Your Neighbor’s Garden: Great Baehre neighbors plant ferns, grasses and much more
Good gardeners will tell you that a big part of their success comes from planting the right plant in the right place. This simple rule makes for healthy plants and beautiful gardens. It is this long-honored rule that is the driving force behind the success of Ron and Barb Nowak’s impressive gardens.
The Nowaks’ yard butts up against the Great Baehre Wildlife Management Area in Amherst. Ron Nowak refers to this 500 acres of federally protected woods as “the Central Park of Amherst.” When the Nowaks’ home was built, there was nothing but woods. The parcel they chose was very low. Over the early years, they had 150 truckloads of fill brought in.
Since then, the Nowaks have been designing, planting, caring for and sharing their beautifully created yard and gardens.
The Nowaks have a variety of gardens throughout their yard. Each area has a theme, and the plants and borders reflect that.
A Meditation garden at one end is in a shaded, quiet spot and is filled with plants of softer hues. These include silver Lamium and white-edged hostas, and the entire bed is framed with a large ninebark shrub. There is a statue at the center, and yellow-tipped arborvitae provide privacy for the area.
The Colonial garden blooms with foxglove, lupine and delphiniums. The Alpine and Oriental gardens are each distinctive in their design, as are the plants and trees included there.
The gardens have more than 20 varieties of ferns, grasses, a large collection of hostas and clematis and many more commonly found plants such as roses, columbine, Astilbe, woodruff, spiderwort and Campanula.
Throughout the yard there are spaces designed and created to give many different views.
“The landscape surrounds you like surround sound,” Ron Nowak says.
Here is a closer look:
The ponds: There are two koi ponds, built in the sunken area where many years ago two 50-to 60-foot tall maple trees stood. The ponds are connected by a small stream and connect to a waterfall. This area is secluded and bordered by tall shrubs and trees that give the space a separate room feel. A shaded bench offers a view of the ponds, and an Oriental Lilac, when in bloom, fills the air with sweet fragrance.
The rocks: Rocks and more rocks form pathways and accents for beds. All of the rocks were collected by the entire Nowak family through the years. The rocks were used to create the ponds and give definition to the curves of each bed.
The yard also has many pieces of statuary and urns, picked up at estate and yard sales.
The Nowaks like to travel and, along the way, pick up unusual plants, gardening advice and statuary to add to their garden.
One of their most prized possessions is a cast-iron urn they found in their travels. It was very old and in bad shape, but the Nowaks had it sandblasted and painted. It is now beautifully restored. When its tag was unearthed and cleaned, they discovered it read: “Buffalo Ironworks, 1898.”
Boxwood, everywhere: Beautiful boxwood is used as borders, centerpieces and accents. Almost all of it comes from cuttings the Nowaks have propagated. Varieties include English, Korean and variegated boxwood. The Nowaks clip a piece of boxwood and, using Rootone, start a cutting. When it is big enough and healthy enough it gets planted in a bed.
Fertilizers: The Nowaks keep all of their garden organic. They mulch to keep weeds down and use compost that they make from household discards. They bury banana peels in the beds where roses and clematis vine together. This is the secret to their big, beautiful blooms.
Trees: Trees comprise the Nowaks’ largest, most unusual collection. Ron Nowak has nursed these trees through freezes, droughts, the October storm and many other tests of Mother Nature. The trees are chosen for their color, size and uniqueness. Many are weeping, a feature that keeps them small enough to use in the corner of a bed — or here and there.
Others will grow to be the size of the trees in the nearby forest. Standard elm and speckled elm; green and yellow locust; a red leaf redbud as well as a green-leaf variety; Austrian pine; 14 varieties of Japanese maples; yellow and white dogwoods; a new “Wolf Eyes” dogwood; sand cherry; tricolor willow; weeping beech and — a real source of pride — a variegated maple. The leaves, with their yellow tips and green centers, grow 12 inches in diameter — proof of how healthy it is.
Ron Nowak trims each tree by hand to keep the shape and to keep it healthy. When trees are injured through disease or storms, he uses the patience and precision of a surgeon to repair the damage and restore the tree to full health.
Favorite tool: The Nowaks favor a Korean Homi hand plow they found many years ago. It is a wooden-handled tool that has a curved iron piece attached to a triangular curved end. It resembles a hook with a small hoelike end. They use this tool for digging weeds, cutting, aerating the soil and other day-to- day garden tasks.
One of the Nowaks’ greatest joys has been watching the yard take shape over the past 28 years. Their favorite expression reflects how they feel about plants in the garden as well as each other, and it is found on a plaque that welcomes visitors to the garden: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”
Jackie Albarella is the executive director of the Arts in Education Institute.
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