14 Wednesday May 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Tags
awards, capital campaign, Gaiety Hollow, garden, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver Conservancy, Oregon Community Foundation
The good news here is that the Oregon Community Foundation has contributed $25,000 toward our capital campaign. Thank you OCF!!!
05 Monday May 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Tags
Aegopodium, boxwood, brick pathways, Gaiety Hollow, garden, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, Lord & Schryver Conservancy, weeding, white oak
Did you know that this beautiful garden is almost totally maintained with volunteer labor? Every Friday morning from 9:00 to noon a small group of very hard-working volunteers does the “dirty work”…the weeding, the pruning, the sweeping and raking…and we need help. I might just say that if you love to work in a beautiful garden, if you have skills or if you want to develop skills, if you like the idea of contributing to a fascinating historic resource in your community… consider joining this merry band. Just showing up to take some photos I’ve learned a thing or two from this group. Think about it…WE NEED YOU.
So here’s what they were up to this week plus a report on some of the ongoing projects I’ve been reporting on.
One project this week was work on the bricks which need cleaning and re-sanding…
pruning…weeding…
the big problem is the Aegopodium…it’s everywhere…
The boxwood is beginning to regrow…!
and Woody has built a very ingenious tool cupboard in his work area…
The new Oak Tree has some leaves!
See you Friday morning…PLEASE!!
27 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Well luckily for the Gaiety Hollow garden, our aborist is also a consumate woodworker, and has an eagle eye and native ingenuity. The beautiful fences, arbors, trellises and gates that Lord and Schryver designed back in the 1920’s and 30’s are, of course made of wood. And now…some 85 years later, repairs are needed…even though Dale Strand worked hard all the years he tended the garden. It is a never ending task. Take a look at what awaits…
Over the years the Strands had acquired and had milled a stock pile of wood for use in repair.
But when the house went on the market, it all had to go. Luckily Woody Dukes was there and located an empty garage of a friend where the wood could temporarily be stored. With his trusty crew the wood was placed on a trailer an moved (in two giant loads) to the garage. Here was the trick though…each piece had to be passed out one at a time through the laurel hedge…
When the purchase of Gaiety Hollow became a reality, the wood needed to come home in order for Woody to begin the necessary repairs. So the wood pile was moved again…
This time though they were able to pass it through a handy chute in the garage floor for storage in the basement…
And this week Woody built himself a work bench in the garage so he can get started…
on wheels for maneuvering…
His plans are at the ready…
Stay tuned!
07 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Tags
"Documenting the Cultural Landscapes of Women", boxwood, Gaiety Hollow, garden, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, pruning boxwood hedges
In the garden today, amazed at the pruning, the open lightness of everything…thought you might like to see the progress…!
Before…
After…
Before:
After…
Before…
After…
Before….
A beautiful place to be on a spring morning…
Consider joining us Saturday, April 12, 2014, 5:30 to 7:00 pm, for Music and Martinis! Come see the refurbished interior, enjoy appetizers and drinks by Alcyone Cafe, and contribute $25 per person to this most amazing effort. Reservations and tickets available on line at http://www.lord-schryverconservancy.org/…see you Saturday!
21 Friday Mar 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Have you ever trimmed boxwood? It’s back-breaking work, but work that makes all the difference in a formal garden. I have trimmed boxwood, so was especially delighted to meet master trimmer Darin Baier at Gaiety Hollow this morning…and he let me watch him work (and gave me a few pointers!). When I arrived I was absolutely amazed and delighted at the progress since last week…
Darin had just finished trimming, at Gretchen Carnaby’s direction, the hedges to 20 inches and the balls to 28…
…oops…he said he really needed to make the hedges 18 and the balls 26 inches so when they got a little growth they would be PERFECT! Out came the big hedge trimmer and he was off and running…
It’s always a pleasure to be in the garden and today I appreciated anew the remaining old oak…
and more trimming…
Darin thought MAYBE he’d have enough stamina to get to this section of hedge today…we’ll see…he says each section is an adventure!
19 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Uncategorized
The public sidewalk in front of Gaiety Hollow was in rough shape, mostly due to tree roots heaving the pavement upwards. The morning of my last visit the City of Salem crew had demolished the old sidewalk, and it was all captured on film by arborist Woody Dukes. Woody said that the old sidewalk was poured directly onto the soil, allowing the tree roots to grow under the concrete and eventually cause the sidewalk to buckle. First they broke up and removed all the old concrete,
then they removed offending roots (and here Woody says we’ll just have to wait and see if the trees can survive…)
then they built the forms for the new sidewalk, giving the tree roots a little extra space…and put down gravel under where the new concrete will be poured…
Today the city crew poured the new sidewalk and it looks pretty good…let’s hope the trees can survive…
(I’m not sure HOW Woody got this next shot…but it’s clear the new sidewalk will be good looking!)
