PITTSBURGH -- Almost 90 years ago, 13 neighbors on Briar Cliff Road met here to form the Rockledge Garden Club. These three gardens on this quiet, narrow street in Point Breeze are as different as their creators.
Silvia Speyer has spent 47 years acquiring and rearranging rare and unusual plants that grow so thick a weed can barely fit. Sarah Drake brings an architect's eye to the steep, shady hillside behind her charming stone home. English professors Jean and Steve Carr have carefully edited a once overgrown English garden into a lovely little piece of heaven with a few great lines.
Let's step through their garden gates for a closer look:
SILVIA SPEYER
It's hard to believe that the lush garden that covers every inch of this quarter-acre lot was once a lone brick path shadowed by hemlock groves. Under Speyer's loving green thumb, it has bloomed into a stunning series of plant combinations hugging winding gravel paths. She points out a cluster of cool blue hostas and delicate ferns.
"I really like purples and blues," she says. "I choose my garden by the color and texture and I do that instinctively. I don't even think about it."
Born in Zittou, Germany, Speyer has been gardening her entire life.
"It's in the genes -- everyone in my family is a gardener," she laughs.
Since moving to Pittsburgh in 1970, she has dedicated at least three hours of every sunny day to her garden -- 47 years of "trial and error." In 2010, she was the small garden winner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Great Gardens Contest. It has only gotten better with age.
Visitors are greeted by a cadet blue gate with a "Beware of Dog" sign, but there's no need to worry. Romeo the long-haired dachshund has no bite, only a "hello" bark for his newest friends.
Over the years, Speyer has carefully constructed a zone 7 microclimate on a zone 6 lot using layers of greenery. As a result, she is able to grow crape myrtles, oxalis and other warm-weather plants as perennials.
Blueberries and blackberries grow amid yellow woodland poppies, purple clematis and gold dust plant (Aucuba japonica). The poppies are everywhere.
Varying textures and colorful foliage keep a visitor's eye moving. "I like having foliage tell the story ... . I especially love the texture of this," she says, bending down to touch a Korean tassel fern.
Hostas include blue-and-gold "Frances Williams" and one of her favorites, dark blue "Empress Wu," the largest hosta in the world. "Herman's Pride" lamiastrum, a variegated groundcover, covers the hostas' feet. Yet Speyer still manages to find a tiny weed. She leans down to pluck it out.
"I really can't have anyone else doing my garden," she says.
Many of the trees date back to the garden's beginning. She has a variety of Japanese maples, several blue Atlas cedars, a pagoda dogwood, a "Horstmann's Silberlocke" Korean fir and a Meyer lemon tree that has produced 20 lemons so far this season.
"My gardening is like art," Speyer says, and points to her signature plant, a hardy ladyslipper orchid (Cypripedium reginae).
"Its white and pink flower with red leaf undertone blends with the red maples. It's an absolute symphony!"
SARAH DRAKE
Drake was not a gardener in 1995 when she and her husband, John, bought a 1928 house designed and built by architect Lamont H. Button for his family.
"I was a putzer," she says.
She's not anymore. With help from her neighbor Speyer, landscape architect Joel Le Gall and nursery owner John Totten, Drake has fashioned a garden as beautiful as her house.
An architect, she says her focus is more on the hardscape -- several arbors, stone steps and patios, a renovated fountain and a dining room addition whose large windows look out on the rear hillside shade garden and Frick Park.
"This is a down garden, not an up garden," she says.
The tour starts, however, with visitors walking up and into the interesting front garden, where once only pachysandra and privet grew. Now small trees and shrubs include Japanese maples, weeping weigela, sweetbay magnolia, Japanese snowbell and American holly. Neatly trimmed ivy arches around the front door and a small, pink "New Dawn" rose is just beginning to climb an iron arch that once held a much larger "New Dawn."
Other roses, Lenten rose, perennial geraniums, epimedium and strawberries edge the little patches of pachysandra that remain from 22 years ago.
The shade begins on the side of the house and takes over in the back. A towering white oak at least 125 years old provides most of it and limits the plants that are planted there. Hostas, ferns, cyclamen, astilbe, wood poppies, autumn clematis and climbing hydrangeas flourish in the lighter shade. In the lower section, Solomon's seal, ferns, paw-paws and Jack-in-the-pulpit surround a bench and large Asian rice vats.
Drake is especially proud of her work on Button's original fountain set into a staircase. She created a rill that flows in a narrow channel down the center of some steps and bluestone pavers. Early on, she was delighted to discover a stone patio beneath ivy and had it reconstructed farther down the hillside. John Drake enjoys weekends in the hammock they placed there.
For gardeners, the biggest surprise is a peach tree planted on a small terrace at the top of the hill. It's the sunniest spot in the shade garden but not nearly sunny enough for a fruit tree. Yet its branches already have a crop of peaches.
"There's no reason it should be here," Drake says. "The squirrels get the peaches."
STEVE & JEAN CARR
The Carrs are only the third owners of the charming brick house where the Rockledge Garden Club held its first meeting. Owner Mary Lincoln Newbury probably consulted with her neighbor, Rena Heilman Lindsay, a horticulturist, on the English country garden she created here. But there was little left when the Carrs bought the house in 2000.
Wood hyacinths, scilla, forsythia, wild cherries and rose of Sharon peeked out from underneath a mat of English ivy. Nongardeners wouldn't know where to start.
"You wouldn't buy this house if you weren't a gardener," Steve Carr said.
The couple started by cleaning out and renovating the circular stone pond. In the water, they planted papyrus, cattails and water lilies (pink and white). Nine koi now swim around the water plants.
In a ring around the pond, they planted creeping jenny, coneflowers and iris (blue, yellow and purple). Nearby beds contain lilacs, azalea, Japanese andromeda, hydrangeas, phlox, lavender, tree peonies, Lenten rose and bleeding hearts. The Carrs work together in the garden.
"I say, 'We should do this,' and he gets out the shovel," she says.
"It's relaxing, but it's also a lot of work," he says.
Adirondack chairs in the shade of a large London plane tree offer real relaxation and the couple often eat dinner on a rear patio that escapes the late-day heat. The sun blasts raspberry and blueberry bushes and the herb garden, which contains tango-hummingbird mint, sage, dill, rosemary, basil, creeping thyme and tricolor sage. Most are used in cooking.
The couple enjoy eating breakfast on their covered front porch. They do not enjoy seeing the herd of deer that decimated their ancient yews this winter. The evergreens are just starting to make a comeback, thanks in part to a small fence Steve Carr installed. He also built the low stone wall in front.
"We spend at least an hour a day working in the garden," Jean Carr says.
"I don't like to calculate how much time we spend here," Steve Carr adds.
High Profile on 07/02/2017