Outsiders

Take a sneak peek at Saturday’s 11th annual Oak Park River Forest Garden Walk

By Liz Jaros

Wednesday Journal, Inc. Contributor

On Saturday, 11 local dirt diggers will throw open their garden gates and cordially invite the neighborhood in for a hobnob with the hydrangea. June 26 marks the 11th annual Oak Park River Forest Garden Walk, an event designed to inspire and educate the regular folk as we’re given inside access to some of the villages’ most glorious lots of greenery. It’s particularly stacked this year, according to Garden Club President Bob Haisman.

“What I love about this lineup is the incredible diversity and the passion involved in creating these gardens,” Haisman says, adding that they expect to draw interest from all over the Chicago area. “I think it’s one of the best we’ve had.”

This year’s walk, which kicks off at 9:30 a.m. from the Oak Park Conservatory, will take visitors through an eclectic array of local properties, showcasing some of the best Prairie-style, cottage-style, courtyard, woodland and thematic gardens our towns have to offer.

“There’s what I call the ‘River Forest wow-er,’” Haisman says, as well as a Frank Lloyd Wright home, a small-space commercial property, a music garden and one of the best examples he’s ever seen of folks in an apartment complex getting together to beautify a common area. “It’s really a great group.”

The 11 featured gardens were handpicked by a committee comprised of volunteers from the Garden Club of Oak Park and River Forest and Friends of the Oak Park Conservatory, the event’s co-sponsors.

“We got about 45 nominations this year,” Haisman explains. “We trotted out committee members to look at every single one, then narrowed it down to the gardens we thought were dynamite. But they were all wonderful. It wasn’t easy.”

According to Haisman, selection criteria included a cognizance of the villages’ economic and architectural diversity, and although a couple of the smaller-scale gardeners selected by the committee were unable to participate, he believes the walk still represents a great cross-section of the community.

“What follows is a sneak peak at some of the sites you’ll see should you decide to go down the garden path this Saturday.

A walk in the woods

Influenced heavily by the gardens of colonial Williamsburg, River Forest resident Ellen Steinberg set out to create a landscape for her North Franklin Street home that would capture both the wild, wooded terrain on which early Americans built their homes and the neat, orderly gardens they planted just outside their doors.

Working with what she had when she first purchased the home – a handful of mature trees, an Austrian pine, a gnarled downy hawthorn and a whole lot of grass – Steinberg has spent the last 22 years chipping away at her 75-by-190-foot lot, scheming and planting, relocating and rethinking with tireless enthusiasm and obvious obsession. Today, the grounds are a rolling carpet of color and greenery, a place for Steinberg and friends to relax and get lost as well as a certified national wildlife backyard habitat. And there’s not a blade of grass in sight.

“This is my favorite vista,” Steinberg says of the giant hosta pool glimpsed through an arched hawthorn branch near her front sidewalk. A flagstone path winds throughout leather leaf viburnum, rose of Sharon and oakleaf hydrangea from the south end of the front yard in a reveal that Steinberg likens to “coming upon a house in the woods,” while a more formal walkway (made with bricks found beneath the driveway when they replaced asphalt with Brussels block) cuts from the front door through a wall of shrub roses toward what would have been the street in a colonial village.

The northern edge of Steinberg’s front yard, shaded by the towering pine, features naturalized fern, variegated hosta (white accents mimic the sun glinting through forest pines) and Karen azalea. Inside the garden gate, a slate patio is banked with hemlock (selected for winter interest as well as privacy), rhododendron, fragrant viburnum (for olfactory pleasure) and a serviceberry (for the birds).

From here, a flagstone walkway rolls west and south through the property’s outer banks, passing poppies and iris, lilies and mountain laurel before pausing at a wooden bench beneath a pair of Chinese seven son flower trees and continuing.

Next to the home, a parterre garden defines the “civilized area,” according to Steinberg. Doled out in equal portions to serve cooking, cutting and ornamental purposes, this area features a fish pond with watercress and an irregularly shaped columnar oak (which Steinberg just loves) that turns gold in the fall. It’s backed by goat’s beard, butterfly bush, meadow skipper and bottlebrush that she says, “shiver and quiver with butterflies at all hours.” An adjacent, grapevine-draped arbor flanked by a pair of re-blooming roses offers seating for two.

Steinberg says her gardening effort was originally sparked by a quest for “eye candy” but her vision has matured over the years. In addition to the overarching colonial theme, she now focuses on striking harmony between wilderness and civilization, striving for an environment that’s welcoming to all friends, family, critters and passers-by.

Cottage charmer

Ave Zuccarino paid careful attention to scale when carving gardens out of the grass and gravel surrounding her North Marion Street home – a “small and simple” home according to Zuccarino, and one that had absolutely no landscape character whatsoever when she first moved in 13 years ago.

