In a little more than a month, we’ll be naming the 10th Best Overall Garden winner in our Glorious Gardens Contest history. Since we launched the contest in 1997, we’ve often wondered how past winning gardens have fared, how they’ve changed and how the people behind them have been doing. So we decided to take this landmark year to check things out and share with you a glorious look at winning gardens “Then & Now.”
We found the jaunt down and up memory lane inspiring. If you haven’t done it already, run out and take some photographs of your own wonderful garden and send us digital images. The deadline for this year’s contest is Monday. Yes, you can be that 10th Best Overall Garden winner. (See the official rules on Page 2.)
GLORIOUS GARDENS THEN & NOW
1997 & Now
JAE RO, NORTHBROOK
There are some metamorphoses/improvements in my garden since 1997 when the garden was awarded as Overall Winner. However, I tried to maintain a main theme of my garden: nature friendly/ecologically sound, perpetually blooming and harmony among plants — [all] under a motto of conserve nature, prevent pollution and beautify the environment.
In my back yard, trees have grown taller with more foliage and plants have become more abundant, even overcrowded, though, I have been keeping them organized and natural. They still provide natural and cozy shelters for animals and birds.
However, I had to keep out undesirable [plant] invaders, especially those not native in this country, such as purple loosestrife, buckthorns, etc. I have planted cattails, Indian arrowheads and wild irises along the lake. I have improved the water cascade by adding a small water garden next to the lake. I have established a wooden box vegetable garden next to a trellis, on which trumpet flower vines are climbing up. I planted flowering fruit trees, such as cherry, apple, peach, plum, etc.
And sometimes I still find some room for new plants from the garden shops and nurseries I frequent.
1998 & Now
CLAUDIA SKYLAR MASTRO, CHICAGO
Right after we won the garden contest, we moved to Wicker Park to a century-old two-story factory building that we turned into our architecture office and home. We took out the middle of the building and created a magical, totally private courtyard, our own “secret garden.”
On the ground floor, there is a geometric composition of paving, gravel and planting beds. The walls around it are mostly large windows, but on one side the brick wall of the old building remains, covered with green and blooming vines, a vertical garden.
On the second level, right off the main living space, we have a large deck overlooking the courtyard. This deck gets its greenery from containers, and from the vines planted in the garden below, which have grown up to it. The upper deck is covered with Synlawn, a very authentic looking artificial turf, which seems impervious to everything and is soft to walk on. In the summer we eat out there and feel as if we are in Tuscany. To top it off, I have a greenhouse and potting shed on the roof where I start most of the plants for the containers and courtyard.
There is a staircase from the greenhouse to the roof, and someday I may be able to afford to expand my garden further.
1999 & Now
MARY ELLEN ROSEMEYER, CHICAGO
The major changes to the garden since 1999 are:
– I narrowed the number of perennials in the beds significantly. In 1999 I planted whatever I wanted without really thinking ahead, and the beds got so crowded that some things died and others just got lost. I focused on fewer plants with longer bloom time and extra-hardy qualities since the roof deck can have some very harsh conditions at times.
– I installed a drip system with a timer to water the plants automatically; it used to take one to two hours every day.
– I added lighting for night entertaining.
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– I added some arborvitae to screen the smokestacks from just outside the deck on the west side, after checking with our neighbor to make sure they didn’t block his view.
– I added a water fountain to help add “white noise.”
– I painted the storage shed blue and put mirrors on the front to make it look like a little garden house instead of just a place for storage.
– I added large vertical blue ceramic and copper pots and planted grasses in them for height and color.
If I hadn’t won the Tribune contest, I probably would not have improved the garden as much as I did. I felt there were so many more beautiful gardens than mine and ended up doing a lot of research to make my garden worthy of an award. It’s much better now than it was then.
2000 & Now
RANDY OTTE, EVANSTON
Our garden has continued to evolve and mature over the past six years. One major change has been the deepening shade in both the front and back gardens — with some sun and prairie plants giving way to more shade-tolerant plants. Some major tree pruning this spring has been helpful in giving some new vitality to the front garden. We still enjoy the “self-planting” flowers (rudbeckia, echinacea, daisy fleabane, golden wood poppy) and let them find their way into new places.
The only expansion of the garden has occurred in a shady corner in the back garden, which was enlarged and replanted as the result of improved drainage. Woodland plants and a fountain urn now occupy this space.
There was one immediate change after the contest: Before, people stopped by asking questions, nodding politely to answers but never taking things too seriously. After the contest, visitors listened intently, many taking notes! The number of visitors increased dramatically, something my wife and I enjoyed. However, our teenage daughter had another name for the drive-bys and sidewalk surveyors — “garden stalkers,” a term we now fondly apply to those too shy or busy to stop for a chat.
2001 & Now
JOHN MOORE, EVANSTON
The biggest change to my garden since 2001 has been on the west side of the yard where I had three viburnum, a couple of daylilies and some astilbe. The viburnum was getting unwieldly and I wanted more flowers. In place of the shrubs, I now have Joe Pye weed, goldenrod, phlox, bleeding heart, golden variegated Hakone grass, sea holly, catmint, bugbane, heuchera and hosta. Moved the daylilies and kept the astilbe. I have tried new plants here and there and had a few casualties that needed replacement.
