Four private gardens in Arlington will be among the seven in Northern Virginia that will be open to the public as part of the Garden Conservancy's Open Days Program.
Landscape designer Tom Manion's Cozy Shack garden has been part of the program the past two years. Manion stressed the variety of the gardens, "When people go on Open Days the gardens found include everything from the wildly naturalistic to the spartan."
The four Arlington gardens on the June 15 tour include: the Burnet-Deutsch Garden, Cozy Shack, the Garden of William A. Grillo and the Garden of Linda Scott and Mary Dufour.
Cozy Shack, is a small but extravagant garden framed around a modest ranch house that exhibits a wide variety of styles and plants. In the front, a sun garden with roses and peonies brackets a wilder section centered on a crabapple tree.
One thing Manion enjoys about his design is "when you step out [the back] you're immediately in the back garden." In this back garden a flagstone patio in Tennessee Crab Orchard, a pink-orange sandstone, balances an elaborate mixed-salad garden with 10 species of perennials and 6 shrubs in a 20 foot by 20 foot space. Past the mixed-salad, plump bamboo girds the edge of the first of two reflecting pools.
"With the water garden," Manion said, "the idea was to have a place for fish and frogs and a place to look out on the water."
<b>IN CREATING HIS SHADE GARDEN</b> William Grillo said, "My intent was to create a very serene feel ... Everything was done for screening ... to create a green view from every window of the house you see green, from arbors, to trees, to lattice."
Aside from greenery including astilbe, hostas, liriope, crape myrtle, oak leaf hydrangeas, Japanese Maples the garden is, in large part, a showcase of a dining pavilion, fish ponds and flagstone patio.
Linda Scott and Mary Dufour's garden is in tune with natural elements filled with perennials that change with the seasons and highlighted by brightly colored gazing balls.
The Burnet-Deutsch garden, which has appeared in Southern Living and Better Homes and Garden, is, according to Thornton Burnet, "a small garden; but it gives the appearance of a large garden.
"It's a series of rooms and spaces that are connected by paths ... incredible amount of privacy given the tight space, tremendous diversity of plant material, strong expression of hard scapes, flagstones, sunken garden with pond, with dry stack stone walls.
"[A great strength was that the] house and garden designed and together, to create unified aesthetic, certain aspects of house to relate the house to the garden ... [an example is that] almost all surfacing and entries are done in stone and stone flows out into the garden.
"It gives the feel of one of those great old English gardens which are three hundred years old [and comfortable] like a great worn old shoe."
As time has gone by the he has moved in the general direction of planting more smaller plants including dwarf varieties. Burnet calls the technique "gardening by shoehorn."
Burnet said his attachment to the different spaces in the garden changes by season, but his favorite would probably be the sunken garden.
Asked to sum up sum of his gardening experiences Burnet said, "I have evolved to understand the values of good hardscapes. Many gardeners put in good plants but they don't show because the infrastructure is weak ... [good hardscapes] impart more structure during the down time of the garden the winter ... supporting a gardenís long term survivability.
"More structured garden helps hide weaker elements of plant materials, perennials and woodland ethereals. As I have gotten older I have begun to appreciate the shade garden, the shade garden is more constant through the year.