For anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through the hundreds of plants that can be grown here, there’s good news in Jeanne Harris Brown’s garden. On her lot in Western Springs, Brown has developed a garden that is not only beautiful and inviting, but also technically superior too-it mixes plant types, forms and textures, and every plant is right for its site.
But that good news is enjoyed only by Brown and her family, who get to live with the garden. The good news for the rest of us is that she did it herself, without the help of a degree in horticulture or any other head starts. By studying the plants she liked in garden magazines, planting those that suited her needs and then moving them around until they landed in the right spot in her home landscape, Brown has, in six years, built her garden and her plant knowledge from the ground up.
Brown has such an expert mix of plant types in her garden that in the Tribune’s Glorious Gardens ’98 contest, a panel of horticulture professionals and Tribune staff dubbed her “Best Plantsman.” In other words, this self-taught amateur so wowed the pros they bestowed on her the kind of compliment they themselves would like to get from one another.
“A `plantsman’ is somebody who understands where each plant will be happy or sad, and uses them appropriately,” says Doug Hoerr, a prominent Evanston landscape designer who was one of the judges last September. (We announced the winners then but waited to profile them during winter and spring, when reading about their experiences can do fellow gardeners the most good–both practically and spiritually.)
Whether professional or amateur, gardeners usually attack it from one of two directions, Hoerr notes. Either they start with a design and fill in the plants, or they begin with a collection of plants they admire and make a garden out of them. Members of that group, the plantsmen, sometimes end up with museum-style gardens, with their plants arranged to be shown but their gardens not necessarily comfortable or visually appealing.
Brown is sort of the accidental plantsman. She didn’t set out to collect plants, just to rev up her home landscape, but she kept finding more plants she liked. She says she treats plants the way some antique collectors handle their finds. “If you like it, you buy it so you can take it home and carry it around and see where it fits,” she says. “You shouldn’t worry that if you don’t know where it will go you shouldn’t buy it. I believe in stockpiling–get a lot of plants and you can move them around until they fit.”
Dig right in
Gradually, a stockpile becomes a garden, but it takes work. “I’m totally willing to dig things up and move them if they’re not working where they are,” she says. “And that’s where it helps to already have a lot of plants in the yard. You get a spade and bring something else over to try in this spot, and if that doesn’t work, you can put it back.”
Husband Doug Brown says this dig-right-in approach is characteristic of his wife’s approach to life. “She’s just very brave about jumping in and doing something,” he says.
At first, she didn’t jump into gardening. Growing up with a mother who gardened, she says, “I wasn’t interested.” When she and Doug bought a house in Chicago, she gardened lightly, mostly planting a lot of easy impatiens.
Then in 1992, the couple and their four children moved from a house in the city to Western Springs. They hired landscape architect Mark Allsup to design a Victorian-style garden for their 100-by-143-foot lot. Doug prepared the soil, and Jeanne did all the planting. By the end, she was hooked.
At last, Brown understood why her mother, Britta Harris, always has been so dedicated to the 5 acres she gardens in downstate Lincoln. Borrowing about 100 back issues of her mother’s two favorite gardening magazines, Horticulture and Fine Gardening, Brown spent all her free time that next winter boning up on the kind of gourmet gardening those two publications cover. They are both plantsmen’s magazines more than design books, so Brown developed a plantsman’s orientation from her winter studies.
In the few years since, building on the layout Allsup had given her, Brown has surrounded her family’s Victorian home with about 30 tree varieties, over 40 kinds of shrubs, and some 200 kinds of perennials. There are also annuals, in clusters of pots on the driveway and porches.
The garden is filled with sophisticated plant choices–hellebores and euphorbias among the perennials, yellowwood trees, the annual cardoon, the shrub aronia–but they blend together into a harmonious landscape.
That is in spite of the fact that she routinely ignores a cardinal rule of garden design. “My weakness might be that I don’t repeat plants enough,” Brown says. Repeating plants is supposed to do a lot to unify the garden, “but I have too much of that `I need one of these too’ to have space for repeating.”
A sense of her own
The house is in an old neighborhood of long rectilinear lots, but Brown has managed to create a sense of getting away from it all. Along the south side of the house, she has used groupings of trees and a run of lawn with undulating sides lined with perennials and shrubs to create the feeling of a private country retreat.
Most of the plants Allsup specified originally are gone now, because Brown has developed her own preferences.
“That first garden had lots of pastels and no evergreens, and I liked it at the time,” Brown says. “But now I’m much more interested in dark-leafed plants, purples and dark greens, and I want evergreens for a year-round structure in the garden,” she says.
From early spring’s hellebores to the seedheads of ornamental grasses that last through winter, the garden always has something new to see. “The whole family likes to go on these 15-minute garden tours, where Jeanne leads us around showing us what’s new or what she changed,” says Doug Brown.
During winter, she goes on garden tours all her own, now habitually wandering the pages of her favorite gardening magazines–having devoured mom’s back issues long ago, she is now a subscriber herself–and making long lists of plants she might like to try come spring.
“January and February are really my busiest months,” Brown says. “It’s almost like I don’t have enough time to (investigate) everything I need to before I can start planting again.”
BROWN’S FAVORITES
Jeanne Brown’s taste in plants runs to the “spiky and airy,” she says. “I don’t like blobs of color, like phlox. They call too much attention to themselves. Big round daisies bother me.” In her plant explorations, she’s come across several plants she recommends to fellow gardeners who want to jazz up their landscapes. Among them are:
– Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), a monster of a plant with spiky, silvery leaves up to 2 feet long and borderline-lurid purple blooms. A perennial in other climates, it is sold as an annual here, useful in places where it’s given enough room. “My friends think it looks like something out of a movie,” Brown says.
– Firetails (Persicaria amplexicaulis speciosa), also known as mountain fleece. Though not usually a fan of red, Brown likes to see this perennial’s red spikes woven into the greenery of its neighbors.
– Smokebush (Cotinus coggygria), a small tree or tall shrub (shown above) whose purplish leaves merit attention but are surpassed by the puffs of red, purple or brown summertime bloom. “Even when a smokebush isn’t smoking, it’s great to look at,” Brown says, “but when it smokes, it’ll knock you over.”
– Feather reed grass (Calamagrostis acutiflora `Stricta,’ and the nearly identical Calamagrostis arundinacea `Karl Foerster’), whose slender seedheads on 4-foot stalks look like clusters of spears held upright. Because of its height it’s often sent to the back of the garden, but Brown likes to put it out front to interrupt a low, sprawling line with a strong vertical.
– Magnolia `Elizabeth’ (both common and formal name), a tree that usually is not hardy to our climate. Brown’s, though, has made it through a series of winters, and its soapy yellow blossoms make it worth the risk.
