Becoming One with Your Garden

St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles - July/August 2000

Contemplating Nature

Story by Kathy Donovan Davis

Photography by R. Todd Davis

Garden designer Linda Kraft frequently finds anonymous notes in her mailbox, expressions of thanks from passerby who purposely pass the spectacular gardens lacing the grounds of her elegant University City home. What her secret admirers don't know is that Linda and her husband, Stephen, almost nixed buying the house because two massive pine trees shrouded its front, leaving the southern exposure blanketed in shade.

Fortunately, Linda could envision the landscape sans overbearing trees. The way others know their ZIP codes, she knows the average minimum temperatures outlined in the 11 U.S. Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zones. A third-generation gardener whose relatives still run the family dairy farm in Wisconsin, Linda describes her own family's 1991 move from Minneapolis as Zone 4 to Zone 6, a net gain of 20 degrees that greatly lengthens the growing season.

"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," she admits. Once the ink dried on the Kraft's purchase contract, the offending pines came down, and a whole new earthen canvas opened up.

With an undergraduate degree in fine arts and a master's in business, Linda had sustained her creative bent as a ceramist, meditation teacher and as an account executive at AT&T. But the newfound sunlight splaying across her front yard very quickly lit a new career path: Her next-door neighbor, Janice Hobson, also an avid gardener, relished the chance to create a new garden in the sweeping area between their two houses. That winter the women laid out the hardscaping and prepared the beds for planting the following spring.

"It turned out so beautifully that one day I said, 'What if we went into business designing gardens for other people'?'"Linda recalls.

Armed with 250 brochures for their fledgling Creveling Gardens (named after their street, with homage to the vast farm that became University Hills), the women went door to door. Five or six inquiries later, they were officially in the garden-design business, balancing Linda's commitment to her husband and then- 2- and 4-year-old sons, Adam and Andrew, with Janice's schedule as a flight attendant for TWA.

Four years ago Janice opted to streamline her worklife, leaving Linda to create public and private gardens on her own with installation help from two associates. While much of Creveling Gardens' work involves actually planting gardens, Linda's meditative/contemplative/organic-is-best approach encourages clients to open themselves to the outdoors, spend more time there and be less caught up in the visuals.

"I try to do more than create beautiful gardens, she explains. "People often miss the tactile experience of touch lamb's ear, the sounds of birds or breeze through the trees. I think exterior spaces should be more than extensions of interior decoration. I want to make something beautiful to be in."

Linda admits that achieving a level of inner and outer harmony is not the goal of every client. But for those whose sensibilities are open to exploring how they want to use a particular space, she suggests visual imagery: Spend a few minutes imagining the feeling of being outdoors anywhere that evokes a sensual experience, like being at the edge of woods near water, definitely not a generic garden-center approach to laying in some geraniums.

Linda first tried a meditative/centering technique on herself five years ago in a client's "ballerina garden" in Frontenac. She saw herself as one among many living elements in the creative process. To include artist Ruth Keller Schweiss' ballerina sculpture, Linda planted a half-circle of fairy roses behind the figure to suggest roses thrown onto the stage at the ballet. "Even my mother, who doesn't go in for all the (meditative) process, noticed the particular, almost heavenly sparkle," Linda says.

Labyrinth gardens, favored by medieval churches to symbolize pilgrimage, inspire reflection. "Unlike mazes, labyrinths have one meandering circuit that always ends up back at the center," she notes, adding that a 20-foot circumference is all that's needed to lay out a stone or concrete labyrinth path.

After contemplating the possibilities some clients share pictures they've collected from magazines or marked in books. Gleaning ideas from pictures at this juncture is OK, Linda says, because they can be analyzed more knowingly and with greater emotional awareness. More traditional steps follow. Site visits draw out Linda's artistic training, and she surveys new gardens-to-be through the wide-angle lens, figuratively creating harmony across opposite corners of the yard ensure that unity pervades the long-angle, mid-range and close-up views of the finished garden.

Getting the details and the broad vision to work is the trick. When the close-up mixture of colors and forms is just right, Linda explains, any clump of the garden could be plucked to make a beautiful bouquet.

Synergy like this requires close timing "Waiting until spring to do everything is like planning a June wedding in April," she laughs. Working a summer ahead of spring planting to do adequate soil preparation , mending the soil with organic matter by rototilling in leaf mulch and compost means working with flower beds in the fall so they can winter over, delivering a rich, velvety texture ideal for plants to truly thrive. Sprinkling systems are best installed in the fall as well.

"I tell people there are two reasons I can be in business: leaf mulch and (wholesale nursery) Bowood Farms," Linda says. Leaf mulch breaks down more quickly than shredded-bark mulch or wood chips, and it doesn't leech nitrogen from plants. Maybe communities offer free leaf mulch to residents. Leaf mulch us also available from retail gardening-material sources.

To those who think they can't keep up a garden like hers, Linda notes that maintenance can actually be less for a well-designed garden that's had proper soil preparation. "Lots of plants in a well-mulched, mixed-border garden bed mean fewer weeds," she says. "Everything will grow and work together in a structured design, blending into a whole that is more than the sum or its parts."

To those who resist putting in a garden for fear of maintenance. Linda cautions that having a garden is like having a pet or a child, each require nurturing so it can nurture us in return.

"People think gardens are like wall paper: Put it up, and it will stay like that forever. But you're creating a living thing," she says. "The beauty and joy og a garden is precisely because it's living."