your head, and you emerge a little more light-hearted.
The garden of Ellen Goldstein and Mitch Flynn is mostly known as “The one with the bowling balls”!
LEND AN EAR
Sally: It’s worth listening to what people say about your garden, as it may be a clue to how you’ll be remembered. Do they mention your place as “the garden with the bowling balls… the place with the china teacups… where they had that mirror behind the pond… the garden with the blue barn?” If so, your identity is emerging! If you don’t like the descriptors you can make changes, but if you like what you hear – make the most of it!
The next garden is a Buffalo-style interpretation of garden rooms. Garden rooms can acquire unique identities based on several things. In the case of a small urban garden, the entire back yard – including the driveway leading to it – can become a stunning room. The furnishings you choose and how you put them together may be more memorable than the plants in the garden. Furnishings have impact. Take one of our favorite examples, a garden that’s first remembered for its furniture, second for the colorful plants – and finally, for something unexpected about the gardener…
A Garden Room Crammed with Coleus… and the gardener’s surprise
The garden of Joe Hopkins and Scott Dunlap
A vast collection of coleus, most in containers on the driveway, would make this urban garden impressive enough, but here it’s the furniture that has made this garden famous and featured in magazines, blogs and news articles. The garden – the whole back driveway and yard – looks and feels like a living room. You walk in the driveway, through the exquisite hand-painted gate (featuring purple coneflowers), and aim toward a destination that begs you to sit down and contemplate the coleus. Cushioned chairs and a rug encourage long visits and deep relaxation. You find lamps on the end tables, mirrors and posters on the walls – and typically the gardener comes out of the house and serves you cupcakes… It is a living room in every sense.
Still, there’s more to this garden. After the awe and head-shaking over the furniture and the over-the-top lush containers with lilies, coleus, licorice plants and bee-balm, Joe Hopkins loves to add a twist. “How do you like my color combinations in these pots?” he asks. People aren’t just being polite when they universally answer, “Beautiful, gorgeous, unforgettable…” And then Joe says, “Guess what – I’m colorblind!”
One of the most popular gardens on Garden Walk Buffalo (and you can see why here) has more plants in pots than it does in the earth.
The Element of Drama
If a garden faces the Hudson River, or has a mountain in the background – voila! – you have drama. Frame it. Feature it. Complement it. But if the garden is in a city or town, with neighbors and fences and sidewalks – then what? Drama can be created with a few calculated choices.
The Umbrellas of Hamburg
The garden of Linda Washut and Kathy Kelkenberg
This garden is featured on the Buzz Around Hamburg, a small-town garden walk with 30-some gardens that attracts repeat visitors year after year because the gardens are so charming and the people are so warm. Hamburg is not far from Buffalo. You could call it Buffalo-adjacent. Linda and Kathy’s beautiful garden is situated on a corner lot. Lots of great gardening is done here, like hundreds of other fine gardens. But this one is unforgettable because of the dramatic sense of the gardeners. It’s about the planters and perennials, but especially those umbrellas… Definitely Buffalo-style!
This garden starts at the street with a vibrant pollinator garden. It’s the only spot with full sun. Once inside the gate it’s mostly a shade garden, filled with hardy plants and hundreds of annuals, as well as a few tomatoes. All very nice, but perhaps this yard wouldn’t elicit exclamations like “Wow… Oh my… Look at this!” if Linda and Kathy didn’t know that a garden walk is a performance. So, before the people show up they add some drama and even decorate the stage.
The first dramatic touch: These gardeners plan and plant containers with huge tropical plants. (We’ll tell how you keep the plants all winter in a USDA Zone 5 region, in Chapter 5.) Then the gardeners place them strategically. In this garden a show-stopping planter with a towering banana or Colocasia greets you. And everyone takes that picture.
They set the tables: When guests arrive, the tables are laid out, practically insisting that you sit down. (It’s difficult not to look around eagerly for appetizers and wine, or morning coffee with croissants…)
Those umbrellas! Lots of gardens have a round table with an attached umbrella and some chairs, but here there are four, overlapping and touching each other. They make the space the most festive, inviting place ever for lingering. With special candles and lanterns, socializing can go on into the darkness.
The Kelkenberg/Washut Garden in Hamburg is defined by its umbrellas – a clever, inexpensive and creative way to define sitting areas in the garden.
Creativity Unbound
The garden of Sue Hough and Miro Sako
What do you get when an advertising art director marries a trained woodworker/carpenter? The ultimate DIYers, that’s what. Sue and Miro have a joyful garden of handcrafted projects, many of which focused around the life of their two young girls. You’ll find no big-box store garden art in this craft gallery of a garden.
Some of their projects are most likely a bit beyond most DIYers’ abilities, but the originality and sense of adventure with each project (like not knowing how the end result will turn out!) is something everyone can appreciate.
A unique treehouse
