A dream in full bloom

A new garden is blossoming in Kernersville: The Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden.

After 10 years of planning and labor, the vision of Paul Ciener has taken form on Main Street. Ciener, who died in 1998, owned Paul Ciener Ford.

The garden fits naturally into the larger area. The buildings echo the extant architecture. The 12,000-square-foot visitors' center is patterned after a horse stable and will be used for weddings, conferences and symposia.

"Two rental spaces will generate the income to make the science and education possible," said Catherine Hendren, the director of development.

So far, they have spent $4 million developing the 7-acre garden and buildings. They expect to spend an additional $1 to $2 million as they expand. For this year, the operating budget is $480,000. Going forward, they expect the yearly operating budget to be about $375,000. The endowment for the garden is $2.5 million.

The primary objective of the garden is to share gardening knowledge and bring new and under-utilized plants to the attention of the public.

"I want to introduce people in this town to rare and unusual plants," said Adrienne Roethling, the garden's curator. She has been at the garden for three years.

Roethling received a certificate in the professional gardener training program at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. She then became the garden curator at Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh. She was there for eight years. Plant Delights is a destination nursery for rare plants.

Though much of the garden hasn't been developed, there is plenty to see.

The visitors' center anchors the garden with its cut-stone terrace overlooking gardens to be. Inside, the spacious ballroom-like floor is ready to hold events.

The main meeting room can be divided into two separate spaces and can be arranged for banquets, lectures or classes. There is also a conference room and catering facilities.

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Outside the visitors' center is the kitchen garden, a series of four raised beds that will be patterned after the Hortus Medicus garden, originally established by the Moravians when they first came to Bethabara before moving to Salem.

This is one of several references to Southern-garden history that are hidden within the design created by Robert Hayter, a Pinehurst landscape architect, and Chip Callaway, a Greensboro landscape designer.

Roethling said the kitchen garden will be planted with unusual and colorful vegetables.

The walls around the kitchen garden will be embellished with espaliered fruit trees. Blueberry bushes in smaller beds will flank both ends of the kitchen garden. There is a gazebo planted with Muscadine grapes. A bronze statue of Ciener will be featured on the opposite end.

"Vegetable gardening was Ciener's first love," said Todd Lasseigne, executive director. Roethling said she will rely on volunteers and schoolchildren to replant the vegetable garden as it changes from season to season.

The pattern garden adjacent to the planted parking area is finished.

This garden, with its paisley-like pattern of scroll-work beds, is a reference to gardens of the Victorian era. On my visit, thousands of tiny bulbs were just beginning to flower: crocuses and miniature and species tulips in a show that will continue through the spring.

The pattern garden is sheltered and framed with seven kinds of boxwood and lorapetalum that are just coming into bloom.

Along the street above is a perennial border designed by Edith Eddleman and Doug Ruhren. They designed the perennial border at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh.

Below is the pleached hornbeam walk, planted with Henry's hornbeam from Western China. These trained trees will lead visitors from the planted parking lot down an allée to the visitors' center.

Beneath the pleached trees are perennial bulbs, many that are rare. The Garden Club Council of Forsyth County contributed $9,500 for plant materials along the walk.

An event lawn and restaurant are planned. Even the parking lot is treated as a planting area with Victorian-style, overhead street lamps. They will be planted with a variety of vines that will provide an ever-changing scene while shading the parking lot. Two beds bracketing the parking lot have been planted as xeric-scree beds, supporting hardy agave, succulents, sempervivums and prickly pears. These also serve to soften the curbing.

This sort of clever, multipurpose planting will be employed throughout the garden. Roethling said they will be tightly planting a columnar variety of ginkgo called Golden Colonnade whose branches will be trained into hoops to hide the bus parking.

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This will not just be a garden where collections of rare plants are lined out and labeled. The garden may be full of rare plants, but there has been no shortage of attention to the structural skeleton that holds up a good garden.

Phase one is nearly complete. The space below the patio terrace awaits the next stage of development.

"We call this the field of dreams," Lasseigne said. It's an open, grassy area that tumbles to a spring-spattered tree line in the ravine below.

"All of this was just kudzu" he said. "Adrienne has seeded the field with groups of wildflowers to delineate the different garden rooms to come." This is where water will spill from the grotto below and trickle toward a planned amphitheater. A network of gardens will include a Japanese garden, wetlands, winter gardens and a series of learning gardens dedicated to tropical plants, vegetable trials, a conservation garden and others.

Lasseigne says he's excited about the opportunity to demonstrate the relationship between Asian and North American plants. It will demonstrate how plant species have evolved as they became geographically separated.

"My sixth anniversary here was Monday," Lasseigne said. He recently accepted a new position as executive director of the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden. His last day is April 12. The board is working to find a replacement.

Too often we see green spaces turned into pavement and parking lots. It is rare to see things develop in the opposite direction. Paul Ciener's vision has turned 7 acres in downtown Kernersville into a garden destination.