GARDEN DESIGN: Growing Up Fast

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C. Roy and Sherry Boutard, caretakers of the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, from 1955 to 1985, remember a summer night in the mid-1970s when people from all over the county arrived to watch the midnight blooming of the phyllocactus. The plant blossoms just once a year, and its flowers last for only four hours. “People came from Tanglewood all dressed up, and locals brought their kids in pajamas,” Sherry recalls. “There were two hundred people there, all waiting for hours.”

 

That sense of curiosity and wonder at what nature can do permeates the Berkshire Botanical Garden (BBG), which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. But if one were to choose a flower that best represents the BBG, it wouldn’t be the phyllocactus but rather the dandelion: hardy, useful, native to the area, lovely yet unpretentious.

 

“When they think of a botanical garden, a lot of people think of an estate with grand, enormous greenhouses and very lush facilities,” says John Parker, director for the past twelve years. “We’re a more humble operation, very much oriented to the home gardener. We always focus on techniques people can use in their own backyards.”

 

The Berkshire Garden Center—whose name was officially changed to Berkshire Botanical Garden in 1991—was launched in 1934 by a dozen local garden clubs and associations, with the Lenox Garden Club in command. Its instigator was herb gardener and author Irene Botsford Hoffmann, who, with her husband, Bernhard, donated six acres on the north side of Route 183 at its intersection with Route 102, including a 1790 farmhouse known as the Center House. In 1954, Hoffmann donated an additional parcel of land on the south side of the road, increasing the establishment’s total acreage to fifteen.

 

The garden’s mission has roots in a time not entirely unlike our own, addressing concerns that, for better or worse, still need addressing. From the start, the Berkshire Garden Center was designed as a place where people could learn not only how to beautify the landscape, but also how to increase their self-sufficiency in the midst of the Great Depression by growing their own food. During World War II, a victory garden was planted here to supplement the public food supply; in the decades that followed, principles of environmentalism and responsible stewardship of the land continued to drive the mission of the organization.

 

As educational director, Sherry Boutard developed curriculum-related programs that drew some four thousand children annually. Today the BBG runs educational programs on-site and in local schools, a series of weekend lectures and workshops, and a professional certification program in horticulture and garden design, in collaboration with Berkshire Community College.

 

These programs, along with special annual events such as the spring plant sale, the October Harvest Festival, and a holiday marketplace, bring in more than fourteen thousand people each year, while the display gardens, formally open from early May through Columbus Day, attract another ten thousand. Visitors divide nearly evenly between tourists and Berkshire residents, who also make up the bulk of the BBG’s 1,100 members and two dozen trustees. Its annual budget of $750,000 comes from membership, donations, revenue from a $3 million endowment, special events and programs, and admissions and gift shop revenues.

 

“We want to inspire people to be successful gardeners, so we show them what grows well, and, of course, we think about what’s hardy for the area,” says Dorthe Hviid, BBG’s director of horticulture since 1992. “Here we can experiment and try new things, and that’s also part of making this place educational.”
 

 

Set on a gentle hill that slopes down to a rustic, covered sitting area, and divided into sections by narrow paved walkways and walls of native stone, the Herb Garden looks like something you’d find on the grounds of a medieval castle. Designed in 1937 by landscape architect Edward F. Belches, it’s the oldest garden on the property; this season, guest gardener Page Dickey redesigned the layout and plantings, creating small gardens within the garden according to their usage and attributes, including a fragrance garden, a medicinal garden, a culinary garden, a potpourri garden, a bug-repellent garden, and a dye garden. The Hogwarts Garden features poisonous and powerful plants, such as snakeroot, wolfbane, and catnip.

 

“It’s designed to appeal to children and the childish imagination of adults by highlighting some of the lore herbs have had since medieval days,” says Dickey, author of Gardens in the Spirit of the Place and Breaking Ground: Portraits of Ten Garden Designers. (Also for kids, the Children’s Garden across the road features a solar fountain, a bathtub full of aquatic plants, and a willow wigwam.)
Since 1957, a local volunteer organization called the Herb Associates has been meeting regularly here to harvest plants grown in a nearby herb production garden, which they cook up in a line of products, including salad dressings, herbed mustard, marinades, and specialty vinegars, sold only at the on-site gift shop. The oldest member of the group is eighty-seven, and many members have been part of the effort for as many as twenty-five years.

 

Roses are among the garden’s most temperamental occupants. “Roses are tough [to grow],” says Hviid, “so we have made a policy in our rose garden to only use roses that are hardy to Zone Four.” Rugosas, floribundas, and species roses have been blooming in the square Rose Garden since 1971. During the winter, the bushes are protected by a foot of manure—generally natural manure and compost is used in lieu of chemical fertilizer—piled around their bases. Utilizing and teaching green methods is a high priority; Parker estimates that the cultivation methods here are 98 percent organic (chemical sprays are used very rarely, if ever, Hviid says).

 

“We’re trying to connect the growing interest in doing things in a more environmentally friendly fashion with the long tradition we have here and how we’ve taken care of the land,” says Parker, a former instructor and interpreter for nature centers and national and state parks. “It’s not so much new technologies as a rediscovery of old technologies, a revaluing of older, tried-and-true ways of doing things.”

