You’d think a lifelong gardener would have known better than to buy a house where half the back yard was covered with concrete 6 inches deep and the other half was clogged with scrubby, messy mulberries. Talk about starting out with two strikes against you.
And yet Ken Neumann jumped in wholeheartedly back in 1986, when he bought a Lakeview two-flat with that sorry excuse for a yard. He had been gardening since childhood, planting divisions from his grandfather’s perennials around his parents’ house, and he expected to start gardening at his own house right away. The fact that he’d first have to haul out tons of jack-hammered concrete and uproot dozens of tenacious mulberries didn’t seem too much to ask.
“My father and I pulled out all the mulberries together,” Neumann recalls. “It took us a while.” Once they and the concrete were gone, Neumann and some friends hauled in 15 tons of new garden soil, shuttling it from the alley one wheelbarrrowful at a time. That, too, took a while.
After that, finally, came the good part, planting a curvaceous garden and lawn in the newly enriched earth. Starting with some chrysanthemums he’d been moving around with him since 1971 and a 6-foot river birch, Neumann installed a nice garden of perennials, trees and shrubs with a fluid lawn running through it.
That was nice, but only a start. Over the next dozen years, Neumann and his companion, Paul Kramer, who moved in later, would continue to expand and develop the original garden. By last summer, it was such a beautifully layered and expertly detailed garden it was pronounced the Best Urban Garden among all the entries in Home&Garden’s 1999 Glorious Gardens contest.
“There’s great balance–plants and stone, color and texture,” said judge Rosalind Reed, an Oak Park landscape designer. She also complimented the careful touches, such as yellow rudbeckias echoing the yellow of the garage door.
Another judge, Morton Arboretum landscape architect Scott Mehaffey, liked the way the flagstone path winds through the garden, making the short walk from back door to garage “more experiential than a straight line of concrete.” Little did he know what had been there before.
It’s a garden that looks good both in close-up and in broader views. Look closely, and there are sharp touches like the way the huge-leafed hostas near one of the ponds pair up with the large stones. Stand back and there’s a unified look. Nothing clamors to be seen at the expense of anything else. They all hang together.
Cokey Evans, who lives on the same block, first tuned into this distinctive garden about 11 years ago, when she was combing her new neighborhood for hints on what plants would thrive in her yard. “From the sidewalk you could tell. Here was somebody who had an understanding of texture, color and change throughout the seasons, and was working within the limitations of a small urban garden,” she says.
And that’s just the front yard, a mere sliver of a thing where Neumann has installed bunches of phlox, oak-leafed hydrangeas and other exuberant plants that give the home’s street face a flourish. “I don’t care for the formality of yews lined up against the house,” says Neumann, an accountant. “I like more of an English country cottage feel.”
Four-season garden
The back yard is the real visual feast, changing throughout the seasons. Here, the zany twists of a corkscrew hazel (Corylus avellana `Contorta’) grab the eye in winter, to be pushed offstage in spring by the sweet fragrance and sweeter purple blooms of Miss Kim lilacs (Syringa pubescens patula `Miss Kim.’)
They in turn are edged aside by the profusion of summer-blooming perennials–purple coneflowers, phlox, bee balm and many others–which then turn the show over to viburnums turning red for fall.
The garden strikes a good balance, complementing those dynamic bursts with a more static and permanent feeling. Running alongside the seasonal turns of color is an ongoing show of textures–lots of astilbes, ferns and hostas, the peeling bark of the river birch, the bumpy leaves off the viburnums.
“Ken is really big on these combinations, like a broad-leafed hosta with a little-leafed astilbe, which end up looking better than I thought they would,” says Kramer, a flight attendant who calls himself the “assistant gardener.”
Along with the plants is a peppering of salvaged materials–trellises and other hardscape items that contribute to the feeling of permanence. They and the wrought-iron side fences signal that this space is to be enjoyed from every perspective (even the neighbors’), and in every weather.
Inspiration and evolution
Her neighbors’ garden “has given me the courage to persist and to experiment with textures and push the ideas I have a little further,” Evans says.
It’s done the same for Neumann and Kramer, who have found that even a well-begun garden is an evolving thing, never quite finished. When Neumann initially designed the layout of the back yard, he knew enough to put in some big, graceful curves and to avoid hugging the fence with prim little rows of plants.
What he didn’t anticipate is the way the garden would expand, eventually gobbling up every inch he originally reserved for lawn.
Early photos show a yard that was a little less than half lawn. “Every year the beds got a little bigger and the lawn got a little smaller,” Neumann says. “Finally, we had so little left it didn’t make sense anymore.”
Kramer was glad; the lawn had been the most work-intensive part of the garden.
The decision to ditch the last bits of lawn made way for something that is now a prime attribute of this urban garden: the pleasantly curving flagstone walk. They installed it themselves, with help from friends.
Its curves are enhanced by the placement of plants–especially the corkscrew hazel, which creates both a focal point and an interruption of the view. “I don’t like to walk into a garden and see it all at once,” Neumann says. On a small city lot, that’s almost a built-in disadvantage, but by putting that hazel out in the open instead of up against a fence or garage, he managed to break up the space.
Neumann and Kramer’s garden hasn’t only spilled over its original boundaries, it also has started colonizing the yard of a rental property the pair own a few blocks away. That’s where divisions and plants performing below par go, and so do ornamental grasses, raspberries and other plants that demand more sun than they can get at the main garden.
“It’s great to have the rental, because we always feel bad pulling something out of the garden just because Ken found something new he likes more, so we can send it over there to live,” Kramer says.
ADVICE FROM THE BEST URBAN GARDENERS
Having wrangled a splendid garden on a seemingly hopeless lot, Ken Neumann (right) and Paul Kramer share these tips:
– Deal with the lousy soil first. And do it again later. Neumann and Kramer dig up a whole section of the garden each year or two and refortify the soil. They use a mix of peat moss, compost and manure.
– Be imaginative with tried-and-true plants. Yellow-leafed hostas, for example, can look sickly and dull in some settings, but Neumann uses them for splashes of false sunlight in shady places.
– On a city lot, favor the switch-hitters. Sun is rare anyway, but if the neighbors put up a tall fence or a new addition, your garden’s supply of sun could be seriously diminished. Neumann likes bee balm (monarda), purple coneflowers (echinacea) and oakleaf hydrangeas (hydrangea quercifolia) because they’re sun plants that won’t gripe over getting a fair amount of shade.
– Plant-shop carefully. “A lot of people just buy the flashiest thing in bloom at the nursery, and they have no idea whether it can work in their yard,” Neumann says. Although already experienced with plants, he took on this garden as if it were a whole new concept for him. He studied magazines, books and other sources to figure out how to improve the soil he had and what would work in a sun-deprived lot. He even put in a summer of working part-time at the now-defunct Fertile Delta nursery on Lincoln Avenue in order to soak up as much local plant knowledge as possible.
