Working with Wood

26 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by bonniehull in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized

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Gaiety Hollow, Gairty Hollow, garden, garden benches, garden design, Historic Gardens, repair of wooden garden structures

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

In the Garden

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by bonniehull in Gaiety Hollow, Garden, House, Lord & Schryver, Uncategorized

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fences, Gairty Hollow, garden design, gates, Historic Gardens, Lord & chryver

The Gaiety Hill garden of landscape architects Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver,

here in Salem, Oregon, is temporarily safe! A generous donation has given the Lord and Schryver Conservancy five years to raise the money for the purchase of the property. As part of the ongoing fund-raising project this blog will give you news of the garden and…ALWAYS…images both current and historic.

For the historic narrative see the Lord and Schryver Conservancy website. Here on the Gaiety Hollow blog, you’ll find pictures of the house and garden and images of progress in the garden restoration and the on-going support efforts.

So let’s start with yesterday, a late and sunny November day…not ANY garden’s Best moment…but this garden looks beautiful any season. The grapes have been trimmed and the arbor tidied