It’s the most important question when creating a garden: how do you get all the plants that you can’t resist and the ideas that constantly flood your imagination to merge into a common ground?
The creators of Sakonnet Garden, a private landscape on the coast of Rhode Island that welcomes the public three days a week in season by reservation, have been puzzling over it for decades — one boardwalk, hedge or unusual plant at a time.
John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli’s creative reference points are broad. The defined rooms of traditional English gardens are an influence in the Little Compton garden. So is the Color Field theory of pioneering modernist artist Josef Albers, whose bold areas of pigment were intensified in the context of carefully chosen adjacent ones.
Memories of business trips to the Amazon are also part of Sakonnet. And so are those of domestic travel — most notably Mr. Gwynne and Mr. Folcarelli’s four- to six-hour car rides back to New York City every weekend for the thirty years they lived part-time in Sakonnet, where they now live full-time..
Before that, Mr. Gwynne knew the country as his family’s second home. Happy memories included working with his sister to clear plant spaces from the dark undergrowth of invasive fall olives, multiflora rose, and oriental bittersweet, connecting those spaces with narrow tunnels hewn from the undergrowth.
Such raw, connected openings were the first hint of what would become Sakonnet.
The garden now has 15 different rooms, affectionately known as Punchbowl, a space with an ombré effect, thanks to gradations of rhododendron colors from cerise to pink to white. Pinkie, in a grove of frankincense cedars (Calocedrus decurrens), is also about color and about verticality: 12-foot posts are painted to match the clematis she climbs.
But Fernie, a small, green space hidden in the middle of the garden, is Mr. Folcarelli’s favorite: there, trunks of dead autumn olives are wrapped in chicken wire to support Euonymus vines, creating sinuous, snake-like shapes overhead.
Throughout the garden, living walls and those made of stone and logs create spaces for horticultural theater, giving you a sense of hide-and-seek rather than overwhelm you as you move through the landscape.
“Since we have too many plants, separators between the rooms try to create a sense of calm and focus,” said Mr Gwynne. “Otherwise you see everything at once.”
Small plates, served one at a time, rather than the exhaustion of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The 200-mile debriefs
However, the garden rooms do more than just measure pleasure. Their walls provide what the men call “microclimate manipulation,” a technique to persuade coveted plants—from palm trees to the elusive Himalayan blue poppy (Meconopsis Lingholm)—to adapt to Zone 7b’s marine environment.
Perhaps this strategy comes as no surprise, given the backgrounds of these gardeners: As chief of design for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo for many years, Mr. Gwynne habitat exhibits. Mr. Folcarelli also created spaces for a living, as a visual presentation manager in retail and hospitality, and for private clients.
He misses the debriefings that took place for decades on their 200-mile ride back to Manhattan. Mr. Gwynne is said to be carrying a black book to write notes in – one of a series of identical volumes that he has been using for demanding administration since the mid-1970s.
“We would assign a plant of the week to talk about, and we would talk about what had been successful and what had not,” recalled Mr. Folcarelli himself. “We talked about what we did or didn’t do. That was a really important part of building the garden, that relentless drive.”
With gardening and volunteering in the local community, there is no time these days, except perhaps in the winter. Instead, there are chores and more chores, and visitors are welcome in the two-acre garden from Thursday to Saturday – about 2,000 of them last year.
“I wish I could make people so happy at church,” said a local pastor with a smile after a recent tour of the garden.
“We’re in the laughter business,” Mr. Folcarelli said. Although there is an occasional unexpected reaction, such as that of the woman who was about to cry after seeing the blue poppies bloom. “She said she never thought she’d see one, a live one.”
Bucket list item checked, for the successful growers and their visitors.
Moving clockwise through the garden
This is “a yard laid out with a wheelbarrow,” said Mr. Folcarelli, as the spaces were too cramped for earth-moving equipment even at the beginning.
“But it’s also monumental,” interrupted Mr. Gwynne.
It is indeed a construction of contrasts – of scale, color, texture, light. And the men enjoy turning up the volume at every opportunity.
