Those yews to the right of the low boxwood hedge maybe not getting full sun? But they look so good anyway. Interesting lesson.
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My philosophy exactly! My small 18 ft x 125 ft lot supports my 18 ft x 30 ft townhouse as well as a dense mix of flora and fauna. With little effort, thanks to perennials, I am treated to thousands of flowers from April to November. Every square inch of available earth is pIanted, inscribed only by narrow paths! I enjoy roses, peonies, clematis, and camellias...but also native poke berries that feed large numbers of birds well into the winter. My native goldenrod teems with bees late in the season, nourishing them just before winter hibernation. In Spring, I keep a close eye on returning cardinals, mockingbirds, and catbirds nesting in the dense shrubbery. In late Fall, I watch the squirrels wait until the rose-hips are just perfectly ripe for the picking. My little patch of earth is truly alive, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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My Meyer lemon tree (first photo) is planted in the ground and is about 15 feet tall. This year it produced almost 500 pounds of lemons. Literal "walls of yellow" masked most of the green.
I put the fruit out front for the neighbors to take. Fifty pounds would be gone in 2 hours.
I love that tree.
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For once, an article where even the comments are lovely. Friends, let’s take to our gardens! Here’s to spring.
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The money? No? No mention?
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@Matthew
There is OF COURSE money. $$? $$$? I lose track. Probably $$$$.
They never SAY, my dear.
12
I wish Deborah Nevins was running for President.
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Nevin’s expressed her skills and talents on her own property with a lovely respect for the balance between nature and design. Alexander Pope said, “All gardening is landscape painting,” equally well-stated by a child student of mine who said, “A garden is like painting with flowers.” Nevins chose refined, restrained environments to soothe her soul. I too would like more pictures! I love that she shared placing her perennials where they won’t haunt her with their need for weeding. Evolved woman!
20
How I wanted to see the inside of that beautiful house.
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We need to get rid of the made in Texas fencing installed at significant expense in Central Park and elsewhere -- often ina ppropriately - and encourage more neighborhood gardeners to set up "landscapes" or flower patches such as the one at about 94th and Riverside in Riverside Park -- thee are enclosed by simple wrought iron railings.
Gardening is a balm for the soul... and perhaps the Botanical Gardens in NYC should charge a pittance for entrance!! on popular days to city residents.
13
Utterly enchanting. Simple elegance.
18
Nice mix of formal and informal. Whoa, where did I get that vocabulary? I recently bought a beach house on Long Island Sound and have been studying "Seascape Gardening" by Anne Halpin, which has many examples of gardens both formal, informal, native and so forth. Fortunately for me the previous owner's did absolutely nothing, so I start with a blank slate and take inspiration from others. I will be going for an informal native garden (aka wild and local) and hope the hummingbirds and bees will enjoy it.
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Charming smaller home, surrounded by gardens.
Beautiful and inspirational.
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@Barbara Brundage
Smaller?
That depends on one's perspective, lol!
12
She evokes the beauty of the wild. Totally natural, astoundingly beautiful. Feels like home.
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But be careful with Queen Anne’s lace...last summer it wanted to take over absolutely everything up here in our Vermont garden. I now think of it firmly as a weed, a bully of a weed at that. I would never plant it (it was wild) on purpose! Many many hours went into keeping it at bay, from overtaking nearly all other flowers and vegetables, and it grows insanely quickly, such a stubborn plant.
22
Relaxed & beautiful.
Year-round structure & loose seasonal color - and not tooooo tense! …and yes - more photos
19
Yikes!!!
Nevins is a modernist...and yet...Did I see base planting in one of those photos...LOL?
Don’t try to misdirect me with that non-landscape architecture caption about Queen Anne’s Lace in a vase.
I saw base planting.
7
@Woodson Dart New to all this. What's base planting?
