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Strolling in a Sunken Garden: Leave the present behind as you step into a garden that Jo Allman has tended for 41 years
Journal Photo by Jennifer Rotenizer
Steps lead down into a formal, square-pattern garden in the West Highlands neighborhood. Camellias and rhododendrons help frame the garden.
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Published: June 27, 2009
In her West Highlands neighborhood, Jo Allman tends the garden that she has worked for 41 years. It's a sunken garden, reached by following a set of stairs. It is as if you have left the present day and descended into an earlier time, a time when gardens were large, formal and intense. Gardening was as much a part of the routine as mowing the grass is today.
The house was built in the 1920s, and the garden would have come about soon after. Allman, 80, said that she and her late husband, Ed, bought the house from Morris and Lillian Soznik, who owned an upscale retail store.
Lillian Soznik had the garden put in. "They had heard about the garden I had at the place we were renting on Linwood Avenue and came to see me. The Sozniks were not going to sell their place to
anyone who didn't know how to care for the garden," Allman said.
Before he died, Morris Soznik agreed to sell the house to the Allmans.
"Lillian told me that everywhere she went, she bought a plant and came home and stuck it in the garden, and I have done the exact same thing," Allman said.
The formal garden is in a square pattern and delineated by brick edging and pea-gravel paths. Beds form a bracket around the perimeter. A central bed is framed with four beds of roses, two on each side.
The central bed is planted with mondo grass in a pattern that reflects the outermost beds. Each corner of this bed holds a curly leaf ligustrum, a broad-leaved evergreen with deep green leaves. The center of the bed has a sundial.
The garden is framed with camellias, rhododendrons and a chain-link fence discreetly disguised with ivy.
Originally, the garden was bordered with hemlocks, but they began to fail and were taken out. Shrubs obliterated the outer path when Allman took over, and there has been a continual process of addition and subtraction.
This is a classic strolling garden, and the bracketing borders supply a constantly changing display of annuals, perennials and flowering shrubs, including many that are original to the garden.
Among the most impressive of these is a massive crinum lily, easily 6 feet across by 4 or 5 feet wide. Crinum lilies are beautiful, 6- to 8-inch long funnel-form flowers with huge, strap-like leaves. She did not know the name of this variety, a deep rose pink fading to a pale white.
It was probably the variety known as Milk and Wine. Allman said she has shipped blooming stalks of this flower to be used in her granddaughter's wedding in Washington.
"Last year it had 50 bloom stalks on it, and the most I've ever seen is about 75," Allman said. "I persuaded some friends who wanted a piece to get their husbands to come over and dig it, and that's how I get it divided," she said with a knowing glance. Crinum lilies are notorious for having giant bulbs buried deep within the earth.
Lilies of all kinds are in this garden, including calla lilies that Allman is proud of. They came in a mixed bag from Costco, and though they were all attractive in sunset orange, shell pink and white, one particular specimen held a brilliant lemon-yellow flower that was easily six inches long.
All of these had the graceful form of the calla, one petal folded in a spiral around a central stalk. Allman, who taught high-school English and business in Yadkin County, had the common orange daylily on the hill that rolls into the garden near the steps. She called it a railroad lily. "I would like them up that hill, but they keep marching down, and I have to move them back up again" she said.
Several varieties of yarrow were blooming, a deep cerise pink that faded to a pale pink and dirty white, and a moonlight-pale yellow that went to cream. The lilac-purple heads of verbena punctuated the air above the round golden flowers of coreopsis. Centranthus and hardy geraniums each have their own version of pink. Shasta daisies hold their flowers high despite the recent storms.
Every year she leaves a few foxgloves and larkspurs to set seed. When they are ripe, she scatters them about the garden to provide next spring's flowers.
A backdrop of angels trumpets will come on later, and the flowers of the Mexican petunia had already closed for the evening during my visit. Lantanas were just beginning to show what would be an ever-expanding display of colorful flowers. A hillside of Japanese anemone will wait until the beginning of fall to lend their delicate white blossoms to the scene.
Underneath a large snowball viburnum were ferns from her home place. The viburnum was in bloom when another granddaughter was married, and she had move than 100 blossoms to decorate with from this huge shrub.
Allman's place sits on a double lot, so once you leave the formal garden, there is an entire other yard to explore. After passing through a rose arbor, an extensive and meticulously maintained area of grass comes into view.
Beyond it are shrubs and trees and what Allman described as a grove of magnolias.
They were recently cut back to a few choice specimens bordering the lawn. In their place, Allman has created a vegetable garden for her grandchildren.
"The best thing a gardener can hear is her grandchildren asking for a vegetable garden," Allman said. She helped them put in cantaloupe, peas, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, spinach, squash and cucumbers.
Allman hires someone to do the lawn work and the fertilizing, but she does all the gardening herself, spending at least three hours a day in the garden.
Allman grew up on a farm in the Bat Cave area and has never been a stranger to outside work. "I have a pacemaker and can no longer use a plow, a chain saw or a weedeater -- and I sure do miss them," she said.
The upkeep on this property is a full-time job. Allman's dedication to it is equal only to her modesty. "In the country they say when you make a quilt from a bunch of scrap pieces, it is called a crazy quilt. I think of this garden that way."
It is orderly and beautifully put together, a testimony to 41 years dedicated to the pursuit of a beautiful garden.
■ 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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