The Winter Garden

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Yesterday was a bright sunny January day in the garden…

sunny day

Sharon Rose and I arrived for an Archive Committee meeting…

shadows

and since she’s a plant biologist she explained the ectoparasite mistletoe in the white oak while we waited for the meeting to begin…(not harmful, for the most part…)

ecto parasite

front cell

archive committee

and then we walked around the garden a bit.  An Oregon garden on a January sunny day is full of spring…

white wall

ROSEHIPS

sunny day 2

camellias!

pink camellia white light pink

suet bird feeder

daphne

statue

 

We’re on the National Register!!

22 Monday Dec 2014

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The Lord and Schryver Conservancy announced today that the Gaiety Hollow garden has been accepted to the National Register of Historic Places…the perfect Christmas present for the garden and its many supporters.  Garden

The nomination was written by board member and L&S archivist Ross Sutherland…with help from the SHPO office here in Salem…

Ross Sutherland

“It is perhaps the best example of their life’s work, a place where they could play out their design principles freely, unfettered by clients’ wishes,” said Bobbie Dolp, president of the Lord and Schryver Conservancy, which has spent 15 years reinvigorating the history and gardens of Lord and Schryver. “The garden draws on classical garden design traditions but also has a distinctive Pacific Northwest flair, showcasing plants suited to the region.”

“The scale and quality of Lord and Schryver’s work at Gaiety Hollow is of particular significance for today’s garden visitors who are looking for garden design and plants suited to their lives,” added Carlo Balistrieri, the Garden Conservancy’s vice president of preservation. “The Garden Conservancy is pleased to be working with the Lord and Schryver Conservancy to develop Gaiety Hollow’s potential as a resource for the region.”

Lord and Schryver established the firm in 1929, a time when very few landscape architects in Oregon were able to sustain a private practice, which Lord and Schryver, nonetheless, did for 40 years. They established a varied practice, encompassing everything from gardens to large civic projects. In 1932, they moved to the site where architect Clarence Smith designed new offices and living quarters for them. Lord and Schryver designed the “home garden” itself, which enabled them to both showcase their work and experiment with new design ideas and planting schemes.

Lord and Schryver met on a tour of European gardens in 1927, a tour for alumni of Lowthorpe School.  Both Lord and Schryver were alumae but attended the school a few years apart so did not meet until the trip…and here they are in Spain in 1927…where maybe the dialog was started…

Lord in Spain 1927

Schryver in Spain 1927

Ownership of the property is being transferred to the conservancy in June as the money for the purchase has been raised, but there is still LOTS to do.  Keep Gaiety Hollow in mind this week as you write your year-end checks.  Local, beautiful, historic…Salem’s own.  Merry Christmas!

The Archives

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

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I popped in to Gaiety Hollow yesterday to see what the Archive committee was up to…

meeting

Ross Sutherland was conducting business and Ruth Roberts brought in some files from her vast store of research material amassed over 20 years of sleuthing gardens and taking photos…

Ruth's file

Ross Sutherland

I headed upstairs…

stair

to take a look at the “archive room”…this room was Lord and Schryver’s office for all the years they were in business.  It’s over the garage and slightly lower than the full second floor…

archive:officew

The Lord and Schryver Conservancy is just now gathering and relocating materials so that the Archive Room can eventually serve as a central research space for the work of Lord and Schryver.

helvesfile cabinet

Being in the house is fun, but one MUST peek out at the views of the garden, even on a dreary Oregon day…

garden front

garden back

Deepwood Estates recently gifted L&S with Elizabeth Lord’s rocking chair…

Chair

Want to help???  The Conservancy is actively seeking items from the home estate sale in the mid 1980’s, but most importantly PHOTOS of Lord and Schryver, in or out of the garden.  And begin thinking about your possible year end donation…more on that next time!

 

THANKFUL…

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

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At Gaiety Hollow we are so very thankful for all the volunteers and donors who have given so generously this year with time and financial support to bring this garden to its full glory.  The journey is full of fun, excitement, with only occasional gnarly details (aegopodium for instance…)

red

We hope you’ll continue to stay with us as the garden year continues!!!!

Here’s a vintage view looking north, when the old oak still stood…Happy Thanksgiving!

Home Garden - Evergreen Garden looking north (DS)

Fall Pruning

24 Monday Nov 2014

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My favorite correspondent, volunteer and arborist Woody Dukes, sent along these photos of the pruning going on at the Gaiety Hollow garden last Friday.  These photos are his.

