In the intimate garden spaces that surround his elegant Northwest home, as in the elaborate floral displays he creates for Chicago’s most lavish weddings and fundraising galas, Bill Heffernan rarely makes a wrong move.
Every spot is used. Every view has been considered. Every vista is stunning. And charming surprises are everywhere.
The first thing that greets a visitor who peeks between the tall hedges, topiaries and vine-covered fences that enclose Heffernan’s property is the surprise of the driveway. No black sprawl of hot asphalt here: In the midst of the mellow gray Belgian block pavers is a patch of bright purple-and-yellow viola, chartreuse lysimachia and purple-green ajuga. There’s plenty of room for tires to roll, but where they don’t, why not use the space for flowers?
Above the driveway is an arbor cloaked in autumn-blooming clematis. Look left, through a gate, and find a formal entry garden, its edges defined by spiral evergreen topiaries and crab apple trees, centered on a rusty-finished urn full of ‘Million Bells’ calibrachoa.
Look right, and your eye flows along the clipped boxwood hedges, past roses, phlox and hydrangeas, to that urn’s twin, planted with bacopa, framed in a dramatic long view.
Wherever you look you find a vista, leading your eye into the distance — defying the fact that this is, in fact, a small, urban garden, a strip no more than 18 feet wide, as narrow as 8 feet in spots, surrounding a relatively modest 50-year-old Georgian-style brick house.
The magic behind this sleight of hand is a strong, clear geometry, an arrangement of rectangles that follows logically from the shape of the house.
“For me it’s all about structure,” Heffernan says. “Because this is such a small property, it all has to be controlled.”
That structure, created mostly by evergreens including 450 ‘Green Mountain’ boxwoods, is just as strong in winter. “When you get a snowfall, it’s a like a fairyland,” Heffernan says.
For nearly 23 years, Heffernan and his partner, Donna Morgan, have been creating fairylands in Chicago. Starting by selling flowers by the bunch on the street on North Michigan Avenue, Heffernan moved onto providing flowers for the lobbies of hotels. That led to weddings and galas, and now Heffernan Morgan Inc. is perhaps Chicago’s top event florist. Heffernan also designs a few select gardens that he says are, like his own, “quintessentially English.”
Heffernan, 50, designed the entrance garden for the 2003 Chicago Flower and Garden Show at Navy Pier, with square planters of green and silver-green plants from which white banners swooped up 35 feet toward the ceiling of Navy Pier.
Since 1999, he has designed interior gardens for the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe for its holiday celebrations and its Antiques & Garden Fair each April. Susan Bainbridge, vice president of visitor operations, recalls, in particular, the 2002 antiques and garden fair, for which he covered over a 70-foot-long rectangular pool in the education building and made it “a river of violets.”
Above all, she says, Heffernan is a master at working with the available space, be it a hall or a tent. That’s the quality she loves in his garden. “He has created on a very small lot many different places to be,” she says. “You can turn any corner and be in a different environment. It’s just beautiful.”
There is not a blade of grass in the garden. Instead, a path of pavers flows around the house, widening from a rectangle here to a square there and narrowing to a subtle ripple of curves in the rear.
The path alternates between the gray Belgian block and red-brown bricklike pavers to help define the half-dozen “rooms” of the garden. For party guests, Heffernan says, those rooms create conversation spots, and their connections provide encouragement to wander and mingle.
“The idea of the garden is to break it up into vistas that reveal themselves as you turn corners,” Heffernan says.
As you wander, there’s always something to catch your eye: An antique wrought-iron gate, an old carrier-pigeon cage hanging on the fence, a steel drum from Thailand planted with licorice plant, a group of potted ferns arranged on a limestone-topped wrought-iron console, a few pavers pulled out and the spaces planted with Irish moss.