Zuccarino says her first priority was the backyard, which required concrete and stone removal, garage relocation, dirt dumping/conditioning and bed planning. “I had to do something back here,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stand it.”

Entering her backyard today, it’s clear Zuccarino has been a very busy woman. A corridor of arching rose bushes offers English-style access from the north side of the property, compelling visitors to stroll in and fill up their senses. Once inside, a white, freestanding pergola draped with New Dawn roses screens the patio area from the rest of the grounds, providing Zuccarino with the “sense of enclosure” she craves.

On the flagstone path that steps off from the patio, small round pebbles fill in gaps around the stones, a water-simulating technique Zuccarino gleaned from Japanese sand gardens. A hidden pond provides a trickling soundtrack. Occasional pieces of found driftwood, a Victorian bird cage and a homemade copper fountain are passed on a sweep around the east end of the lot, where wisteria twines around the tall stumps of an old mulberry. Three Austrian pines, fern, hosta and a tree-trunk bench define a woodland area near the garage.

In front, Zuccarino chose an all-white palette (with the exception of some spring blues). Shrub roses, hosta, impatiens, astilbe and miniature iris intermingle with variegated red twig and boxwood in an orderly but natural, brick-trimmed bed that runs along the south perimeter and then spills out into the parkway.

It’s appropriate, in this quaint and comforting garden, that Zuccarino learned everything she knows about plants from her mother. Now admittedly a full-blown obsession, she says, “The hardest thing about gardening is knowing when to stop.”

Small space, big secret

Before Sandra Burns began pinking up the place in 1988, the grounds surrounding her south River Forest law firm were in a state of serious neglect. “There was nothing out here but a bunch of weeds when I moved in,” Burns recalls of the property that had been previously occupied by a piano refinishing company. “It was a mess.”

Today, nearly 15 years later, Burns and company go to work each morning in one of the town’s prettiest corner pockets, passing tricolor beech trees, weeping cherries and Japanese maples as they enter the building, opening windows inside to pull the sweet scents of lilac, viburnum and nasturtium through the office. Even the parking lot has been given the floral treatment in the form of raised limestone beds mounded high with pink impatiens.

But while the exterior plantings dole out sensory stimulation to the general public, it’s what Burns and her co-workers keep to themselves that delivers the most powerful impact here. In an 8-by-52-foot galley running east-west between Burns’ office and the building next door, a scrolled iron gate swings open to reveal a whole other world.

Inside this hidden oasis, which Burns says they use for al fresco lunches and end-of-day unwinding, cool plants like fern, hosta and ivy roll along the south wall which is mostly shaded, while sun-worshipers like honeysuckle, dahlia and hibiscus consume much of the north. Assorted evergreens and shrubs, another beech, a crimson queen Japanese maple and a pair of high-climbing clematis lend height to the space. Eclectic statuary, annual- and perennial-stuffed pots, wrought iron window/wall containers and a central stone path intermingle with the ground material to create a secluded whimsical escape.

“I’m like a lunatic in the month of May,” admits Burns. “I’m out here watering every morning and running out to pick up more plants. I’m out of control, but we really do enjoy the space.”

Resurrecting a Prairie plan

Referring to historic photos and the circa 1908 plans for her Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence (the William E. Martin House in North Oak Park) Laura Talaske set out to reconstruct the home’s original grounds and gardenscape. Because part of the lot was sold off over the years, reducing its size from 150 to 100 feet in width, the plans would have to be scaled down and slightly modified.

After purchasing the home in 1990, Talaske had giant yews removed and replaced the original garden walls in front. Along them, she filled the earth with native Prairie plants such as bluestem, coneflower, mondarda, aster, goldenrod, native columbine, pasture roses and Queen of the Prairie. Inside the formal garden entrance, Talaske says she went with a more “turn of the century, Victorian-style garden,” employing “cottagey things” like poppies, daisies, hollyhock, delphinium and iris. These were materials favored by W.B. Griffin, the landscape architect who directed the home’s original garden construction and planting.

At the southwest corner of the backyard, a miniaturized version of the home’s original pool, which was 30 square feet, houses koi and goldfish. At points on the patio area, concrete piers are set for the re-creation of the original pergola, which Talaske says is her next major project out here. Around the perimeter, a black walnut tree, native dogwood, a swamp white oak tree, lilac bushes, Annabelle hydrangea and mock orange provide height and visual interest above a sea of daylilies, goats beard, phlox, peony, foxglove, thistle and sedum.

While Talaske says it’s sometimes hard to stay on top of watering and weeding duties in her yard, she doesn’t spend too much time trying to control things. “I believe in letting the garden grow itself,” she says. “I like things to flow and feel natural.”