Colorful Woodland Garden, Berea, USA

Mary Startsman has loved gardening since childhood. When starting her own garden in Berea, she found inspiration in a gate she saw in the movie Barry Lyndon. Today her backyard garden is an explosion of colors and textures with surprises around every corner. Here we are at the very heart of Mary's garden. In fact here's the gate that started it all 28 years ago. This is the entry to the heart or the hearth in this case of this garden. The fireplace is the center point and all the rooms come out like spokes to a wheel. My garden is pretty much divided into different, I would call them vistas, and they all have their own little special plants or they're all special effects. They're all different but they're all part of the one. That unites it from one room to the next to the next. The connecting element there is the fact that of course it's all the garden plants, but it's like going from one little microclimate to another little microclimate. It's all a nice little vista that you walk into and get to explore. The main start of practically the bulk of my garden was mail order because you couldn't you couldn't get hostas or you couldn't get hydrangeas or you couldn't get they didn't carry them. And now of course you can find them in any store. When we bought this property here it was all a blank slate more or less. I wanted you to feel when you came down the path and into the garden that you were coming into a courtyard. And to have a courtyard you got to have walls around it. I didn't want the typical fence so I came up with the idea of using the cedar boards and making it curving. But then I didn't like the solidity of it and I had those rings. I love rings. They come off a half barrel that I rotted. And so I you know I would take chalk and we would play with where to put them. I love the way it just sort of hugs the interior of the garden. I already had a small inground pond which is not very deep. It's only maybe 16 inches deep. I went to our local store and they had little baby koi. Sure enough I bought some and I read about them and they said the koi will grow in proportion to their environment. They didn't read that page. They just kept growing and all of a sudden I knew that they were not going to be able to winter in 16 inches of water. So that's how the koi pond got to be. It's made a nice addition. It's got a arbor on top of it with flowering honeysuckle and you can put pots around it and so it's just enriched the garden. Being above ground actually is easier to maintain. The filters that you have to clean out you only clean them out twice a year. It's got a skimmer box and the skimmer box does have to be cleaned out maybe every two or three weeks depends on how much food they're getting and what season it is. Even the main filters in the koi pond are not that hard to deal with. You just take them out rinse them and put them back in. So I'll put out little metal tables on the hosta bed and put the bags of filter media on them and then rinse them so that the water and the nutrients get used. To me they're kind of like the water type butterflies. You have the butterflies that go in and out of the garden through the gates and around and you see them flitting around everywhere. And the koi do the same thing but they do it in the water. In the small fish pond you wander around to the side and go up to the tree house. It's just a lovely area to spend time up there or if you want to go up there and survey and get a different feel for the garden see it from a different perspective. You need to have a sit-in area so there is a sit-in area right at the center of the garden that has a table and benches and a very nice stone fireplace. I love fire. I think fire is so it's a fascination I think since the creation of time you know the caveman discovered it. There are paths that wind around away from the fireplace and then circle back to the center of the garden. And there's also from the rose garden near the house there's a boardwalk that leads you into a nice size secluded I call it the side garden. It faces mostly northeast so it's very shaded it doesn't get a lot of sunlight but there's enough light that you can grow some flowering shrubs like hydrangeas or viburnums. The art elements in the garden are kind of a anchoring focus point that helps the eye to rest on something that is not green that is not flowering and yet it adds another dimension of mystery or intrigue or beauty to the garden. I try to you know just keep it simple and have just a couple here and there but I think all those things are important. It raises up the level of the garden the water the statues the fireplace. I was at the rehab store one day I thought I'll go in there and see just what they have and I was walking through the store and they had this two very old bed springs and they still had horse hair on them I didn't even know they used horse hair on them and I thought what lovely coils that mattress has. It's near the tree house so it's sort of a barrier between the the wilderness and the maintained garden. I love it in the evening when the sun is setting in the west and it shines through and lights up some of those coils. Those coils are wonderful they're really lovely I think they're lovely I think they're interesting. Nothing was pre-planned it was just a matter of feeling the flow. Don't do things in a straight line try to keep an air of mystery don't see everything at once because if you sit in one place and you can see the whole thing all right you saw it you move on but if you have a curving path or you have a tree or that's blocking it or something that's overflowing on a path and it beckons you and it's mystery you want to see what's on the other side. It wasn't a conscious effort of making rooms it was just trying to make it interesting mysterious exciting you want to go and investigate. Plants are very forgiving they're going to come back you can't kill them unless you you really really have to try hard to kill them. Prune whenever you have time or transplant whenever you have time. Don't be afraid to try. Trial and error it's your best teacher more so than any book I think. You'll remember it if you do it and to me that's probably the best secret of all. Here we are in Mary Starsman's beautiful backyard garden. Now mostly it's shade but as you can see right here this is a beautiful sunshiny spot and she's taken advantage of it. She has beautiful Asiatic lilies she's got day lilies she's even got coneflower that's just about ready to flower. Stunning roses this in fact she calls her rose garden. Blend it in with the roses or black-eyed susans. She's even got the climbing flowers that are native the trumpet honeysuckle beloved by hummingbirds. So if you have even the smallest spot of sunshine in your garden take advantage of it. Plant day lilies or black-eyed susans even roses plant something that loves sun that will bring you joy and color to your garden.