Like the garden’s shapes, its color is controlled. The basic colors are white and green: The green of the evergreens and the Boston ivy that covers the house, the white of phlox, rhododendrons and `Casa Blanca’ lilies, the soft silvery leaves of the licorice plant and, in winter, snow. For accents there are cool shades of pink, blue and purple, especially in the spring: “There’s a million bulbs,” Heffernan says. “It’s allium-land in May.”
Originally, when he bought the house on a whim after living in apartments for 25 years, Heffernan’s plan was to have a garden that was all about structure, with no flowers at all. “I can’t really bring myself to make that step,” he says. “It has something to do with the long winters here. You really crave those blooms.”
It’s not easy finding plants to bloom here, for this is a shady garden. An 18-foot-tall hedge of trimmed spruces shields the house from the street and cuts the sun to about three hours a day, Heffernan says. “There’s been a lot of trial and error, to see what would work,” he says.
Nonetheless, there’s enough sun for an apple tree to be laden with ripening fruit in August.
The shrubs are pruned twice a year by a landscape service. There’s a sprinkler system on a timer. Beyond that, “I nip and tuck every day,” Heffernan says. Except in the spring and fall, he figures he spends about six hours a week maintaining the polish of his garden.
When it comes time to relax or entertain, he can turn to the gazebo that anchors the north-side garden. It was here when he bought the house, but he painted it white, trained Boston ivy to grow over the ceiling, hung a crystal chandelier, ran wires for light and sound, and turned the plain rectangular terrace it overlooked into three spaces defined by low hedges. In the center space, a 3-foot-square checkerboard of clipped boxwood can be covered with a table for additional dinner seating.
All the home is a stage
Next to the gazebo, the kitchen entrance is carefully staged, with a set of graduated steps between tall clipped English hornbeams. The interior of the two-story, essentially square house is as formal and elegant as the garden.
In the living room, where casement windows look out on year-round greenery, everything is light and airy, in creamy shades of white with touches of gold, red and green. Fabrics — stripes, damasks, satin — are rich and tactile. Gilt gleams from ornate chair legs, and black wrought iron provides contrast.
Between the living and dining rooms stand a pair of porch columns with peeling white paint, bought, like many ornaments in the house and garden, at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s antiques fair. With the moldings Heffernan added around the fireplace, they give texture to the room.
Everywhere in the house, the garden theme continues. On one living-room wall is a collection of 19th Century pressed plants, their faded gold echoing the gilt in furniture and picture frames. Dried boxwoods flank the fireplace and preserved juniper topiaries flank the door to the kitchen.
On a stool before the fireplace is a stack of gardening books. The stools themselves, it turns out, are chair seats — with the gilt chair backs hung on a nearby wall as art.
Upstairs, it’s like a photographic negative: Walls are black, bed linens are creamy white. On the stairs between is a striking collection of black-and-white photos of plants.
Look out, below
Overlooking the gazebo garden, enclosed by a black wrought-iron railing inspired by Chippendale furniture, is an ivy-wrapped deck with two off-white upholstered chaise lounges. Dinner guests can be seated up here, Heffernan says, and lean over the railing to chat with other guests seated in the garden below.
In the house, as in the garden, nothing is merely utilitarian; the decorative effect always is thought through. The gas grill in the rear garden, for example, is a plant stand for pots of annuals when not in use.
That economy extends to space. None is wasted. In the garden, planting materials are densely layered so not a speck of earth is visible. By the driveway, for example, stands a tall arborvitae. Around its foot are boxwoods, and beneath the boxwoods spreads pachysandra.
The garden is planted right to the property line — and beyond, for Heffernan has staked out the parkway with arborvitae at the corners and sprinkled it with whimsical poufs of boxwood.
Not content with making an English-style formal garden on his little patch of Chicago, he is urging others on his block of bungalows and modest two-story houses to give up their front lawns and plant gardens right out to the sidewalk. “If everybody did that, it would feel like a village. You’d really feel like you’re in England,” he says. “It would be charming.”
