Not all of the gorgeous surprises to be found in the South Side’s storied Pullman neighborhood are relics of the district’s origin as a 19th Century company town. Although the turreted Hotel Florence and Arcade Square’s colonnade are perfectly lovely, they have been joined recently by a gem of a back yard that, if it’s not as grand as either of those, is at least as thoughtfully built.
In a back yard just 25 by 40 feet, first-time garden designer Scott Ware has developed a landscape that is as beautiful as it is instructive for other gardeners struggling within small confines. Ware started doing his yard in 1994 without a plan, but over the next few years, his knack for precision and his appetite for simplicity worked together to help him create a genuinely remarkable garden.
This is a garden that successfully solves problems with which sophisticated gardeners continually struggle. It has four-season visual interest–some gardeners with more room are hard-pressed to cram in even two seasons. It’s trendy, with a big swath of black-eyed Susans, a pond and a few dollops of ornamental grasses, at the same time that it feels timeless and settled. It includes more trees than most city gardeners imagine they could ever shoehorn into their itty-bitty lots.
And on top of all that, the space is so absorbing a composition of colors and textures that those who get to visit can’t help but daydream about it afterward.
“My starting point was that I was looking for an enclosed little Garden of Eden,” says Ware, a railroad engineer who is 49 years old. “Beyond that, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. None of that cottage garden thing that is so popular, because it just looks chaotic to me. No lawn. Low-maintenance.”
When Ware moved into the rowhouse in 1992, it had been empty for 20 years so there was lots of renovation to be done. That gave him time to sit on the back stoop and try to draw his ideal garden. He didn’t get anywhere with it, so when the indoors was done, he started an incremental approach to the outdoors. He did one major feature–deck, sidewalk, pond–at a time, focusing intently on doing each one just right instead of scattering his attention over the whole lot at once.
For the pond he envisioned as a centerpiece, Ware brought in the West Chicago pond-builders Aquascape Designs and asked them to put in “as big a pond as I could get away with.” The 1,000-gallon pond he got fills about one-quarter of the back yard, but its bigness is balanced against another flat expanse, the deck.
Ware didn’t select a single plant until after the deck, sidewalk and pond were complete and he knew what space there was to deal with. That decision alone sets him apart from typical first-time gardeners, who are so eager to start seeing flowers outside their windows that they start planting right away and only later look around to see where the big stuff will fit.
The next smart move he made was to loosen up, and he had help on that. The ideal of simplicity had him believing he should use as few plant varieties as possible, probably fewer than a dozen. “It was my idea of what would look peaceful,” he says. That’s a fine concept for such a small space, because it allows the gardener to plant large numbers of each kind of plant and maximize its impact, but Ware now admits he was overdoing the plan to underdo plants.
Fortunately, he was overwhelmed by the thousands of plants available, so he tapped a professional for help picking plants.
Harry Schuster, a landscape architect who has since died, encouraged Ware to open up to more plants–but not too many more. There are about 30 varieties in the yard now, including three in the vegetable garden and three or more in the pond.
“Harry really got into the idea I had for this yard, and we ended up going to nurseries together and arguing about what would work,” Ware recalls.
Keeping it simple
They settled on a plant list that is mostly evergreens–to keep the garden strong in winter. But it’s not a winter-only tableau, because the evergreens are a mix of colors, shapes and textures. And they are complemented by the seasonal shows.
For spring drama, there are lilacs and irises; for summer, black-eyed Susans and feather reed grass, and for fall, sedum “Autumn Joy.”
“I wanted no more than one or two things blooming at a time. I like to keep it simple,” Ware says. Each bloomer then gets all the attention it is due, and shifts the effect of the overall composition ever so slightly, and temporarily.
The garden is decidedly different from season to season, but unified and subtle the whole year. “I don’t want anything to look cluttered,” Ware says. “My goal was a peaceful refuge.”
Mission accomplished.
