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http:// --> Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Obituaries Weather Archive Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Gallery Video Readers Polls Revels Etcetera Backpage O-Zone Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad Online Games Movie Preview November 3, 2006 Plant a fabulous tree and grow old with it By Adrian Higgins The Associated Press HOCKESSIN, Del. — Bill and Nancy Frederick came to the 17 acres of stream valley they call Ashland Hollow in 1965 when it was a bare and hilly pasture. The livestock and the farmhands were gone, but the Fredericks arrived determined to breathe new life into the landscape in the shape of a garden they could grow old with. As we look across the hollow, distant maples, hickories and dogwood trees have formed a tapestry of autumn color against the far hill, the 19th-century springhouse is half-veiled by the land, and a sense of rustic tranquillity has settled over the place. The couple walk their dogs past trees and hedges that have grown to stately maturity alongside their keepers. "I've been very fortunate that I could stay in one place," said Bill Frederick, who turned 80 last month. "We had that ideal when we moved here. It's a wonderful thing." Ashland Hollow has developed over the past four decades as one of the most admired private gardens on the East Coast, but what has brought me here (other than Frederick's invitation) is the realization that beyond its calm grandeur lie some truths about how to make a garden, big or small. Don't fight the site. Have a vision and let it unfold. Plant a fabulous tree for your dotage. This garden in particular is not merely a decorated landscape, it is a journey of changing vistas and experiences that may take two hours or more to savor. It borrows from the idea of a Japanese stroll garden, where locations along a path create contrived scenes, "except here," Frederick said, "you're going through a variety of horticultural experiences." It is also a journey through time, or at least through seasons. A key part of the garden is a large area devoted to plants that shine in winter. At the edge of a wood, a free-standing painted door announces winter in brass letters, and leads into Frederick's Winter Garden. In the waning fall, the promise of what is ahead can be seen: The fruited deciduous hollies, the blazing witch hazels and the grove of five paperbark maples, whose decorative peeling takes a good decade or two to show. In February, the place is a carpet of flowering bulbs, including winter aconites, adonis and snowdrops, while the redtwig dogwoods shine and the witch hazels burst into fragrant color. "Bill has an inner time that doesn't feel 21st century, where everything is immediate and hasty," said Chris Woods, garden director of the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia. Bill Frederick set out to be a lawyer but felt the tug of plants instead. "I've been gardening since I was 8," he said. Soon after he and Nancy married, they enrolled in horticulture classes at Cornell University, then returned to the Wilmington area to start a nursery, which they ran from 1952 to 1976. Among his early mentors Bill Frederick counts Henry Francis du Pont, who was Nancy's cousin. Du Pont famously made Winterthur, his home north of Wilmington, into a museum of American decorative arts, but also as a place of sophisticated (and, for years, unnoticed) naturalistic landscaping. "He was very good to Bill," said Nancy Frederick. "He would call up and say, 'I want you both to come over and see something.' And there was some part of the garden he felt was glorious at the time." The Fredericks worked with two Wilmington architects in making a home for the rolling site, designing a stuccoed house that actually spans the brook downstream from the springhouse. The main room of the house, and its balcony, are on an arched bridge, the floor 15 feet above the water. Conrad Hamerman, a landscape architect in Philadelphia, then helped the Fredericks create what became the essential element of Ashland Hollow, the Stream Valley Garden. Hamerman said the stream originally was too small for the desired effect. His solution was to dam it, creating a broad, glistening pool of water at the base of a grove of big old tulip poplars and beech trees. In the middle of the resulting pond is an earthen pyramid, clad in moss and lichens. One of the challenges, said Frederick, was to establish the pond in a way that would not flood any of the trees. Nancy Frederick built a topographic model of the site showing elevations and tree locations, and Hamerman added modeler's clay to it to fix the shape of the pond. The backdrop to this vista is a hillside of azaleas that Bill Frederick selected to form interlocking blocks of red, pink, lavender and salmon. No white-flowering azaleas, he said, because "it only punches holes in the design." Hovering over the organic contours of the tree terraces and the splashy azaleas is the spirit of the late Brazilian landscape architect and painter Roberto Burle Marx, with whom Hamerman studied and whom Frederick also knew and admired greatly. We wander through the stream valley to its elevated source, a circular pond garden with