Perhaps you see them from the ”L” or the commuter train. From upper-story apartments, you might also view them amid the jumble of the city landscape, maybe even a whole cluster of them standing out, say, on a once-barren city lot.
Despite land in Chicago being so valuable that single-family homes built on them are generally crowded close to one another and apartment buildings are pushed upward to gain the space they cannot get sideways, it is still possible to find little oases of green or multicolored gardens tucked away in the back yards of even the most minimal 25-foot-wide lots.
”People want to get something green, they`re almost desperate to get something growing around their homes,” says Karen Morby, a landscape designer who lives in Evanston. ”They want to alleviate the (harshness of) concrete and to create the feeling of spreading out of their home. They like to be able to get the feeling that when they step outside, their living space doesn`t end. (So) they go out in either direction or up with decks and roof gardens.”
Morby says many of those who seek her advice are DINKs-for double income, no kids-people who have little time for gardening but who, after spending a lot of money rehabbing their homes, then decide to spend a little more to extend their living pattern into the yard.
”Once you`ve spent all this money on the house, to stop at the foundation is weird,” she says. ”We find that people are researching their houses and learning what they once looked like and (that) their yards were once landscaped, so they want to restore that, also.”
For these landscape projects, the key element is low maintenance, something Morby cautions her clients to consider because no garden scheme takes care of itself. ”They want immediate gratification; the ground cover should go on like wallpaper,” she says. ”They want a small tree that has a long blooming period, small fruits but no mess, great fall color but won`t grow past 8 feet in height. I don`t know of many trees that meet those criteria.”
Morby says the biggest problem city gardeners face is shade, particularly the dense shadows that buildings cast upon adjacent gardens.
”Most shade plants need to be protected from the noonday sun,” she says, yet that is usually what they get-two or three hours of the day`s harshest rays. Plants such as pachysandra and hostas, though, can survive such a regimen if they are watered regularly.
North-Sider Vaughn Aiello carefully considered the sun`s path when laying out his garden, a matter he had thought of from the time he started house-hunting. He is so set on obtaining the maximum amount of light for his plants he had his telephone and electric lines moved to the north side of his house to keep them from throwing the slightest bit of shade on his garden. With that much care and with regular watering, he has happily found that he can grow any shade-loving plant in his garden.
Aiello`s is perhaps one of the city`s densest gardens. In a space measuring 25 by 28 feet, he has crowded 30 shrubs and trees and some 10,000 individual plants. He has two woodland gardens. One, along the north side of the property, consists of shade trees and larger shrubs that form the backdrop for his main beds. The other takes up a space, 3 feet wide and 28 feet long, that separates his lot from the garage and parking lot of a church next door. Pruning to keep things under control is a regular chore.
The central portions of his garden are devoted to rock gardens, perhaps the highest form of the art of outdoor gardening. He dug down two feet, filled in the pits with broken bricks and rubble and then covered them with more than a foot of a soil-free mix to suit the needs of specialty plants that are native to rocky mountain terrain. Ants and earthworms, however, would pull up original prairie soil from further below, and that small amount of overly nutritious soil was too strong for some of his tiny alpine plants, so some of the plants died.
He doesn`t need to water his rock-garden beds because the plants in them have evolved to thrive on dry mountainous terrain. Away from their natural environment, however, many of these plants will die in summer because their roots, finding enough nutrition in soil, don`t go down far enough, he says.
”In their home environment, the roots can go down 5 to 6 feet looking for water and nutrients.”
His rock-garden plants grow in a mix of two parts pea gravel to one part sand and one part peat, with one bucket of soil added in for every five wheelbarrows of the mix. One bed devoted to plants that require more acidic conditions is totally devoid of soil, consisting instead of a mix of granite chips, pea gravel and peat. The mix has worked well, Aiello reports.
Because summer is so short in upper-elevation regions, the alpine plants must grow, flower, set seed and be ready for winter in a short time period. In the Chicago climate, that means the gaudy color that makes them so sought-after by collectors is gone by the end of June. Aiello says his garden is usually bereft of much color in July, though other perennials pick up the slack from August to November.
For a color treat, Aiello advises a visit to Mary Gehr`s garden a few miles south of him. He swears she has something in bloom every day of the growing season in an area roughly the same size as Aiello`s.
”It`s very difficult to keep things from getting crowded out,” Gehr says as she pushes one robust planting that has moved out of line back into its alloted space. She, too, grows rock-garden plants but also has many forest wildflowers tucked into shady corners. A small pond looks as if it has always lain next to the fence.
As with so many fussy gardeners, no matter how much color currently bathes her garden, Gehr points out that it was better two weeks ago or will be better two weeks hence, when another family of perennials comes into bloom.
Viewed from the deck off Gehr`s kitchen, a sweeping crab-apple tree dominates the right side of her garden. To the left at the back, the brick wall of the building that abuts her property is almost completely covered with a Hydrangea petiolaris, a vine that has been growing there for the 28 years Gehr and her husband have lived in their home. The effect elicits oohs and aahs from visitors, even the veteran horticulturists among them.