Every year I change things in the veggie garden — for visual appeal and/or culinary use. The one thing that has remained a constant is my affection for ornamental peppers and coleus.
2002 & Now
BRUCE HOCHSTADTER, HIGHLAND PARK
Winning the Best Overall in the 2002 Glorious Gardens Contest definitely has changed my life as gardener. Overnight, I went from a hobbyist who dabbled in obscurity in his back yard to an expert. I gained instant credibility. It seems as if everyone I come in contact with to this day still refers to the Tribune article of four years ago, asks me how my garden is going or asks me a question about their own garden.
Since 2002, my garden has definitely gotten better. My emphasis has shifted more so toward daylilies since 2002, but I still have all the standard perennials. As the grass disappears and more beds appear, I’ve added more and more daylilies. I’ve eliminated some that didn’t please me aesthetically (‘Chocolate Dude,’ a muddy purple/brown bloom ‘Little Grapette,’ which has a beautiful purple, but a very small flower) and added some new things, especially more varieties of daylilies (‘Persian Ruby,’ ‘Chance Encounter,’ ‘Egyptian Ibis,’ ‘Red Volunteer’ and ‘Paper Butterfly,’ all of which I ordered online). I now have over 100 varieties. I’ve added a new bed, which includes the Stout Silver Medal winners (No. 1 daylily of the year as voted nationwide) from 1985 to the present.
Something that I’ve learned is that fertilizing — and a certain regimen — has made a huge difference in the amount of bloom and the length of bloom.
2003
DENISE RUCH, VILLA PARK
(Editors note: We were not able to make contact with Ruch for an update.)
But this is what one contest judge, Lee Randhava, garden writer for the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, had to say about Ruch’s garden in 2003: “She’s created lots of garden rooms and has good scale in the way she’s planted in layers.”
2005 & Now
MARIE SCHULTZ, JACKSON, MICH.
I look at my garden in a different way [since winning the contest]. In the past, I enjoyed my garden as a lovely tranquil place but I did not view it with a critical eye. The award gave us a burst of enthusiasm and it awakened a new interest in gardening for both my husband and me.
Right after winning, I installed a pea gravel path with my husband’s help in an area that was the plant hospital. That area had been overlooked and ignored, although it was very visible. We moved the grape arbor that was off-center to make an entrance to expand into the more densely wooded area of our property. We tidied up more, moving some plants that had been overgrown by surrounding foliage.
We were asked to join a local garden group of 16 couples. They toured our garden and, of course, that made me see the garden with their enjoyment in mind. I combined plants to increase contrast and looked to correct combinations that my husband pointed out were not visually pleasant.
I admired the changes and that prompted more scrutiny, more changes and more enjoyment of the results. I’ve been contacted by other local gardeners to arrange visits and exchanged plants with them and got suggestions on improvements I could make.
I plan to expand our garden to include a less formal woodland path through the pines and we created a sunny area by removing two large oaks that were damaged in a storm. This will be planted in roses.
2004 & Now
MELINDA LEHMAN AND JIM CYBUL, RIVERSIDE
Since we won the garden award, the basic structure of our garden has not changed. The plants as a whole have continued to mature, some growing larger (the bee balm, phlox, globe thistles, dark-leaved and goose-necked loosestrife, lady’s bells, etc., have all needed to be reined in), and some have gone in the other direction (last year’s drought took a large boxwood with it, this year’s rain and iris borers have reduced my iris clumps considerably; I also lost a large 18-foot-high ‘New Dawn’ rose on the west side of the house to some virus last year).
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My ‘Pacific Giant’ delphiniums have yet to do as well as they did in 2004, when they were a glorious 8-foot-tall clump of brilliant blue magnificence. Only two or three of the dozen or so I plant every year have come back … but as we love the plant, I’ll keep trying.
The biggest impact since our pictures were taken has come from our neighbors removing two of their trees between our houses and next to our fence right after we won the contest. Now our patio and side yard, once dark, shady and private places, are wide open and full of sun. While I mourn the loss of a more enclosed-feeling space, I do enjoy being able to grow more roses and clematis (I’m particularly enjoying the disease-resistance and reblooming qualities of new roses such as the ‘Knock-out’ varieties, and the new ‘Rosemoor’ and ‘Wisley’ clematis as well as some of the new hydrangea hybrids) and many varieties of flowers where previously only hostas, ferns and deep-shade plants would grow.
I planted a white garden in the area that is now a beautiful addition to the patio, and maturing nicely with all the sun. I also put in a nice clump of inkberry holly around a moss mound … but that now gets too much sun and needs to be moved.
But having a certain number of plants die on us or need to be moved doesn’t concern us too much because a garden is always a work in progress. However good it looks to others, I always see those next changes ahead, the plants that are new and still maturing, those “holes” that need to be filled in, the new plant introductions I want to try, etc. Gardening to us is enjoying those changes and adapting to whatever nature (and the plant breeders!) bring us.
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See additional photos of the winning gardens at chicagotribune.com/glorious.