 

The gardens are mulched with pine needles so they require less watering (and less weeding), and the greenhouse used for winter plant storage is solar-heated. The property has two rainwater collection systems: a passive system that collects rain in barrels and an active system through which water from the greenhouse roof is pumped inside for the plants. The Pond Garden, which was given a new 84-square-foot liner last fall, is fed with a water harvesting system. In an ingenious move, the Wetland Garden was created with runoff from the parking lot beside the office building and Visitors’ Center on the south side of Route 183.

 

“Water is transported from the parking lot, which is on a little bit of a slope, through underground lines into this retention basin,” Hviid explains. “Water percolates through the roots of the plants and gets cleaned of solids and waterborne chemicals, and then percolates back into the groundwater.”
Facing each other across a smooth oval of emerald lawn, the Frelinghuysen and de Gersdorff Perennial Gardens, both crescent-moon-shaped, are mirror images of each other: the seventy-one-year-old de Gersdorff Garden, supported by the family of Carl de Gersdorff, is home to a selection of sun-loving perennials, while its companion garden, created for Beatrice Procter Freylinghuysen in 1999, contains flowers and shrubs that thrive in the shade of towering trees. (Freylinghuysen’s mother was honored with the nearby Beatrice Sterling Procter Memorial Garden, donated in 1966 by the Lenox Garden Club.) Early summer here brings a swath of deep red poppies, before the colors move to blues, pinks, and whites, followed by yellows and oranges.

 

On a glistening weekday morning, volunteers Sarah Boyd of Stockbridge and Stephanie Bradford of West Stockbridge are uprooting weeds in the de Gersdorff Garden. “It’s very therapeutic,” Boyd says, “particularly doing it with somebody,” Bradford adds. They are two of some three- to four hundred locals who volunteer at the BBG year-round. A core group of ten volunteers works outside throughout the growing season, supplementing a crew that includes Hviid, senior gardener Serena Epstein, one seasonal gardener, and two interns.

 

“Volunteers are a very important element of what the garden is in this community—not a place you look at from a distance as a showcase, but a hands-on place where you can be active and get involved,” Parker says.

 

The tiny cottage encircled by the miniature Martha Stewart Garden at the Meadow Cottage is painted Bedford Hills Grey this year—Stewart’s signature color, formulated for the exterior of her own home. “It’s emblematic of the company, and it’s also a really great color to show off plants,” says guest gardener Stacey Hirvela, senior associate garden editor for Martha Stewart Living. Hirvela has designed a very Martha garden, complete with a picket fence and birdhouse as well as hundreds of tulips and alliums packed into the fourteen-by-eleven-foot plot.

 

In a nod to the BBG’s theme for the year, Back to the Future: Rediscovering Our Roots, Hirvela also added a variety of rose called Skyrocket that was registered in 1934, the same year the garden was founded. “We wanted to include classic heirloom varieties as well as more modern cultivars that will add length to the bloom time,” she says. “There should be something in bloom clear through the first frost in September or October.”

 

In a contrasting aesthetic vein, the Timmy and Lincoln Foster Rock Garden across the lawn is home to plants adapted to high wind, poor soil, and cold temperatures, such as dianthus, phlox, and thyme; it was created by the Berkshire chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society for their national meeting here in 1994.

 

The grassy promenade, known as the Arboretum, runs along the north side of the road, between a selection of native and exotic trees including American beech, copper beech, honey locust, downy hawthorn, and spongy-barked cork. (Some of these commemorate loved ones through the garden’s Memorial Tree program.) This stretch of the garden lends itself well to alfresco artwork; in recent years, the BBG has experimented with integrating sculpture into the natural landscape with shows such as last year’s Cultivate, a companion to MASS MoCA’s Badlands exhibition, and this season’s Gone With the Wind: The Kinetic Art of Tim Prentice, showcasing lightweight aluminum and steel structures that respond to the wind. Contained Exuberance: A Fresh Look at Gardening in Paris, an exhibit created by Margaret Roach and Bob Hyland, focuses on container gardens of all sorts. “We want people to realize this is a changing place,” Parker says. “We’re doing more special exhibitions that reacquaint people with the garden and help them to see us in a new perspective.”

 

“The more you look at gardens and plants, the more you come to appreciate subtlety,” says Hviid, a former fashion designer (and Denmark transplant) whose sense of color and aesthetics matches her knowledge of growing times and plant varieties.

 

In the garden’s Lexan Greenhouse more than seven thousand young plants are nurtured in March and April. “This is the joy of it all—the babies growing up,” says Epstein. “It’s a very logical, linear process, but it’s kind of like magic.”

 

The long rows of plants include historic and newer perennial varieties, cuttings, hardy succulents, and seedlings for the Vegetable Garden, redesigned this year by gardening author Jack Staub. Epstein, 25, studied landscape architecture and horticulture at the University of Connecticut, and is an example of the faction of environmentally sensitive young people who are dedicated to responsible stewardship of the land. They represent hope not only for the planet as a whole but also for places like the Berkshire Botanical Garden, whose typical visitor demographic skews older.
“I think society is shifting,” Epstein says. “We’re going back to old-fashioned ways—you can call it green, you can call it conscious. I see myself as doing what I love to help society function as a whole.” [AUGUST 2009]

 

Tresca Weinstein, a frequent contributor to Berkshire Living, lives in Canaan, N.Y., where she enjoys eating tomatoes and basil from her raised-bed garden.

 

 

THE GOODS

Berkshire Botanical Garden
Routes 102 and 183
Stockbridge, Mass.

www.berkshirebotanical.org