Enlarge Heritage Hill Garden Tour 2011 gallery (11 photos)

Grand houses demand grand garden spaces.

As Heritage Hill gardeners know, the grandeur of those gardens is amplified when set beside the architectural grandeur in the historic downtown neighborhood.

Consider Jerry Dreyers garden.

The plantings and spaces surrounding his house at
50 Lafayette Ave. NE are an eclectic, contemplative 37-year labor of love. It began soon after he and his late wife, Sonja, bought the 6,500-square-foot, Queen Anne shingle style and stone house built in 1886 by John Holt, president of the Antrim Iron Co.

The years had not been good to the interior, Dreyer said, and the outside had fared no better.

It was very overgrown with junk stuff, he said. During the first two years, I literally wore out a chainsaw cutting stuff out.

Winding brick pathways lead visitors through the front yard, which is shaded by enormous deciduous dawn redwood, blue spruce and towering American beech and weeping Chinese beech trees.

The paths, with limestone steps the couple hauled back from vacations on Drummond Island, continue around the side of the house and to the backyard, stopping at sitting areas with statuary that includes a pair of 19th-century porcelain Capo-di-Monte boy and girl figurines, nine ponds and a wooden pergola that droops with wisteria.

You can hear water from every location on the property, and every bench has a nice view of something, Dreyer said.

In an antique tub, dozens of wine bottles make for colorful yard art. In an old toilet further on, a few bottles are upturned inside the tank.

Those were the crappy ones, Dreyer said, laughing.

As for plantings, the self-taught green thumb estimates he has 3,000 daffodil and narcissus bulbs that come up every spring, 30 rose varieties, 50 varieties of daylilies, 10 Japanese irises, 20 Siberian irises, 30 hostas and eight types of ferns among the 16 flats of impatiens he planted in the spring.

But I dont really keep track, he said.

Rather than the constant effort it appears to be, Dreyer said his garden has evolved organically over the years.

People who come here say, You must spend all your time working in the garden, he said. I say, I never work in my garden. I just go out there and play.

Something just strikes me, and I say, Oh, I guess Ill do this.

Buono!

Two blocks east, Jack and Susan Hessler are enjoying the second full season of their carefully planned garden on a lot next door to the 1890 American craftsmen style home on College Avenue NE they have owned since 1992.

A house had been there, until it was destroyed by arson in January 2007.

Several months later, the Hesslers bought the lot, had the house demolished and got to work studying landscape design and buying every garden book there is, Susan Hessler said.

The result: a 60-by-60-foot Italian Renaissance garden that whisks the Hesslers back to trips to Italy, where they have vacationed several times.

Behind the emerald green arborvitae that surround the space, there is a lawn- and stone-path-covered quadrangle with a water fountain in the center and arches that hang with silver lace vine, which flower from midsummer to frost.

At dusk, a line of cafe lights much like those seen at outdoor cafes in Europe shine a path to a curtained pergola with comfy seating where the Hesslers, their five tenants and others who live in the tight-knit North College Block Club neighborhood gather for coffee or cocktails.

A wooden fence at the back of the pergola was transformed by local artist Mic Carlson, a friend of the couple, to look like the limestone exterior of a Perugian building.

In keeping with traditional old Italian gardens, they said, plantings are minimal: red geraniums evocative of those that flourish in Assisi, sweet potato vines and white petunias.

The true Renaissance gardens in Italy dont have flowers like our gardens here, Susan Hessler said. Theyre more park-like.



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