GARDENING: The Secret Garden

 

When Peter Bevacqua and Stephen King began their search for a country house in the 1980s, they had the usual list of must-haves, most important among them a quiet street and lots of acreage. But those went out the window when they found the handsome, 1920s Foursquare Colonial along the main drag of stately historic homes in Claverack, New York.

 

“We didn’t want a house in the village,” Bevacqua says, but the garden had good roots: it was owned previously by Walt Nicke, who ran a business importing English garden tools, and his wife, Kathryn, a schoolteacher and former president of the Claverack Garden Club. With plentiful trees and shrubs—not to mention a lovely 1950s Lord & Burnham greenhouse—the property had what Bevacqua calls “a history of good gardening.”

 

Fast-forward to 1997; the charming Sears & Roebuck bungalow next door (the 1923 Walton model) went up for sale after the passing of its owners, the Williamses. “They were a wonderful couple,” Bevacqua recalls. They were good gardeners, too—having tended a charming cottage garden immediately behind their garage. What else could Bevacqua and King do but buy the property?

 

Over the years that followed, the couple merged the two properties seamlessly into one of the region’s most exquisite gardens. But just as their garden grew when they purchased the Williams’s property, so did their challenges. “We sat with the house for two years before changing anything,” Bevacqua says. “We debated about tearing it down, renovating it, or even selling it off,” King adds.

 

They began by replacing the original garage and driveway with a gracious, stone-topped terrace and wisteria-covered pergola to form a vantage point for viewing the gardens and a private space for entertaining. The two properties were united by forming a series of outdoor garden “rooms,” beginning with a long border that leads to the greenhouse, along with a shrub garden, a hedge garden, a conifer garden, and areas for bulbs and cut flowers.

 

Located on a corner lot, the newly acquired house and yard screen out the street. “It occurred to us to re-orient everything,” King says. The couple shifted the egress of the driveway from bustling Route 23-B to Willmon Road, a quieter side street. Now containing an office, library, and guest quarters, the second house serves as a barrier to traffic noise and provides greater privacy. “We’re on the edge of town, but it’s a private world in here,” King says. “Yes,” Bevacqua agrees, as both men gaze out towards the greenhouse. “It’s a secret garden, really.”

 

The first indication that a garden grows behind the tall white fence along Willmon Road is an extraordinary paperbark maple that greets visitors at the side gate. At the base of the tree, Bevacqua planted a bed of soft lamb’s ear punctuated by Allium schubertii, whose enormous purple orbs make a striking graphic statement that foreshadow the beauty beyond the gate. Inside, pea stone yields to a brick walkway and an antique garden arch (with Eastlake leanings), whose white-picket gate leads to a greenhouse that sits midway back on the property. King laid the brick walkway himself after clearing away large stones and other debris.

 

The garden bordering the walkway boasts a variety of lilies that Bevacqua starts in pots to see what color they really are. “Vita Sackville-West always talked about checking color,” he says. “Then I put them where they need to go.” A Clematis grows between the branches of a bright Rosa glauca rubrifolia, which boasts tiny, dark-red leaves and small, hot-pink blossoms. Pink tiger lilies and ‘David Austin’ roses contrast the border’s cool colors, which begin dramatically in spring with near-black ‘Queen-of-the-Night’ tulips followed by more purple and blue-red tones as the seasons progress. Thalictrum ‘Elin’ and bronze fennel complement neatly clipped barberry shrub orbs, their deep red color the perfect contrast to the frothy green of lady’s mantle, which, Bevacqua says, “gives the border a snap.” A fern-leaf Japanese maple hides among tall monkshood and Lobelia.

 

The hedge garden, once their neighbors’ well-tended cottage garden, is located immediately behind the remaining garage. Here, Bevacqua has kept the spirit of Mrs. Williams alive. “We just layered more formality on top,” Bevacqua notes. While the space still feels as comfortable as a cottage garden, Bevacqua has elevated its design to near-regal status. They began by planting tall hedges of yew that they shaped into tapered walls reminiscent of those at Great Dixter, the celebrated English garden of Christopher Lloyd, one of Bevacqua’s teachers, and added gravel to the pathways. They extended the entire garden, adding more shrubs and small trees, and placing a statue of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest, at the far end.

 

The colors in this area are hot, dominated by yellows and oranges. Several varieties of Rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans), tiger lilies, ‘Lemon Queen’ Helenium, yellow yarrow, foxtail lilies, Euphorbia, tall ‘Illuminator’ Thalictrum, and an enormous cup plant, along with burgundy Perillas and a riot of classic perennials such as Baptisia, spiderwort, and the ubiquitous Allium provide continuous color from April to November or later. The garden’s basic architecture—stone pathways and evergreens, including the carefully spaced and trimmed boxwood—make this garden room just as interesting in winter, when the other plants die back.

 

By 2004, both men had retired from their demanding schedules as creative directors in the advertising industry, and Bevacqua had begun his rewarding new career in garden design. “I’d always been interested in gardens,” Bevacqua says. “I took garden-design classes both here and abroad, and I read and read and read!” He studied with several renowned garden designers, including Helen Dillon and Lloyd. Meanwhile, King, when not edging a bed, leveling a bench, or otherwise helping with the demands of the couple’s exquisite property, pursues his artwork, creating mixed-media “magical-reality constructions.”

