It’s a dream many a nine-to-fiver dreams: turning a preoccupation into an occupation. Debi Phillips did just that in 1988, when she chucked her plumbing-parts sales job and founded her garden-design business, the St. Charles-based Scentimental Gardens.
A longtime plant manager who tilled her first garden at age 8, Phillips educated herself by completing the University of Illinois/Kane County Extension Service’s Master Gardener program, attending lectures at the Chicago Botanical Garden and reading the hundreds of gardening books that now line her home office in west suburban Wayne.
Phillips made frequent trips to England, where she says she “picked the brains” of gardeners listed in England’s “Yellow Book,” a guide to private, storybook gardens, and cultivated mentors including published British gardeners Angela Whitfield and Penelope Hobhouse. Back in Wayne, she duplicated her favorite English cottage gardens on her 5-acre spread.
As Phillips’ business grew via word-of-mouth, her specialty emerged: the historically correct garden intended to match the period of the home it surrounds.
To recreate a true Victorian garden, for example, Phillips combines huge statues, formal walkways of flagstone or limestone and oversized plants.
“The Victorian home had a garden that was more decorative and showy than functional because it was originally the garden of the wealthy,” Phillips says. “It included big, even gaudy, plants and flowers such as 7-foot foxgloves, giant ferns and lots and lots of roses. Originally, it was more fragrant than it is today because of hybridization.”
Each Victorian flower had a meaning, says Phillips, and gentlemen picked bouquets accordingly. Forget-me-nots meant “true love,” while violets said “I’ll be faithful.”
The late 19th Century farmhouse, home of the working class, had a more practical garden that was actually a series of several small gardens, maintained by the lady of the house. To recreate this garden, Phillips includes a small orchard with apple and pear trees, and a vegetable garden with carrots, onions, potatoes and beans. The farmhouse’s flower garden contrasts with cutting gardens because its original purpose was to generate potpourri–essential to pre-antiperspirant households.
But the farmhouse’s most interesting garden was the herb garden, says Phillips. “It was usually by the kitchen and included herbs for cooking, for cosmetics such as rose water for fighting wrinkles and for medicinal plants–yarrow for treating wounds, horehound for coughs, chamomile for antiseptic,” she says. As these holistic remedies have made a comeback among Phillips’ clients, she has added this topic to the talks she gives at garden club meetings, the College of DuPage in Wheaton, Garfield Farm in St. Charles, Cantigny Gardens in Wheaton and public libraries.
Fences surrounded each of the farmhouse’s gardens to keep out 19th Century pests–wandering “street cows,” coyotes and foxes. The fences still are effective, says Phillips, although the intruders have changed. Today’s area gardeners are more likely to lose plants to deer, raccoons, chipmunks and moles.
Fast-forwarding to the early 20th Century, Phillips describes gardens many remember as their grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’.
“These are on smaller lots and are miniature versions of the 19th Century farmhouse gardens, with some flowers, some herbs and vegetables, an apple tree,” says Phillips. The arrival of cars and grocery stores meant fewer medicinal and cosmetic plants. While the Baby Boomers remember these as tranquil nirvanas, they were working gardens that fed the family, warns Phillips. “Like the larger, farmhouse gardens, these do take time to maintain,” she tells clients.
Phillips says she is not a purist; sometimes “historically correct” isn’t good enough. She is not opposed, for example, to dressing up a Civil War-era home with window boxes that would have been too frivolous for the original owner.
For clients with homes from the 1950s or ’60s, Phillips suggests junking the “correct” notion altogether. “Those homes typically had austere foundation plantings and few flowers. The lawn was king,” says Phillips. “They might have grown some flowers or vegetables, but, otherwise, people wanted low-maintenance evergreens.”
Many owners of these “lawn chemical era” homes, as Phillips calls them, and owners of newer homes, ask her to re-create the decorative aspect of Grandma’s garden, sans functional plants. Here, Phillips creates 1990s retreats with 1890s accents–trellises, antique roses and climbing vines.
Regardless of the ages of their homes, Phillips says most of her clients call her after tiring of their “basic, boring plantings.” The current proliferation of gardening magazines sparks their interest. When shopping for landscape designers, old-house enthusiasts, especially, zero in on Phillips.
Unlike most designers, Phillips does not work from blueprints. Instead, she brings artist Stephanie Fania of Geneva to a client’s home, where Fania sketches the home and proposed garden. “Before we leave, the client has the drawing and can see what the garden will look like,” says Phillips, who adds that many clients like the drawings so much they frame them later.
Phillips then takes the drawing to her home office, where she estimates the cost of plant purchases and installation by her four-man crew. Her 20-plus projects a year range from $800 to $30,000, but average $4,000. Although she prefers the old-fashioned, pen-and-ink sketches to computer-generated renderings, she does use a computer to produce invoices and track material orders.
“Most clients want us to do it all. But others want to do some of the work themselves or want to add to it in stages over a few years,” she says.
Although most of Phillips’ clients are referrals, some discover her at her St. Charles shop, also called Scentimental Gardens, which is a candy store for garden enthusiasts. The shop is a cooperative between Phillips and six designers/artists who take turns selling their garden accents–architectural remnants, dried flower arrangements, decoupaged flower pots, painted furniture, hand-woven baskets. The birdhouses and custom window boxes are made by Phillips’ husband, Steve, a sales manager by day.
Phillips orders most of her plants from Fox Valley-based wholesalers. She grows some of the hard-to-find species at home, including the Victorian flowers “Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate” and “Love Lies Bleeding.” In fact, her own garden is a showcase for her work.
Phillips’ most elaborate project was a garden reflecting the Cape Cod home it circled. “We used tons of flowers and trellises and an old rowboat as a container. The effect was a seaside-cottage look,” she recalls.
For her fans, Phillips hosts annual garden-study treks to England, where she says the garden is a fixture, an outdoor room. “Here, gardening goes in and out of fashion. In England, it is a way of life,” she says.
