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A Garden Imitates Life
by Mary Jasch
Up the drive into woodland takes you by surprise. A quick glance around and you might wonder where the garden is. But that’s a secret.
This garden at 1,200 feet elevation in Pawling, New York, is a lingering tranquility, an appreciation for the human habitat, a slip into nature – or is it?
It is a trompe l'oeils woodland where the tame and the wild meet.
Along the stone drive under the maple trees, rhododendron with ferns and wildflowers at their feet point their buds upward to the house. Leaves float in the sunlight piercing the trees like nature’s glitter to dust the ground.
A bee sucks nectar from toad lily. Hostas splash dark waves around dainty-leaved shade lovers. Heuchera, hellebore, aster, geranium. They blend everywhere: along the stone wall, the driveway, the woods.
The house appears, a quiet house that melds with the land – a case of the human animal moving its built home onto different soil. Indeed, Kathy and Stan Scherer moved the three part house here where it belongs. First the 18th-century part from the Catskills, then the little schoolhouse and larger accompaniment from Nova Scotia.
“We wanted an old house here with a nice garden” says Kathy Scherer, owner with her husband Stan. They started here almost 30 years ago with an empty 5-acre lot and a few trees.
Walk around back to a cloud of a garden above a valley. Puffs of color, blossoms, fragrance, bees and butterflies. Delicate flowers of tall annual salvia on bright green stems intrigue. Cuphea, boltonia, verbena, browallia, tall magenta lobelia. You can spend a half hour just here, looking at every flower. You won’t even notice the sweeping vista of mountains across the sloping lawn, or the herb garden a few feet away, or the big pots of bay laurel and westringia (an Australian oceanside cliff-dweller), or the huge mounds of red-berried viburnum.
“I’ve seen birds on top of Echinacea picking the seeds out. One day 200 to 250 robins came in and picked all the viburnum berries,” Scherer says.
Soon the scent of creeping thyme allures and pulls you to the billowing blue-green-silver herb garden. Set up for dry heat and floating fragrance, some pretty floral faces enchant: Iris ‘Fairy Wands,’ dwarf baptisia, dark clethra and dwarf agapanthus (with 20-25 flower stems a pot).
Around ye olde house, past a delicious-smelling fir tree, meet the tree from Sleepy Hollow – a horizontal beech – with branches flung wide to grasp you on a dark and moonlit night. Its leaves curl like holly.
Around front between the house and the woodland that runs to the street, borders of sunny flowers and shrubs – yellow, blue, purple and white – some self-seeded flowers explode shaken by nature, not stirred by hand. Their tall stems of autumn flowers whip in the breeze, soon to scatter new seed. An autumn garden like no other, designed after nature!
A perfect lawn with uniform blades and not a weed lies between the garden and the old house. Contrast extraordinaire! The house’s foundation garden is simple and sedate, controlled and contained – like a man’s neatly close trimmed beard or the lace trim around a lady’s old-fashioned collar. They do not detract from the other gardens, except in the back where they ARE the other gardens, set free.
Pass little gardens between drive and house – shady spring gardens with intimate delicacies: toad lily, hellebore, geranium, pulmonaria, bulbs, and Spanish bluebells in spring.
Head into the pool garden where a sparkling pool will ask you in. Resist if you can. This is truly a rock garden, having taken 10 days to blast a hole for the pool. Exquisitely thriving plants on rock and in containers blend color and texture to form a tapestry. Some are expected, some not. Silver eryngium, heuchera, tiarella, toad lily, ferns, goats beard, baneberry berries among rhododendron, viburnum and native trees: the pool’s own little woodland.
Every spot is to be looked at. It is wildness everywhere, luxuriant, alluring, lush and bejeweled with dainty blossoms.
Pass by the veggie garden and rhubarb out back and head downhill. The mossy path, crisscrossed with roots, goes a short way through easy woods. The entire property is fenced – you can’t get lost. Come out to a bench with a stone birdbath, then up into sunlight with goldenrod, apple trees, ironweed and butterflies.
It is autumn nonetheless. Leaves yellow and drop beside their former strength; flowers diminish; but the gardens take on a different hue – a sensuous scent, enveloping color, embracing sounds and feel. It was created in the very image of life itself.
Lance Casper, irregular columnist on a visit to the garden:
I had the pleasure on September 25 to visit the garden beautifully envisioned and brought to fruition by Stan and Kathy Scherer. It is an ongoing garden storybook. It was the day before my birthday “birthday present.” It is a garden not to be missed, an "Optical Explosion."
Picture this: Mother Nature with eyes closed, plucking seeds randomly and tossing them into the wind, at the same time painting an outstanding garden. What a sight to behold!
One walk around the property just doesn't work. On the second time around not only did I see the wonderful sights from the first pass, but I saw flowers of different colors and shapes as well as shades of greens and yellows of ground cover plants and grasses crying out "don't miss us!" Absolutely spectacular!
Flowers of red, blue, purple, yellow, the purity of white, shades of pastel peach, blue, pink and violet, the intermix of greens, yellows and the blue hues of grasses and ground cover. So many geometric shapes and designs all designed by " Mother Nature " but set to appease the viewers’ discerning palette by the garden's creators, Stan and Kathy Scherer. Thank-you for affording me the opportunity to visit and visualize your wonderful "Optical Explosion."
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published September 28, 2010
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