@jrig
Base planting is basically a catch-all term for the shrubbery one sees planted around the perimeter of most residences where the exterior meets the ground. Often ill conceived and derided by modernists as a sort-of architectural "decorative parsley on a dinner plate" it is rarely seen in contemporary modern residential landscape design. It is almost always seen in well executed traditional "cottage gardens" which Ms. Nevin's personal garden appears to hark back to. It is so ubiquitous in most residential settings that one rarely even thinks about it.
For a look at the "no base planting" model, try Googling images for "shaker style home".
Then take a look at Philip Johnson's Glass House and Steven Holl's Stretto House. Plenty of "landscaping" but no bushes sprinkled around the exterior wall base.
For some reason minimizing or eliminating base plantings is something very few homeowners can tolerate...perhaps because so few architects can design a structure that meets the ground skillfully.
Sorry to be so long-winded.
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@jrig
For another example, albeit non-residential...try Googling an aerial view of the Lincoln Memorial. Years ago Philip Johnson would tell Washington Post interviewers (very much intending to shock them) that his first act as President would be to remove all the "base planting" around the Lincoln Memorial. With its base planting, the Memorial does not sit as a crisply defined sculptural "object" (as the Washington Monument does) at the western terminus of the Mall but a sort-of romantic "temple in the woods". Of course the Memorial is so colossal in scale that it's base plantings are not mere groupings of shrubs but rather small forests.
9
It looks like an English country house garden where the gardener recently quit. But in a good way.
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This is interesting to me. These wildflowers spread like mad, by wind and birds as well as by root-spread. I love Queen Anne's Lace and Goldenrod, but if you want to have any areas free them, then a lot of weeding will be necessary. Lovely gardens, though. I love the way that the presence or absence of a view and the personality and needs of each gardener determine the garden s/he will end up with.
17
Beautiful, beautiful gardens! Enjoy them all!
12
Meyer Lemon tree? On Long Island? Didn't think any citrus could survive NY winters.
@peter
You bring it in for the winter. You can grow citrus or mango on your window sill. You can start a plant with the seeds from the Meyer lemon you purchase.. The plant can be about two feet high and produce a lemon or two. If you want more blooms and fruits, try a calamondin orange (an indoor plant).
20
I laughed when my husband bought an orange tree here in Virginia, but I have one orange getting ready and quite a few intoxicating blossoms that will not grow to be oranges, but what a pleasure to get up and inhale their scent. We put the orange on a deck facing northwest in summer and next to a window facing west in winter.
14
No mention of birds! (Someone needs to get their priorities straight on what makes a great garden!)
24
@PaddyMac
and butterflies and lightening bugs and crickets and occasionally grasshoppers!! (and a few beetles tomunch the roses.) Milkweed gardens for monarchs hav become popular but the caveat there is that non-native milkweeds actually interfere with the life cycle of this creature now at dangerously low levels. the number of those who winter in CA was down to nearly 1000 this year!! (Ban Roundup??)
You are so right.... (Also far fewer birds in NYC-- even sparrows and pigeons. Poison out for rats has apparently killed lots of birds!!)
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@Anna
The Black Swallowtail Butterfly loves Queen Anne's Lace as a host plant for egg laying and larvae food ... a healthy brood of striped caterpillars will feast in her garden.
10
"....Tommy Hilfiger, David Geffen and Michael Eisner — and almost nothing is out of bounds."
These guys ain't no Medicis. Deborah should ply her trade elsewhere.
4
Awesome. In a great landscape, the structure ("bones") of the garden support the serendipity ("chaos") of the plants. Nowhere done better than here. Thanks for sharing.
34
Wild gardens are what I am about and I do love the gardens of Deborah Nevins as a model of my own.
20
So beautiful and imaginative. We have a similar situation here in a large expanse and I cannot wait for Spring to start implementing her very effective visions. What a tableau to admire.
21
Oh, dear, how wonderful. Here is the very garden I have designed for myself and which I love so much. I am engulfed with bushes and trees and busy birds, all color through the spring to autumn and sculptural branches and stems through winter.
28
Intriguing but not enough pictures!!
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@Raro
Deborah Nevins & Associates: http://www.dnalandscape.com/projects.html
^_^
12
Whoa!
7