a curving stone bench. The space is shaped, enclosed and made almost sacred through the plantings of 10 Japanese umbrella pines, a choice long-needled pine relative that grows less than two inches a year when young, six inches afterward. These are specimens approaching 20 feet. "We had grown them from seed from our nursery," Frederick said. "We probably started them in 1955 and brought them into here in 1970." The trees are underplanted with the golden-leafed St. John's wort, Hypericum Brigadoon, bright against the deep green of the pines. The pond is full of rare aquatics, including an iris collected in Korea. "It's an electric mauve that's fantastic," Frederick said. Tres Fromme, a landscape architect who was a garden intern at Ashland Hollow in the early 1990s, said Frederick uses color "not just as a decorative overlay but (as) part of the structure." He also favors bright colors tweaked to be discordant and visually exciting, in the way, perhaps, that his turquoise shirt clashes a bit with his bluejeans. He is also wearing a gray tweed jacket and, on his belt, a well-used Stanley tape measure. It comes in handy, he says, when he wants to scale garden blueprints. Frederick is a slight, distinguished-looking fellow with a silver mustache, not chatty but ready with a story for all the plants and garden features that intrigue him. The garden is an intellectual experience for him, but also a place of well-planned jollity. (He has a six-foot bullfrog at the end of one border.) And for all the garden's expanse, it has not been developed for public display. "It's a large garden that succeeds as a personal statement about aesthetics," said Woods, the former director of Chanticleer, a public garden in Wayne, Pa. The journey leads across the game lawn built for the four children, now ages 44 to 51, through woodland to the Winter door, to an elevated grassy walk past trees planted for winter interest. Plato, one of his two Norwich terriers, remains with us. The second, Socrates, has slinked back to the house. We walk past a wildflower meadow to a hillside capped with a gazebo on stilts. This was built on posts, Frederick said, so as not to interrupt the view around the grassy path that is one of the signature garden features of Ashland Hollow. The walk curves so you don't know where — or if — it ends. It is reinforced with plantings of shrubbery and perennials in considered shades of white, gray and dark green. The idea, Frederick said, is to enjoy this walk under moonlight, when the lines differentiate into black, gray and white. He has figured that a warm gray leaf works better by moonlight than a blue-gray one, so he has placed lamb's ears at the base of a hedge of dwarf Japanese yew. Other plants include white-flowering rose of Sharon, miscanthus and variegated dogwood. Depart from the path and you find a lower terrace dominated by wisteria "trees." The vines are trained on sculptures of steel girders, one emulating a 30-foot conifer, the other a squatter shade tree. "When he put up these sculptures everybody thought he was crazy, but they have become outstanding," said Paul Meyer, director of the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia. "The trouble with most wisteria arbors is that once the wisteria is getting really nice the arbor is rotting away, and he dealt with that." The Fredericks have developed all this with a small gardening staff headed by Paul Skibinski. As with all successful gardens, the process has been as important as the result. Frederick and Skibinski visit nurseries and other gardens in search of new plants, mindful that there are always new areas of old or failing planting to fix. The bullfrog sculpture (which croaks as you approach it) sits at the top of a path back down to the house. Plants at every level bring structure and color to the descent, including a pair of golden larch trees, a deciduous conifer whose needles turn a rich orange in October. The garden has been blasted by frost and yet looks fabulous. The dogwoods are maroon, the beautyberries are festooned in purple fruit, and the Aster tartaricus is tall and in full bloom. Frederick points out the drifts of Korean chrysanthemum, a soft lavender-pink. "They are much looser" than standard garden mums, he said. "They haven't been pinched or anything like that." The path descends to a small outbuilding, an artist's studio where Frederick had been painting intensively for a while. Then he decided he'd better stop and write a book about the garden, and its creation, driven "by the threat of old age." Nearly finished, it will be followed, no doubt, by some other creative endeavor fueled by the aesthetic energy of the garden. He is currently waiting for the leaves to drop on a magnificent specimen of cutleaf English beech. "The bark is very beautiful and on sunny days you get shadows from the upper branches on the lower branches. It's like a checkerboard effect," he said. "And it's quite neat." Meyer has no doubt the garden has kept Frederick youthful: "Boy, I want to be like him when I grow up." Leave a Comment: Advertisement: Advertisement: Paid Advertising Inkjet Printers Student Loans Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Advertisement: Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.