Here are Jay and Anne Raney working on the “tall and straggly sarcococca under the dining room bay window…”

against the house...

with Molly O’Dea packing off the cuttings, here and after pruning the untidy laurel hedge on the alley…

Woody Dukes and Bobby Dolp worked on the osmanthus (on the right over the cart) west of the holly hedge.  They hand-pruned instead of the shearing that worked for the holly hedge.pruning 2

Woody says that last week Gretchen Carnaby worked to get the rose on the alley fence back in bounds…here’s what it looked like in the summer:

oses file photo

and here when Gretchen finished…

Gretchen pruning

Stay tuned for the pruning of the camellias and rhododendrons as weather permits…

 

Sprinkler Update

15 Saturday Nov 2014

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The sprinklers are in, the porta-potty is gone, and now as late fall closes in, the garden will have a welcome dormant time to “regroup” and heal.  First the nice long views…

axis 1

axis 2

…the new drip system looks like it will make a big difference, come spring…

path

drip line

drip line 2

and the trenches are nicely filled in (a bit muddy, but not too bad…)

lawn 1lawn 2

but the most amazing part of this November visit was the big camellia near the kitchen door…in full bloom!  Ahh gardens…roll on winter!

camellia 1

camellia 2

SPRINKLERS!!!

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Hooray…the two week process of installing new sprinklers and a drip system for the beds began this week, executed by Kevin Schindler’s Autumn Leaf Landscaping.  We stopped by today to check the progress…the pvc pipe is ready…

PVC 2

the trench in the allee has been dug (this trench incidentally will carry 8-9 pipes each of which will feed various parts of the system)

the trench

and in the digging they found an old piece of iron pipe from a much earlier system…

the old pipe

the lines are drawn indicating pipelines, and the white flags denote sprinkler heads for the grassy areas…

white lines 2

sprinkler heads

white lines 1

and here’s the coiled drip hose…

GH pvc

drip hose

Stay tuned for a progress report, and in the meantime, check out the boxwoods!!

Here’s the “before”, on the day they were trimmed…

boxwood 1

and today…gardens do continually amaze us 🙂

boxwoon update

Brick Update

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

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I thought you might like to see the group that helped Gaiety Hollow with the bricks…here are the Tuesday Morning Gardeners of Friends of Bush Garden…what a nice looking group they are:

FOBG

they worked hard…digging…

bricks 3

bricks 1

bricks 2

and sweeping…

bricks 5

well…MOST of them did anyway…

bricks 4

Thanks for your help FOBG!!

Newspaper Mulch

19 Friday Sep 2014

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Friday morning at Gaiety Hollow, sunny and bright…

8

Gretchen was already there with a load of mulch…

1

They are putting down a newspaper mulch to keep down the aegopodium.  The method is as follows:  water heavily the night before, place newspapers all over the desired area,3wet newspapers fully…

2

layer mulch—3-8 inches dep7ending on the situation…on top of newspapers

cover newspapers fully with mulch…

mulch

cross fingers for a good result.

NOTE:  The tea garden at Deepwood IS a Lord and Schryver design, but no planting plan exists so the restoration has included a bit of guesswork according to what was in the garden and the plant lists favored by L&S.

Maintaining Brick Paths

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Its been a long time since my last news bulletin on the garden at Gaiety Hollow.  The National Garden Conservancy team was here for a visit in August, and a LOT of work has been done…done by volunteers.  The Gaiety Hollow Garden welcomes volunteers on Friday mornings from 9:00-12:00 and let me just add that not only is it work/fun and you are helping an amazing cause, it is an excellent short course in pruning, brick restoration, invasives, transplanting, and numerous other garden activities and techniques.   Just showing up to take pictures, I’ve learned a LOT!  (…and there is always somebody there who really knows what to do and instructs…as well as providing coffee…)

The project this month has been the brick paths.  As lovers of Lord & Schryver gardens know, L&S LOVED brick paths…nowhere more than here, in their home garden.  Over time though, brick paths get weedy and the Gaiety Hollow paths had begun to look like this:

summ er 2013:2

summer 2013

here’s me last spring taking some pre-easter egg hunt photos, but note the brick with a new bunch of weeds beginning to take hold in the April rain…

spring 14

So The Tuesday Morning Gardeners from FOBG (Friends of Bush Gardens) came across the street and started the process of digging the weeds out from between the bricks.  BUT, as Gretchen Carnaby pointed out…you have to dig DEEP to also get rid of the weed SEED.  I arrived at Gaiety Hollow at the end of the process,

bricks 4

bricks 2

bricks 1

bricks 3

so today I went to the little Tea Garden at Deepwood Estate to watch the FOBG Tuesday gardeners work the brick paths there.  This garden was planted in 1932 and though no planting plans exist, we’re fairly sure it was done by Lord and Schryver for Alice Brown.  The restoration work in this garden began in 2007, and it was a joy today to see it looking absolutely beautiful…but I digress.  My mission was to see the team at work on the weed-seed-clearing and they were in full swing when I arrived…

Deepwood 3Deepwood 4

Deepwood 2

Deepwood 5

I went back later in the day to check out their work and it was looking very good…with lots of sand to sweep in later after a bit of watering…

Deepwood 6Deepwood 7Deepwood 8

To see this garden looking so beautiful after seven years of hard restoration work was wonderful.  Heavy pruning, installation of a drip system throughout (coming to Gaiety Hollow at the end of September), replanting, weeding, tending…well I think you should go take a look.  This garden is just down the path from the parking lot at Deepwood Estate, on the right.  It looks absolutely beautiful at the moment…a calm oasis.

Deepwood 9