News
Nature's Way: Woodland garden is a carpet of variety, beauty
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Bill Edwards has for 25 years watched his garden grow, partnering with nature now and then to enrich the scene with some of the rarities he has found.
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Published: May 10, 2008
CLEMMONS - CLEMMONS - On a sweetly warm spring evening, Bill Edwards and I wandered the meandering paths that thread through his garden. It is a woodland garden composed of wildflowers and exotics and burnished with age. No amount of planting and pruning can bring to a garden what time can. For nearly 25 years this garden has melded into the surrounding landscape until the seams that separate the garden and the woods have unraveled.
Edwards was a nurseryman in his native Alabama for a time. There he tended to 140,000 azaleas. After five years he decided that the demands of the nursery were encroaching on all of his free time. He eventually landed at L.A. Reynolds Garden Center, where he spent another 10 years. Now retired, he spends time in his garden and his studio, where he teaches and paints in watercolor.
The garden begins near the house and drifts down to the woods and studio. It is mature woodland, with neighboring houses barely visible between the stately trunks of old tulip poplars and oaks. Among them, Edwards has planted choice camellias, rhododendrons, azaleas and selections of rare trees. Most were planted in the mid to late '80s, and many came from Camellia Forest Nursery in Chapel Hill, a rare-plant nursery specializing in camellias and other woody rarities.
Most of the camellias had passed their peak but offered enough bloom to hint at their character. A 12-foot specimen behind the studio bore flowers that were pale pink, pink and white variegated, or all red. Edwards says this plant starts to bloom around Christmastime and continues to flower now with only the coldest weather snatching the buds that have opened the most. Edwards acquired this plant at Camellia Forest, but it was never named to his knowledge; he knows it only as a number. Most of the camellias in the garden are in the 12-foot to 14-foot range, happy to grow old in the dappled shade and rich humus of the forest.
Azaleas are also scattered throughout the protected woodland. Some have already begun to shed their flowers, the blooms drooping like bells from the extended stamens. Others, such as the low-growing Polly Hill varieties, had not yet begun to bloom. With age these beauties had sprawled out into a patio area nestled in the woods where they could steal some sunlight from the closing canopy.
Over time, the plantings on the forest floor have grown together to form carpets of color and texture. Like the camellias, some of these plants had already had their day in the sun but still contributed to the scene with their endless variety of foliage texture and form. Bloodroot was one of these, its white flowers long since shattered but its beautiful lobed leaves marrying with the patterns of violets and ferns.
The garden was very strong in the stitching of these groundcovers, and as we walked along the patterns changed from the heart-shaped leaves of white violets to the grassy foliage of dwarf mondo grass. Sensitive ferns mingled with the fan-shape foliage of dwarf crested iris, and stalks of lavender-pink wood hyacinths hung in cascading bells. Sweet woodruff flowers twinkled white beneath the competing carpet.
The two main avenues of the woodland garden are linked by a long flower bed that borders the woodland and the lawn. Edwards had recently refurbished it, taking out the existing plants and adding tons of composted farmyard manure. Here he had planted such perennials as columbine and geranium that thrive with a bit of shade but benefit from the sunlight the wood's edge affords.
He had phlox in rosy pink and sedums and many columbines in great variety grown from seed. There were astilbes, coral bells, bluestar and bee balm for the hummingbirds, and lilies that would arrive later. Edwards had grown several clematis and led these vines up into the trees by training them on fencing attached to their trunks. A yellow flowering Lady Banks rose disguised a light pole in this same manner. The border ends at a little woodland alcove with a hoop bridge serving as a focal point.
Here were old deciduous azaleas with their flame colors and the beautiful white lacecap flowers of the double-file viburnum. Across a small dry stream bed the viburnum flowers had fallen onto the azaleas below, bringing them the appearance of a second flowering. Two nests of trilliums, yellow and pink, were surrounded by fall-flowering toadlilies and wild ginger.
Edwards says that the creek rises during storms and once carried off a Lenten rose that he had recently planted, leaving only the hole. He found it flowering deep in the woods below a year later. Edwards brought it back and replanted it a little higher up. It is a rare exception, one of the few plants that hasn't immediately settled in and called this garden home.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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N.C. Politics
Federal Politics
The Downtown Summer Music Series will begin on Thursday. Ed Bumgardner talks to some of the organizers of the Downtown Jazz lineup, in which a form of music known as "smooth jazz" will play a more prominent role this year.
Thursday's relish stories will appear in the Entertainment section.
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