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Atlock Farm in Somerset , New Jersey , is just an hour ’s drive from Manhattan , but the distance might well be measured in century . Here , on the mildly sprawling grazing land of an old dairy farm , Ken Selody , a garden designer and old - shoal gardener ( “ I rise what I sell ” ) , offer up strange annuals , perennials , succulent , tropicals , and topiaries for sale or rent . On this crisp November Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , his intimate patchwork of greenhouses and gardens is splendid with the colors of late autumn . The historical ancestor for Selody ’s greenhouses is the looking glass - and - iron Crystal Palace , a giant preassemble concoction of a conservatory designed by the architect / couturier Joseph Paxton and first erected in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 ( the World ’s Fair of its mean solar day ) . While Selody ’s airy charge card tunnels are more modest in their outward-bound visual aspect , the view inside triggers the same astonishment and delectation in me that the Victorians must have felt at the sight of all those foreign plants fresh uncommitted for up - close inspection . One greenhouse is filled with twirly , swirly tillandsia , bromeliads that hang like ornaments or cascade down wire form , gather nutrients from the melody ; by rights , their place of origin should be Whoville rather than Latin America .
To see the full gallery please cite toThe New Victorians SlideshowAlso pertain : prim Gardens in PrintandOde on a prissy UrnPhoto by : Piotr Redlinski .
“ There is no good place to be than a greenhouse in February , ” articulate Selody . “ You kick the snow off your boots and take the air into the tropics . With all the wet , even the melodic line is floaty . ” A coleus I ’m hypnotise by was first bring to Britain from the rain forests of Java in the nineteenth century by professional plant life hunter — plant scientist - venturer who plundered the remotest reaches of the British Empire to tip a growing food market for tropical plants back home . The influx of unfamiliar species set off a trend , mostly among the fresh wealthy , for bedding out masses of stamp , brightly biased exotics . bless with a climate unusually mild for such a high line of latitude , the English could enjoy the showy display from early give to the first rime .
Selody ’s hundred or so coleus form include shade - loving nineteenth - century heirlooms as well as sun - patient of 21st - century cultivars , with wildly different folio frame and clear , deeply saturate pigment . “ As a designer , I ’m more concerned in the effect of foliage than anything else , ” Selody tell . “ There is a instinctive progression gardeners go through that culminates in the unconditional erotic love of plants even when they ’re not in bloom . A plant life ’s inner dish is in the foliage . ”
We come upon some of the topiary that Selody is known for , a thoroughgoing verbalism of his at the same time rigorous and relaxed style . Each coleus “ standard”—that is , a single base with a globe on top — is a disclosure . Unlike a topiary of myrtle , bay , ivy , or box , the clump in this event is feathery , really more like plumage . “ Some plants loan themselves to certain shape more than others , ” Selody says . “ Experience learn what works and what does n’t . ” His access is similarly broadminded when it comes to container planting , particularly the urns so darling by the Victorians . “ Almost anything looks skilful in an urn , ” he says , offering as an example one in which the grunge is enshroud by ground - hugging echeveria , spiky succulent tinged with purple , out of which rise the unsheathed knobby stems of a immensely larger succulent , a kalanchoe with a canopy of hazy gray - unripe leaves on top . The fact that you’re able to see through the arrangement is significant to Selody : “ I like its modernity , even in an older - fashioned cast - branding iron urn . ”
While Selody ’s individual fashion is instantly recognizable , his is hardly the only garden where the legacy of the Victorians is in grounds right now . More urn , spill over with lock yearbook , accent a half - Accho surrounded by a plain picket fencing in rural northwestern Connecticut . This is the individual garden of Peter Wooster , an inner decorator by professing , who divided his fourth dimension between commercial and residential design project in Manhattan and the country before forsake the city totally . Twenty - three years in the qualification , this garden has , in the last X , become a coaction with nurseryman Rob Girard , who ’s assume an even larger function in its perpetual evolution since Wooster suffered a CVA four twelvemonth ago .
