Her Woods, Her Solace
Woman's spectacular backyard garden shows Asian influence

Grace is not a quality you can create in a garden. It exists of its own accord. You can, however, create conditions that invite grace, and this is what has happened in Helen Kennedy’s garden.

The front of the house is nondescript, a typical development scenario: Tidy houses cut from the same mold repeat themselves along the curve of the street. They are a similar color, shape and material.

Behind these row houses there is a creek that has cut a deep and wide dividing swath between the housing development and the forested land beyond. It forms a natural boundary, one that Kennedy has used to her advantage.

By building a bridge across the creek she has set the tone and formed a gateway to her garden.

The bridge delineates the space better than any garden gate possibly could. You cross it into a woodland oasis with a distinctly Asian feel.

Kennedy developed a taste for the Asian aesthetic when she visited the Far East 15 years ago. She and her husband spent four weeks in China and a week in Japan after he retired. But it was not until she and fellow members of Forest Garden Club took a trip to Fearington Village and she brought home a bird feeder styled as a pagoda that Asia started working its way into her garden.

Little sections of the garden began to develop around the feeder until finally there was a full-size tea house fashioned after a photograph of a Japanese boathouse. She has since moved from that garden and taken with her many of the ideas and successes that she achieved.

The present garden is only four years old. The Kennedys selected this site because of the old trees that fringe the streamside. There is a magnificent old tulip poplar and a very fine old cucumber magnolia that frames the bridge. A native tree of extraordinary character, the large leaves of the cucumber magnolia can reach a foot long and half again as wide. In spring, the creamy, green flowers can be more than four inches in diameter. Kennedy says that they look like tulips.

The tree is the perfect companion for the gently arching bridge, giving the garden a sense of antiquity and permanence despite its youth. Across the bridge, a little woodland cove opens to the white painted tea house (actually a garden shed), complete with faux sliding doors and windows trimmed in an earthy brown. A wood porch surrounds the tea house on two sides. The roof was created by cutting and layering Ondura, a corrugated asphalt roofing material that comes in large sheets. The roof mimics tile or split bamboo. The garden is anchored by the tea house and by a central pond designed and built by V. Cheatwood of Natural Vistas.

Kennedy saw a fountain design set up in a florist shop while visiting LaJolla, Calif. Made from bamboo, the simple design has a large upright column and a bending spout.

She pleaded with the owner who found her some similar size bamboo, had it cut and tied and she took it home with her on the plane. Cheatwood designed the pond around the fountain, having it spill into a bowl-shaped basin and wind its way into a lower pond. Native stone forms the surround, blending beautifully and naturally into the scene. Because of the existing native stream, the pond seems a completely natural feature.

Kennedy has enhanced it with long, grassy iris leaves that will bear large, yellow flowers and with variegated carex and bracken ferns. Wide paths surround the island beds that Kennedy de-signed by hoeing out a mark and having Mr. Gonzales, her gardener, help her to dig out. The curvilinear beds are bordered with metal edging that Kennedy ordered by mail. They offer a clean, hard, straight line. She has also used pieces of cedar log about 3 inches in diameter and sunk on end into the soil.

The entire scene is framed by Cheatwood’s bamboo fence, the posts of which are native cedar cut off head high and left standing.

The plant palette is restrained as befits a garden of this nature. There are Japanese cedars and mahonias forming the background, along with clumps of beautiful black bamboo. Farther back, flowering apricot and weeping cherry will form a white filigree through the native pines and cedars in the spring. They will be followed by native redbuds and dogwoods that the Kennedys selected to keep when they cleared the woodland cove for the garden. Beneath the trees there are hostas and calla lilies, ferns and coral bells, trilliums and Solomon’s seal. Hydrangeas and peonies and even a white rose or two have been worked into the design. To remind her of the temple gardens in Nara, Japan, where herds of wild deer roam free, the Kennedys have statuary of a pair of deer.

Wide paths, carpeted with moss, work their way around the beds. The moss was installed about a week ago, and Kennedy has to keep it moist until it becomes established.

Sherry Koontz of Carolina Pondscapes was responsible for the installation of the moss paths. The moss is gathered from her father’s property in Tennessee and was brought to the site in two pickup trucks. It took six people two full days to install the moss.

Koontz said that installing moss is like piecing together a puzzle. First the ground is cleared of sticks, rocks and debris, and then it is raked to create a permeable surface. Koontz said she sprinkles the area with sulfur to raise the pH to a level the moss finds agreeable. The moss is then placed in sheets, each patch butting against the previous one.

Koontz said that the moss needs watering once or twice a day for two weeks before it will take hold. From that point, watering once a week is sufficient.

The addition of the moss carpet was the missing piece that molded the garden into the greater landscape. It is a special spot that marries the best of garden and nature, an unexpected oasis in a hidden woodland cove.

– By David Bare
Media General News Service