 

“What interests me most is using form and texture to create a garden,” Bevacqua says. “Because of the climate in this region, where winters are relatively long, our efforts can’t be about the flowers, which are just too short-lived. Because I come from a design background, not a plant background, I have a different perspective.”

 

Paula Forman, a garden writer and former advertising executive, and her husband, Phil, hired Bevacqua to design a garden at their home in Hudson, New York. “It’s part garden, part park,” Forman says of the space, which adjoins the city’s dynamic Warren Street. “What I love about working with Peter is that he’s able to get you to tell him what you want,” she says, “and then he does it. How many people really listen?” Bevacqua’s design for the Forman garden is symmetrical and quite simple—a boxwood hedge with a border of plants that changes as the season progresses. Both formal and graphic, the garden is as beautiful and engaging to passersby on Warren Street as it is to the homeowners.

 

Bevacqua’s design talent—not to mention all of that reading—has paid off. In his Claverack garden he is trying to introduce more shrubs. That means fewer perennials to divide and deadhead. “It may be a sign of the times or just our aging bodies, but we need less maintenance,” Bevacqua says, quoting another teacher of his, Penelope Hobhouse. “Christopher Lloyd used to say that low maintenance means low interest,” he continues. “With the range of plants available today, however, you can create a garden of great interest that’s also relatively low maintenance, if you focus on texture and form.”

 

The couple’s shrub border features a curving river of shimmering ‘Silver Queen’ Artemisia dotted with ‘Limelight’ Hydrangea. A handsome Viburnum opulus, pruned upright so its rose-like flowers are at eye level, joins ‘Pee Gee’ Hydrangea and one of Bevacqua’s favorites, ‘Pink Diamond’ Hydrangea. Together, these hardy shrubs provide long periods of interest from bloom and foliage, with little need for maintenance. A large ‘Diablo’ ninebark with deep burgundy leaves provides a backdrop to the Hydrangea, and an elegant bust of Bacchus set on a column peeks out at visitors. A rosemary willow is layered with Euonymus and under-planted with Allium, while near the greenhouse are lovely Amsonia (Eastern Blue Star), which will turn honey color as autumn approaches.

 

One of Bevacqua’s design trademarks is to prune trees and shrubs upward, and then under-plant with low-growing plants, bulbs, and vines to give a garden bed greater texture and a richer, more layered appearance. In the new conifer garden, Bevacqua pruned a Pinus parviflora (Japanese white pine) to thicken its growth and replaced several dead or dying trees with dawn redwoods—rare deciduous conifers that were thought to be extinct until one was discovered growing in China in the 1940s. They help soak up moisture in this part of the garden and their texture balances the neighboring Japanese ‘Bloodgood’ maples.

 

Attention-grabbing plants and trees that begin their show in spring—a stunning white crabapple tree at the center of the shrub garden, American and Chinese fringe trees, Ligularia japonica, and the fast-growing Magnolia hypoleuca with flashy white flowers—progress to staghorn sumac ‘Tiger Eyes’ and redtwig and salmon twig dogwood shrubs. A contorted larch tree gets a showcase position, while both purple- and gold-leaf smokebush join another of Bevacqua’s favorites, dragon’s-eye pine, with its unusual variegated needle, for more year-round interest.

 

‘Quick Fire’ Hydrangea, which holds its bloom through the season, complements the anchor tree, a ‘Crimson King’ maple. Its purple-green foliage in summer mellows to a deep maroon in autumn and balances several red obelisk beech trees, an upright columnar species with paradoxical growing habits (its burgundy leaf turns green in the fall) that was a favorite of authors such as Hans Christian Andersen and Henry David Thoreau. By planting the larger beech tree in front of two smaller ones, Bevacqua uses the vertical shape to carry the eye to the end of the fence, while the smaller trees behind it draw the eye down and force the perspective, making the entire garden appear deeper than it is.

 

The couple created large garden beds using the tried-and-true no-till method of alternating layers of newspapers and compost. Time and nature did the rest. King confesses to being an edging neatnik, preferring a crisp, natural edge over stone, brick, or metal. Walking through the garden, he notes that they need to straighten the obelisk in the hedge garden and level the bench in the shrub garden. The couple’s attention to detail—and to each other—is loving, yet matter-of-fact. It comes as no surprise that they’ve been together since meeting thirty-five years ago in San Francisco.

 

Just outside the greenhouse are the beginnings of Bevacqua’s homage to Belgian garden designer Jacques Wirtz, famous for his undulating boxwood hedges. Bevacqua and King have planted a saucy legion of their own—several varieties that they have started to shape into a form that’s both witty and dramatic. But boxwood are slow growers, and the results won’t be final for several more years. Understanding nature as they do, Bevacqua and King are nothing if not patient.  [AUGUST 2010]

Shawn Hartley Hancock is a freelance writer living in Spencertown, N.Y.

 

THE GOODS

Peter Bevacqua Garden Design, LLC
Claverack, N.Y.