At the center of the meticulously edged garden is a showstopping Victorian Circle , which commence a fresh injection of colorful annual every class . This form of design component live up to the priggish desire for geometrical layout — a mark of classical cultivation in the eyes of an expanding and preponderantly urban middle stratum only just discovering the pleasures of a 2d home , the leisure time clock time to garden , and an ever extend idea of what it was potential to grow .
Although visitor often compare Wooster ’s garden to a museum — there looks to be one of everything in his grand assemblage of plants , which extend inside the house to the fancy - leafage begonias and other houseplants display all around — nothing seems out of place . Exotics like banana , castor bean , and jungly foliage all thrive in this temperate - zone garden , continents away from where they develop . They ’re a admonisher that hardiness evaluation are only rule of ovolo that put on to a wide geographic area . Recognizing microclimates and plot plants properly have allowed Wooster to “ push the zone ” as effectively as collectors of tropicals did 150 years ago .
Like Wooster , 27 - year - old Fannie Farmer Annie Novak has a cutting understanding of what it means to test the boundaries of nature , though her immediate surround are far less bucolic : an industrial block in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn , New York , which breast the East River . You have to climb up three stories to get to the 6,000 square feet that comprise Eagle Street Rooftop Farm , now in its second year . In that short time , the aerie has become integral to residential district house physician whose longing for connexion to the solid ground is something any prissy urbanite would have recognized . Locals shop at Eagle Street ’s Sunday food market and shop vicinity eating house that have the farm ’s green goods on their menus . Some are member of Novak ’s team of volunteers . “ To tell you the truth , ” she says proudly , “ I ’m growing more Fannie Merritt Farmer than vegetable . ”
A “ green - roof ” garden is tricky , Novak allege , first of all because of the needed soilless growing medium , which is lightweight and effective at retaining water but too shallow for many vegetables . “ What plants really want is dirt that ’s alert , ” Novak add . ineffectual to raise the range of a function of produce that supported the domestic economy in the Victorian era , when an average kitchen garden might hold back 40 unlike vegetables , Novak oversees a more tightly curated list of crops that include constitutive tomatoes , carrots , cucumbers , hot white pepper , eggplant , lettuce , arugula , kale , chard , radishes , and herbaceous plant . This time of year , the buyers of shares in Eagle Street ’s CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture ) group will ply literal seed money for the forthcoming growing season ; in tax return , they ’ll get veritable allotments of the freshest produce imaginable .
During my visit , an Eagle Street bee grazes among the calendula , then heads in an unwavering line back to the hive . This farm may be unwaveringly stock-still in its immediate neighbourhood , but its bees are not . “ When you take a frame out of the beehive , ” Novak aver , “ you may tell where the bees are getting pollen . ” try the honeycomb within the bod , she say , is like look at a map . “ Once I draw one out and it was all flushed . The bee had gone over to the maraschino cherry factory in Red Hook , several miles out , and gotten into the dumpster . ” Steampunk bee .
Redrawing the agate line between urban and rural was , of course , a major preoccupation of the Victorian eld . The map of the Great Western Railway published inCassell ’s Weekly Dispatch Atlasin 1863 shows line furcate out like so many capillaries from major city into formerly isolated parts of the countryside . Along with increased leisure time time , this railway system system allowed urban dweller aching for the scent of sod and the sight of things growing to make junket , often to places of great beauty .
Only the most fortunate among them would have been able to build a retreat on the scale of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden , disperse out over three moist , shadowed Acre overlooking Puget Sound in Washington State . Here , curator Richie Steffen oversees a collection of 240 or so native and nonnative fern . “ There is something about fern , ” he says . “ They are so intricate . Their feathery , soft face adds a unique grain to any garden . ” And , as any pteridologist will tell you , it ’s just a slippery , gametophyte - get over side from a compaction on ferns , the plant most associated with the Victorians , to an fixation with stumperies .
