Even though some gardeners spend a lot of time praying over their plants, gardening still doesn’t count as a religion. But if it did, Randy Otte would belong to the fundamentalist branch of the church.
On a large Evanston lot that backs onto parkland, Otte has crafted a spectacular garden whose colors and textures evolve through the seasons, a place that welcomes not only Otte’s family and friends but also local birds and animals. It’s a terrific display of gardening prowess, so lovely and inviting that it took the grand prize in the Chicago Tribune’s Glorious Gardens 2000 contest.
Best of all, it’s made up almost entirely of the basics: reliable, sturdy plants that are widely available in local nurseries; none of those gourmet species you need an advanced degree in horticulture ever to have heard of. Proven design rules that don’t require a lot of fancy footwork. And a no-nonsense attitude toward the garden that saves Otte from wasting his summer slavishly pruning and staking plants.
None of this is to suggest that Otte hasn’t applied a mountain of experience to combining his plants to bring out each one’s best visual qualities, or that his garden is even an inch short of gorgeous. No, this is a no-clunker garden, a place where everything seems to sit together just right.
Otte’s yard is so finely pulled together that one judge, Chicago Botanic Garden plant information specialist Lee Randhava, described it simply as “very nice for every reason.”
Randhava and several of the other Glorious Gardens judges spend their days working around exquisite, professionally done gardens. So they could be forgiven had they fallen for an assortment of high-end, exotic plants. Instead, they fell for Otte’s collection of maiden grass, black-eyed Susans, spirea and bee balmpretty plants all, but not a groundbreaker in the bunch.
Why is this good news? Because Otte’s success with a palette of familiar plants and techniques shows that dazzling gardens are within the reach of most of us Chicago gardeners, not just the experts.
Ask Otte himself to spill the secret of his gardening success, and he says “starting with a few plants that are easy to work with and taking it [forward] from there a little bit at a time.”
On top of that is a long-held rule that the garden not run his life. When Otte, who works in the futures industry, moved with his wife, Peg, into their house in northwest Evanston 19 years ago, the landscape was mostly lawn, maple trees and foundation plantings of yews. “It was fairly high-maintenance, even though it wasn’t much garden,” he recalls.
When in Evanston . . .
Along with starting a family (they now have three children), the couple started populating the landscape by planting trees. There were a pin oak, a river birch, two honey locusts, until there were 10 new trees in all.
For Otte, this step–rare for new gardeners, because baby trees take so much longer to pay off than quick-to-bloom annuals or perennials–was part of his stick-to-what-works attitude. “We’re in Evanston. There are a lot of trees. It seemed like the natural thing to do,” he says succinctly.
After a few years, when his attention inevitably turned to smaller plants–an urban lot can handle only so many trees–Otte started with a handful of plants he and Peg already knew from other people’s gardens: black-eyed Susans (rudbeckias), purple coneflowers (echinacea), astilbe, sedum `Autumn Joy,’ gayfeather (liatris) and lavender (lavandula).
Of those, the first five are still mainstays of the garden more than a decade later because they all “grow like weeds and don’t need me to worry about them. If we’re gone for a few weeks, they’re always fine when we get back.” Lavender, on the other hand, failed Otte’s sink-or-swim test, so it doesn’t get the nod anymore except in one specially prepared bed, where ample additions of sand to the clotty local soil has made it happy.
That kind of preferential treatment is a notable exception in Otte’s garden, where only the strong and the upright survive. “I won’t keep anything that doesn’t stand up on its own,” he says. “If it flops, it gets taken out. If I have to go out there and stake something up or artificially support it, I’m not interested in it.”
Going wild
As he branched out from the original set of plants, Otte was drawn largely to plants with a wild or natural look. He’s never planted hydrangeas, he says, because they look too cultivated. He’d rather plant fountain grasses and viburnums, plants that look as if they would be at home in an untended natural area as in a cared-for suburban yard.
Each new bed–one goes in about every two years–includes some plants Otte recently has come to know, along with some of the tried-and-true. The result is that the garden has a unified feeling, with some plants repeating themselves throughout the garden, at the same time that it holds visual surprises. That makes for an inviting and dynamic layout.
“Randy’s garden really invites people in,” says Peg Otte. “It’s not a big perennial border that you’re supposed to stand and admire. He wants people to walk through it and see what they find.”
Otte’s determination not to have a work-intensive garden initially kept some wonderful plants from getting footholds in his ever-expanding plantings. Among them: roses, rhododendrons and azaleas, three fabulous bloomers that can give a Chicago gardener fits for their inability to take our hard climate.
As his horizons expanded, though, Otte discovered the joys of David Austin roses, PJM rhododendrons, and `Northern Lights’ azaleas, all of which have been bred expressly to meet our needs. “I never would have thought I’d have rhododendrons or roses until a few years ago,” says the man who now has at least 50 hardy roses tucked into his beds.
As a fan of low-maintenance plants, Otte naturally landed on ornamental grasses, which have both the vigor and the verticality he likes. He soon discovered such beauties as maiden grass (miscanthus), feather reed grass (Calamagrostis arundinacea `Karl Foerster’ ), blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens), and northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). Grasses, he says, “have that wild look I like. They look right massed together for a natural effect.” Because they’re at their best in autumn and into winter, grasses also ensure that Otte’s yard “is at its most gorgeous during our longest season,” noted Glorious Gardens 2000 judge Rosalind Reed, an Oak Park landscape designer.
As the flowery seasons give way to the paler, colder seasons, the hard elements of Otte’s garden–a charming green urn, a gourd birdhouse, some bits of architectural salvage–come to the foreground, taking over for the rhododendrons of spring and the black-eyed Susans of summer.
With a strong foundation and the promise of four seasons of visual pleasure, this is the garden of the year in more ways than one.
IN THE GARDEN WITH RANDY OTTE
How big is your yard? 65 by 180 feet
What is your favorite plant? Maiden grass (Miscanthus sinesis gracillimus), because of its height and fullness, its movement in the wind and year-round interest.
What is your favorite gardening book?
“The New American Garden,” Carole Ottesen
When did you start your garden? 1982
What advice do you have for a beginning gardener? Don’t worry about color or continuous blooming. Start working with green and foliage, and shape and texture-the rest will follow.
If I weren’t gardening, I would be: Sailing
If someone gave me a garden gnome, I would . . . put it on the front line in the battle against garden pests and bugs-heavy casualties expected.
What’s the difference between gardeners and non-gardeners? Gardeners are the ones with dirty knees.
OTTE’S ADVICE
Having spent 19 summers working his Evanston lot into stellar condition, Randy Otte advises gardeners who want to reach the same point to master the fundamentals. Besides starting with easy-care plants, he offers these tips:
“Mass your plants,” Otte says. “Put at least four or five of the same thing together. It looks more natural and has a bigger impact. You have to think about the plants for their overall landscape impact, not just as single plants you can put here and there in the garden.”
“Think about the entire space you have. Don’t plant only around the perimeter of your yard, but come out into the yard and even the parkway. The whole property can be part of the garden, so don’t just look at the traditional spaces people planted.”
– About that lawn . . . “You have to keep some lawn if you have kids or pets or if you entertain. But I like to use the lawn as part of the design. I think of the grass as the water and the garden as land–the fingers and points that come out into it.”
– “If you put in something new one year, then the next year work with it until it’s right. Don’t put in new beds every year” because some second-year adjustment is always necessary.
— Dennis Rodkin