Set on the steps leading down from the deck are tiny alpine plants growing in a mix Gehr makes by combining one part Portland cement (”Not ready-mixed concrete,” she insists), one part perlite and one part peat and moistening it with enough water for good consistency. She pours the mix into planters that are made to look like rock formations. Because of the peat and perlite in the mix, the planters are light enough to be moved easily to sheltered locations in winter.
For her more-formal plantings-combinations of red-flowering wax begonias that stand erect and deep-blue lobelias that trail over the sides-Gehr uses formal terra-cotta planters that she brought home from a trip to Italy.
A few blocks to the south of Gehr, Eldon Danhausen, a sculptor, has built at the back end of his lot a studio building that includes a 2d-floor greenhouse where he nurtures his 200-odd orchids and bromeliads that add color to his home when they are in bloom. Between the studio-greenhouse and the back of his house is an elaborate garden. Shortly after Danhausen bought his home in 1962, he transformed it into a two-flat that now bears little resemblance to its former row-house self. On the ground level are his living quarters, which include a den that opens into the garden. On the 2d level are a gallery of his sculptures, a conversation pit, the kitchen and a balcony-deck overlooking the garden. The 3d level, which has its own deck that also overlooks the garden, is rented out to a tenant.
All this was designed to give Danhausen different perspectives of his garden, which, like much of the house, is sculpted in terrazzo, a stone-and-mortar material generally used as flooring. Fluted copper tubing emerges from the base of the greenhouse to drip water into a simulated river that flows diagonally across the garden to a pool with a fountain. A board laid across the flowing ”river” allows access to the plantings in the far corners. Two ducks now and then emerge into view and go for a swim. Danhausen says he keeps the ducks at night inside one of the sculpted structures in the garden to keep them from being attacked and carried off by raccoons or other predators. Their wings are clipped to keep them from flying away.
As a serious rock gardener, Danhausen is more an eclectic than a naturalist. Terrazzo paths and structures set formal limits to the various plantings, which are a combination of styles. He says the garden has a heavy Japanese influence, a style he likes to carry over to the larger elements of the garden.
A redbud tree, which in a forest would have a light and airy shape, is here a gnarled trunk with a few leaves beginning to fill in a few short branches. ”I prune it back almost completely every year after it blooms in the spring,” Danhausen says. ”It will get 3 or 4 feet of growth during the summer. The severe pruning is probably the reason it has lived so long. Redbuds are not terribly long-lived in the wild.”
Another tree that has benefited from his desire to keep it in bounds is a crab apple in front of his house. ”I just liked the tree, and I decided I had to have it in front,” he says, warmly recounting the story of how he got it there that he has probably told countless times in the last 25 years. ”It took a semitrailer truck to deliver it on a Sunday morning because (the nursery people) couldn`t block off traffic on a weekday. I`ve cut more off it than it has on it,” he says, referring to the thrice-yearly shearings he gives the tree.
It doesn`t take a lot of scrutinizing of his sculptures to determine that Danhausen has a sense of humor, which is carried into his gardening on occasion. Pointing to a large Allium giganteum in the middle of one bed, its lilac flower the size of a baseball, he recalls the time a group came to view his garden after the decorative onion plant had stopped blooming. Asked by the group`s leader, a noted horticulturist, what the plant was, Danhausen responded with a straight face, ”Why, that`s an Allium grafitteum.” The horticulturist nodded and admitted he had never heard of the species. The sculptor then explained with a chuckle that when the plant`s bloom had faded, he spray-painted it to restore its color.
To those seeking to establish a semblance of a city garden but who are low-maintenance fanatics, landscape-designer Morby says that grass ”is not always such a problem. You only have to mow it once a week.” Other plants she often recommends are ground cover such as pachysandra and Vinca minor. Slightly larger shade-loving plants include hostas, which Morby calls ”a really underrated plant, because there are so many different varieties.”
Moving up from ground level, she says yews are some of the best evergreens because they tolerate shade better. She likes them because they add color to the winter garden. ”Rhododendrons are spectacular when they work,” she says, because of their spring flowers and year-round greenery. ”Many of the varieties stay small.”
In the area of smaller trees, she says the big sellers are redbud, crab apples, magnolias and Amelanchier, or serviceberry. ”Among street trees, we try not to plant too many honey locusts because the city seems to have planted enough for the whole world,” she says. ”We favor the maples because they`re so hardy, but Norway maples get such a dense canopy you have to watch where you use them. And we`re against silver maples because they are so weak-wooded and messy they can get to be a serious problem. Birches are big; people are anxious to bring a little country into the city. As long as they`re river birches, not the white-bark birches, they do fairly well.”
The next horizon for the city`s DINK crowd? ”Some of the sophisticated customers have been asking about ornamental grasses,” Morby says. ”But you have to be careful with those; some get to be 15 feet tall, and they are completely out of scale in a small yard.”
