(04-08-10)
A Foray Through Peirce’s Woods
Nature… but better? … At least, that’s what Peirce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens is going for. Its a natural woodland garden, but at the same time, its a display garden! So it may be that our visitors find it to be a unmaintained and naturally occurring space, but in some ways that’s exactly opposite the truth! While all the plants ARE native and you WOULD find them in your woods in PA, they are actively maintained and controlled.
To give us this weeks student Learning Session in Peirce’s Woods was Pandora. Pandora is the section gardener that oversee’s all the happenings in this area, so it was neat to walk through and glean some of her experiential knowledge.
We started in Peirce’s Plaza, which is the only area in the woods section that has any hints of formal. Peirce’s woods is a display garden, of course, but its done in a natural way with native plantings. The plaza is a transitional element to tie the woods and the highly formal flower garden walk together. You walk through a Carpinus hedge onto a patio of brick surrounded by low seating walls. Its the only brick you’ll find in the whole section. The wall is actually composed of Avondale stone, which is a ‘native’ stone. (The quarry is in the town of Avondale, which is close to Longwood.)
Containers in this area are different from containers anywhere else in the gardens. Most containers are pre-designed and have season plants pre-ordered well in advance. To keep it native, Pandora will use plants from the other area’s of her section to fill the containers; usually ones she needed to thin out anyway! And they’re always beautiful containers, especially in the summer and into fall.
The garden was designed by Gary Smith, who also designed the children’s garden at Winterthur (which is quite fun, I love it there!) The space itself (reaching 7 acres is size!) is viewed an art form garden using native plants; the flora represented in the entire space is from the piedmont region.
The whole garden is divided up into smaller ‘rooms’ with only divisions of shrub ‘walls’. In the spaces are shrubs like native azaleas and rhododendrons, trees such as redbud, maple, dogwood, ash, and oak, as well as amorphic sweeps of native ground covers such as native phlox and pachysandra.
After our brief introduction to the garden space itself, we set off to learn as much as we could about the plants themselves. Some of the plants are linked to full plant pages – so you can read even more about the one’s you’re particularly interested in!
(The foam flowers – Tiarella – were just starting to bloom all over!)
(Fothergilla gardenii blossoms)
(Pandora showing us the flower of a wild ginger – Asarum canadense)
(A natural outcropping of white trillium)
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