Dealing With the Reality of Wooden Structures

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…

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Over the years the Strands had acquired and had milled a stock pile of wood for use in repair.

 

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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…

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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…

wood on trailer

This time though they were able to pass it through a handy chute in the garage floor for storage in the basement…

wood chute to baSEMENT `1

wood in basement

And this week Woody built himself a work bench in the garage so he can get started…

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on wheels for maneuvering…

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His plans are at the ready…

PROJECTS 1

PROJECTS 4:5

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

Easter Egg Fun at Gaiety Hollow!

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It was an Oregon day in the garden…chilly and misty…but it didn’t stop the Oregon kids from hunting for eggs!  The party was a thank-you for the kids and grand kids of generous donors to the garden, and the welcome balloons marked the gate…

balloons

We got there a little early to capture the preparations from chicks to baskets to treats…all was ready…

ks

empty tabler flowers

baskets

food 1 food 2 beverages

blue egg

YELLOW EGG purple egg orange egg

Ready or not…

BEFORE

Here they come!

READY

GO!

GO 3

hunt

GO FOUR

GO 2

BINGO

and EVERYBODY was taking pictures…

camera 2 camera 1 photo

the garden was beautiful of course…

garden 2

garden 1

and then it was time to enjoy the spoils of the hunt…

lamb cake

winding down

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Wishing you all a lovely family weekend from the Lord and Schryver Conservancy!  Thanks donors!!

 

 

 

Music & Martinis

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Last evening was a FUN evening in the garden showing off the newly redone rooms, and the garden of course…Board member Susan Miller and neighbor Amy Chayfetz provided the music and it was wonderful…

Music

and of course, Martinis from Alcyone Cafe and Caterers…

Martinis

Polka dots!

LADIES IN DOTS

Elizabeth Lord arrived early…channeled by Gretchen Carnaby… here with Board member Joyce Zook…

Gretchen and Joyce

and it was a lovely early evening in the house and garden!

toward the RBOR

HOUSE

outfits 2

Gretchen and the O'Briens

GARDEN 2

allee

Gretchen and Bobbie

Happy to be here!

tulips

 

Boxwood Pruning Complete!

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In the garden today, amazed at the pruning, the open lightness of everything…thought you might like to see the progress…!

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Before…

next up

After…

after 1

Before:

before 5

After…

tulip[s

Before…

before 6

After…

after 2

Before….

espaliered before

kitchen entrance

A beautiful place to be on a spring morning…

camellias + tulps 2 last

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!

BOXWOOD!!

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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…

Box 1

Box 3

box 4

Darin had just finished trimming, at Gretchen Carnaby’s direction, the hedges to 20 inches and the balls to 28…

measuring

…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…

cut 1cut 2cut 3

It’s always a pleasure to be in the garden and today I appreciated anew the remaining old oak…

oak

and more trimming…

faucetcloseup

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!

next up

New Sidewalk!

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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,

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then they removed offending roots (and here Woody says we’ll just have to wait and see if the trees can survive…)

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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…

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Today the city crew poured the new sidewalk and it looks pretty good…let’s hope the trees can survive…

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(I’m not sure HOW Woody got this next shot…but it’s clear the new sidewalk will be good looking!)

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Camellias, Boxwood and the Renovation

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When I got to the garden today the crew was just finishing up the Friday morning work party…trying to rid the garden of “invasives”…a thankless task…

goodbye invasives

and I checked the boxwoods…the severe pruning has begun…

radical trim

but you can see from this view of the unpruned on the left, recently pruned on the right, that this will be the right thing to do…

both

and then the camellias are all in bloom…

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c 6C 1c 5

…a quick check of the new tree…

new tree

and then I headed inside where the renovations are almost complete.  The former living room has become the meeting room…

inside 2

inside 1

the dining rooms views remain the best in the house…

dining rooom 1dining room 3dining room 2

and upstairs, the room over the garage that was Lord and Schryver’s office will become the “library”/”archive” room…

LIBRARY 3LIBRARY 1LIBRARY 2

and the carpet has been removed from the stairs…

taIRAS

A quick fond view…

last

and I was off.  Next time: the removal of the front sidewalk…will the trees live??

 

 

 

The End of the Day

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The last photos have rolled in this evening showing the oak in situ, the magical machine that grinds stump by remote control, and the Townsend’s warbler doing a good imitation of a hummingbird.

After we left the intrepid team worked on and on (THANK YOU ADAM!!!) and the tree is in place.  It went like this…

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And earlier Gretchen was telling me of the miraculous stump grinder from Elwood that works remotely…the guy hardly even needs boots…

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It was a long day for our intrepid crew…a day that proved above all else that FOCUS and PERSEVERENCE are part of the L&S story.  Congratulations Gretchen, David, Woody, Joyce, ADAM….hooray!

and here are Woody’s photos of that Townsend’s warbler pretending to be a hummingbird.

warbler 1warbler 2

The Garden Comes Back to Life!

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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…

hedges 3

hedges 4

hedges 2

blue wheelbarrowhedges 4.5hedges 5

hedges Joyce

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…

Hedges 1

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…

Adam 1

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…)

chip removal

COFFEE BREAK!

equipment

coffee break

(I DIDN’T get a shot of the Townsend’s Warbler with it’s nose in the camellia)

camellia

Woody pointed out the snow damage in the camellias…

snow damage

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…

squirrel damage

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…

future prune

interior

On our way out we checked the new little white oak, waiting to be planted…

new oak

A lot of activity for the sunny and bright last day of February!