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David Epstein: Welcome to this week’s growing wisdom. I feel like I should be a little bit quieter while I am here in this particular garden. It is quiet and contemplative garden and it was actually designed by Gary Koller.
I want you to tell me about first what your vision was and then show me some of your favorite elements of this garden.
Gary Koller: This is a garden of perhaps an eight of an acre and it was meant to be a garden where you could come and sit and be at peace with yourself and meditate.
David Epstein: Where do you want to start?
Gary Koller: Well I would like to show you a ground cover.
David Epstein: Okay.
Gary Koller: That most people probably would not know. This is a ground cover called Waldsteinia or Barren Strawberry. This is a ground cover that is ever green here in Massachusetts. It is very dense it keeps most of the weeds out. You can plant things in it and you use kind of like the carpet and then you put things growing up and this is a flowering onion called an Allium. This is a plant that I love. It is one of the mints and they call it catmint, Calamintha nepetoides and this will flower from probably the fourth of July until frost.
David Epstein: What are we walking on here?
Gary Koller: Well we are looking at a stone terrorist that has thyme in between the cracks and there is very small space in there so you kind of staff it in between the crack and let it grow. When you walk on it you crash some of little stems and branches and the fragments comes up.
This is one of the newer plants that I have discovered in let us say five to ten years. It is sedge and the botanical name is Carex and this particular one is “ice dance”. This is fully evergreen. It is standing here maybe 18 inches tall and then you have the Barren strawberry and you have Boxwood which is called Buxus “Tide Hill” and it makes this lovely little mounts.
This is a grass called Hakon Grass, this will never grow in a fair amount of shade. It looks good all year round. This is probably if I was telling people about one native plant that is incredible, it is the Christmas fern. If you want to come back here probably as late as Christmas it will not look too much different than it looks now.
This is called Showy Sedum, this flower heads are going to dry and they will turn brown and if you like texture in the winter garden they had this beautiful seed cluster and when it snows or you have froze on it, it looks very pretty.
There are some new Geraniums out that have a very long flowering period. You know typical geranium and the garden will bloom from every two or three weeks but this will probably go on for three months.
David Epstein: You have certainly created something absolutely beautiful here. Gorgeous garden, I love it, thank you very much for sharing it.
Gary Koller: It was fun to show it off.
David Epstein: Come back every week for all of our tips here at growingwisdom.com.
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