A Working Garden - DIG IT! Magazine

Blue Meadow Farms Landscape Architects in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, encompasses seven acres of gardens, work site, the 19th-century homes of owner John Meeks and his son, JW, and one flock each of chickens and yellow pigeons.

A formal-type brick courtyard adorns the entrance to Meeks’ house with clipped boxwood and a turret-shaped aviary. Here, plants define the edges and the brick just kind of was there, says Blythe Yost, landscape architect with Blue Meadow Farms. “I love that. You almost never see that. If another landscape architect designed this it would have a shape. Here, it’s so organic.”

At the koi pond (not your “seen-one-seen-them-all” koi ponds), Sarracena blooms between stone slabs, statuary and softly draping plants overhanging the pond. Orfes, koi and their babies swirl past a waterfall and forget-me-nots. Ghost fern appears shimmering and well. Itea virginica ‘Henry’s Garnet’ is here and everywhere – a favorite of Yost with its drooping, clethra-like blossoms and red fall color – plus shade tolerance and deer-resistance.

A Japanese maple with a footed trunk planted 30 years ago, falls like a delicate shroud. “John love, love, loves to prune things and I’m sure this branch just wasn’t sitting right,” Yost says. It’s a perfect spot for a nap on a summer’s day. An espalier yew against a wall – a cast-off from a job that was slowly trained and now on display – reaches a limb gracefully under a window and box of flowers.

Garden upon garden, lots of natives… tall yellow lysimachia, mahonia, variegated Solomon’s Seal in shade, plus blue hostas – huge and little ones. Chickens roam and scratch the edges.

What about deer on this unfenced property? There is no deer problem here, explains Yost, for the land is sharpshooter, canine and deer decoy occupied.

Here, on this working land where plants are revered and understood, the tallest specimen trees grow such as a cluster of twining shadblow reaching high. Enormous river birch with such old bark looks like wild cherry and you only know it’s birch by looking skyward at the youngest branches. A lush weeping beech reaches the ground with nearby fern leaf hellebore in a shade garden, and then a reclining woman made of annuals.

See the chickens and coop, window boxes on JW’s house, Seven Son’s tree, a tree-climbing wisteria, a semi-knot garden and several long isolated beds with plants that run the gamut from trees to annuals in shade and sun.

Detailed ponds stretch the imagination, not surprising since Meeks was once aquatic plant grower for Waterford Gardens. One pond sports a pagoda and carved bench from Bali. An aquatic buttercup, Victorian lilies, lotus and pickerel weed decorate the koi pond. The blossoms of an especially cold-hardy variety of Southern magnolia smell like lemon pledge.

The water here is slightly murky. “I don’t like the water super clear because I like the fish to have some protection against the heron,” JW says. When the pond is cloudy, the heron that sometimes visits don’t seem to see the fish and vice-versa. “The fish can sense if it’s a bird or us. If it’s a bird they go down deep a couple inches and hide.”