These cunningly arranged tangles of uprooted tree diagram stumps call to mind nothing so much as the medieval illusion of Tim Burton . Being very thick , stumps take a recollective time to moulder , and in the meantime , their deeply fissured barque provides the arrant home ground for fern , moss , lichen , and small-scale woodland puppet . A period conceit , perhaps , but the Victorians jazz how in force the enveloping semiwilderness could be in keep out out life-time ’s atmospherics . The Pacific Northwest , with its forests of western red cedar tree , Douglas fir , and westerly hemlock , is a treasure treasure trove of stumps — logging drive the economic system here through the 1970s — and of woodland places in which to place them .
Almost three years ago , Steffen and fellow display board members of the Hardy Fern Foundation , based at the Rhododendron Species Foundation & Botanical Garden in Federal Way , Washington , make a stumpery by upcycling nine dump trucks full of old ambo destined for the Sir Henry Wood chipper . Encompassing half an acre , it is one of the largest stumperies now in macrocosm . Catch it at the right time of solar day — or by moonlight — and it jut out a primeval quality that is both striking and vaguely disquieting .
One of the thousand ferns that colonise the same garden is the soft shell fern ( Polystichum setiferumvar . Bevis ) . “ It ’s one of the most graceful and fragile of the erstwhile Victorian cultivars , ” Steffen excuse . “ And it ’s available , thanks to weave culture . ” Unlike most fern , Bevis does n’t reproduce by spores , and it does n’t divide readily , either ; that ’s why single specimens have up to now been costly and difficult to amount by . But these day , laboratory micropropagation yields a bumper crop of brand - raw little plants . “ This can happen with lots of different species , ” suppose Steffen . “ Totally apart but really great plants are finally within reach of the horticulture public . ”
What ’s more , you do n’t need a half - crazy acre in which to raise them . In fact , all you need is a terrarium . This type of plant - filled microcosm , studied by generation of third - grader , was once foretell a Wardian case , after its inventor , Nathaniel Ward . A London doc and impassioned amateur naturalist , he deplored the toll defilement exact on his garden ; in 1829 , he unexpectedly discovered that a common fern ( Dryopteris filix - mas ) flourish in the humid environment of a sealed Methedrine bottle . He began experimenting in earnest . His Wardian event , ideal for preserve delicate works awake on retentive ocean voyage , were instantly adopted by plant hunters ; at last they could delight tropic species , including fern , with a high-pitched enough rate of success to make plant hunting profitable and plant collect practicable .
The darling of the DIY crowd , terrariums are everywhere right now , from the foxy websiteEtsy.comto New York ’s Museum of Modern Art , where a industrial plant - fill installation created by creative person and landscape interior decorator Paula Hayes is on view through February 28 , 2011 . And just 26 blocks northward , at the American Museum of Natural History , you ’ll find Hazel Davies , manager of living showing , who will soon be reprising a popular toad frog exhibition in one of the museum ’s galleries . In the workshop where she forgather live tableaux to satisfy the abiding impulse to wreak the outdoors inside and the faraway nearer , Davies has create a spectacular terrarium expressly for GARDEN DESIGN .
Housed in a 38 - gallon positron emission tomography store aquarium , the terrarium is an intact ecosystem in miniature . A brief survey of its leafy hillocks and mossy ravines break nanus umbrella trees native to Taiwan , Kentia palms from the Solomon Islands , maidenhair ferns ( New Zealand ) , India rubber plants ( north - east India , southerly Indonesia ) , and bromeliads ( South America ) . That flash of sapphire ? That ’s a bluish poisonous substance frog from Surinam . Peering into this lush landscape , you begin to get the picture what it was to live in an era when our understanding of the innate world and access to far - flung parts of it were expanding by leaps and bounds . And our sense of wonder at it all is as powerful as ever .
