture.

tour 5a

Here Ross Sutherland, L&S Board member and curator of the Bush House Museum, talks about the original garden design.

Tour 1

And while I was sneaking around in the bushes taking photos of the Guild members, I noted the boxwoods are storming back to life after their hard pruning!!

tour box 2

tour box 1

Wednesday the Monmouth Book and Social Club will be in the garden.  Like to have your group take a tour?  Check the website under “contact”.