On open days, it is Mr. Folcarelli who greets visitors by pointing them clockwise. They pass through a doorway in a wall of ten feet of stones and logs and enter a world with an undulating surface covered with moss and a grove of old blueberries, “all gnarled, Arthur Rackham-y,” said Mr Gwynne, referring to the work of the English illustrator.
It’s “a kind of fairy forest that gives you a huge feeling,” he said.
Duck to navigate a small hole in an old holly hedge, where the first of several boardwalks beckons to an allée of Cryptomeria, the Japanese cedar, which feels as towering as giant redwoods. Such shape-shifting elements excite visitors to explore – the desired effect.
Next up in what Mr Gwynne calls ‘a series of strange experiences’ is the central lawn – and finally a bit of a vista. Along a wall of yew (Yew) are iron benches found at the Paris flea market, decorated with Chinese Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus henryana).
The Black Border contains dark-leaved plants, including weeping beech (Fagus sylvatica Black Swan), black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus Nigrescens), and Ligularia dentata Britt-Marie Crawford.
A little further on is a beacon for Mr. albers. Through an opening in three-foot boxwood hedges, the Neon Yellow Garden screams contrast to the dark space you find yourself in with an outflow of golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra Aureola), massive yellow-variegated comfrey, hostas, and more.
The oldest space in the garden is a rectangular room “wallpapered with showy azaleas and designed by rabbits,” said Mr Gwynne. Years ago, when an evergreen azalea from a protected nursery was transplanted into the future garden, the animals would have it. Back to the nursery row, the chewed-up sapling would go, creating a series of ‘refugee azaleas’ that eventually became the blooming wall.
The plants are in charge
How do you create a jungle in New England? The Tropical Quadrant of the garden offers an answer.
There are bananas and cannas, as well as large-leaved, faux tropics such as Ashe’s magnolia (Magnolia Ashei, a Florida native) and large-leaved magnolia (M. macrophylla, usually found in small pockets in the Southeast). A red Mughal pavilion, a souvenir from a trip to India, sits high in the mini jungle, draped with marigold garlands.
The two men admit it: their chamber-making process was a bit retarded. Best practices would dictate starting with the hardscape and then adding plants. The walls and paths should come first, but that wasn’t the case here.
“The factories are in charge,” admitted Mr Gwynne. “We just started planting and then incorporated everything. That’s probably why it has such a strange feel – quixotic and sometimes even crazy.”
While the head count is already what he describes as “three plants for one hole,” the search for more “mythical plants” never seems to end.
It doesn’t help that the rare plant specialists at nursery Issima are neighbours. The nursery was the source of the latest Chinese May apple selections for males (Podophyllum chengii), with wildly mottled dark leaves they couldn’t resist, and the new tantalizing range of Thalictrum.
Christmas lights on the palm tree
The climate’s shift towards warmer winters — the typical low in this part of Rhode Island was once around minus five degrees, but is now in the single digits — has encouraged more daring zone-pushing.
The men’s first experiment with the zone-stretching power of a well-placed stone wall involved a courtship with a Mexican Yucca species that failed to thrive. The 12-foot wall they built for a coniferous palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix) was more successful: The tree grew for 35 years on the south side of the wall, in the shade, but not without some extra attention.
To minimize the effect of freezing and thawing on the evergreen leaves, the palm is wrapped in Reemay fabric during the winter, leaving it in suspended animation. Last year, another layer was added: glowing Christmas lights under the fabric, with a thermostat that turns them on when the temperature drops below 35 degrees.
But most of the plants in the garden aren’t wrapped in cloth — and some aren’t even hidden in rooms. In the newest area, just as you exit the last formal, enclosed space, are three species of milkweed (Asclepias), several aniseed hyssops (Agastache), and Verbena bonariensis among the crazy swirl of foliage and pollen and nectar-filled flowers.
The target? “A hole in every leaf,” Mr. Gwynne said.
Come get it, beneficial insects. Dinner is served – not in a formal dining room, but in the Pollinator, as the newest unwalled garden space is called.
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A way to gardenand a book of the same name.
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