28 Friday Feb 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Tags
camellias, Gaiety Hollow, garden, Garden in winter, Historic Gardens, Lord & Schryver, pruning, pruning boxwood hedges, pruning camellias, snow damage, tree planting, white oak
Gaiety Hollow is an old garden, as you know. The lovely small hedges and decorative trees have become huge, so the problem of scale is now on the agenda…big time! The problem becomes how to strike a balance between the original intent when the garden was planted, and the fact of maturity in an historic garden. It took Darin 12 hours to prune the massively overgrown hedges at the front of the house. He saved some sections for infill and when we got there today Gretchen Carnaby, David Lichter and Joyce Zook were hard at work…take a look…
He didn’t prune the inside of the hedges…Gretchen said next year or the year after for that…when the street-side has filled out…
but the BIG news for today was the arrival and planting of the new white oak to replace the fallen giant, the donation of John Miller. Adam volunteered to work on digging the chips from the old oak out of the dirt left in the hole. Any chips of the old tree will rob nitrogen from the new tree and retard healthy growth…
David and Joyce jumped in to help, along with arborist Woody Dukes assessing the chip-to-dirt ratio… (it looked a little like a needle in a haystack…)
COFFEE BREAK!
(I DIDN’T get a shot of the Townsend’s Warbler with it’s nose in the camellia)
Woody pointed out the snow damage in the camellias…
and worse yet, the squirrel damage. The squirrels are killing off the tops of various camellias by girdling the trees to eat the bark. Look just above Woody’s finger and you can see where the bark has been gnawed off…
just below the stripped trunk is a strong shoot in healthy bark, so in due course Woody will remove the now yellowed and dying top and the new shoot will fill in.
Gretchen pointed out to me one of the next projects…an espaliered camellia that is very overgrown, and is going to be massively pruned…here it is today, with Gretchen’s note that it has a strong interior structure…so stay tuned for the results…
On our way out we checked the new little white oak, waiting to be planted…
A lot of activity for the sunny and bright last day of February!
20 Thursday Feb 2014
Posted in Garden, Uncategorized
Lots has happened at Gaiety Hollow in February…sorry I can’t show you the garden under 3 feet of snow, but I couldn’t get out of my driveway to take photos!
The day before the snowstorm arborist Woody Dukes sent these photos of what looked like spring on the way…
and work continued on the removal of the giant ten foot tall oak stump…It turns out that age is calculated by diameter not circumference, and the tree once thought to be almost 275 years old was found to be more like 140…still venerable
and then the stump was dug out and ground…
Almost time to replant. Interior renovations are almost complete…stay tuned for a pictorial update.
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized, Vintage Photos
Tags
Gaiety Hollow, garden, garden benches, Garden in winter, house remodel, iron in tree, Lord & Schryver, tree removal, white oak
Gaiety Hollow has been a beehive of activity of late. Luckily today arborist Woody Dukes was on hand to explain the activities of last week when the stump of the old oak was cut down, the badly overgrown crab apple near the front door was removed, and also the overgrown katsura tree in one of the beds near the allee…take a look at the process of removing the huge stump…
when the stump was down they began to saw it into pieces which was difficult due to all the metal inside…denoted by the black marks…
several pieces still had the spaces where metal receptacles for 2×4’s were inserted in the trunk to support a bench…
The crab apple and the katsura, flowering trees planted by Lord and Schryver in the 1930’s, had become hugely overgrown…the crab apple will be replaced with another smaller crab apple. The original tree had been injured when it was small but new wood hard formed around the injury…
Meanwhile inside the house work has begun. First up was removing some paint with lead in it from the living room woodwork and repairing a leak that caused a wallpaper problem (the self-stripping wallpaper!)
It almost feels like spring…(though Woody reminded me that the garden has a different camellia blooming almost every month!) Stay tuned…
01 Wednesday Jan 2014
Posted in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized
Back in 1973 David Duniway, former State Archivist…then Executive Director of Mission Mill Association, wrote a short bio of Elizabeth Lord who was honored that year in Panegyric II, an event that honored contributing citizens. He quoted Elizabeth Lord as saying:
“Salem people have never seemed to realize the great privilege we possess to make this city one of the outstandingly beautiful cities in our country.”
Consider volunteering this year in the Lord and Schryver gardens at Gaiety Hollow, Deepwood or Bush’s Pasture Park. Consider donating to the Gaiety Hollow fund to secure the purchase of the home garden. Consider visiting all of Salem’s garden resources this spring and summer. Consider thinking of Salem as a gem.
Lord & Schryver Conservancy blog 