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Atlock Farm in Somerset , New Jersey , is just an hour ’s drive from Manhattan , but the distance might best be evaluate in century . Here , on the gently sprawling pastureland of an old dairy farm , Ken Selody , a garden designer and old - schoolhouse gardener ( “ I develop what I sell ” ) , offer unusual annuals , perennial , succulents , tropicals , and topiary for sales event or tear . On this crisp November day , his familiar patchwork of glasshouse and gardens is fantabulous with the colors of former autumn . The historical antecedent for Selody ’s greenhouses is the drinking glass - and - iron Crystal Palace , a gargantuan preassemble sweet of a conservatory designed by the designer / designer Joseph Paxton and first erected in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 ( the World ’s Fair of its Clarence Shepard Day Jr. ) . While Selody ’s airy charge plate tunnels are more mild in their outward appearance , the view inside trigger the same astonishment and delight in me that the Victorians must have felt at the sight of all those foreign plants newly useable for up - close inspection . One greenhouse is make full with twirly , swirly tillandsia , bromeliads that hang like ornament or cascade down conducting wire frames , gathering nutrient from the atmosphere ; by rights , their provenance should be Whoville rather than Latin America .
To view the full gallery please consult toThe New Victorians SlideshowAlso relate : Victorian Gardens in PrintandOde on a straight-laced UrnPhoto by : Piotr Redlinski .
“ There is no better place to be than a greenhouse in February , ” say Selody . “ You quetch the snow off your boots and walk into the Torrid Zone . With all the moisture , even the air is chirpy . ” A flame nettle I ’m mesmerized by was first brought to Britain from the rain forests of Java in the 19th century by professional plant hunters — botanist - explorer who spoil the distant ambit of the British Empire to give a grow market for tropical plants back home . The inflow of unfamiliar species sparked a vogue , mostly among the newly affluent , for bedding out passel of attender , brightly dark-skinned exotics . sign with a climate outstandingly mild for such a gamey parallel of latitude , the English could enjoy the showy presentation from early springiness to the first frost .
Selody ’s hundred or so coleus varieties let in shade - know nineteenth - century heirlooms as well as sunshine - tolerant twenty-first - century cultivars , with wildly dissimilar folio shapes and clear , deep saturated pigment . “ As a designer , I ’m more interested in the issue of foliage than anything else , ” Selody says . “ There is a natural patterned advance gardeners go through that culminates in the unconditional making love of plants even when they ’re not in bloom . A industrial plant ’s internal beauty is in the foliage . ”
We come upon some of the topiary that Selody is known for , a unadulterated face of his simultaneously rigorous and relaxed style . Each coleus “ standard”—that is , a exclusive stem with a testicle on top — is a divine revelation . Unlike a topiary of Vinca minor , bay , ivy , or box , the ball in this case is feathery , really more like plume . “ Some plant lend themselves to certain chassis more than others , ” Selody say . “ Experience teach what works and what does n’t . ” His approach is likewise broadminded when it comes to container planting , particularly the urns so beloved by the Victorians . “ Almost anything looks good in an urn , ” he says , offer up as an example one in which the soil is cover by undercoat - hugging echeveria , spiky succulent tinged with purple , out of which uprise the marginal knobby stems of a vastly prominent succulent , a kalanchoe with a canopy of fuzzy grizzly - green leaves on top . The fact that you’re able to see through the arrangement is crucial to Selody : “ I like its contemporaneousness , even in an old - fashioned hurl - iron urn . ”
While Selody ’s single style is straight off recognizable , his is hardly the only garden where the bequest of the Victorians is in evidence right now . More urn , spilling over with interlacing annuals , mark a half - Accho ring by a plain picket fence in rural northwesterly Connecticut . This is the individual garden of Peter Wooster , an interior architect by profession , who divided his time between commercial and residential design projects in Manhattan and the country before forsaking the city entirely . Twenty - three years in the making , this garden has , in the last decade , become a collaboration with nurseryman Rob Girard , who ’s assumed an even larger role in its perpetual phylogeny since Wooster meet a stroke four years ago .
At the centre of the meticulously butt garden is a showstopping Victorian Circle , which get a fresh injection of colorful annuals every year . This kind of blueprint component satisfied the Victorian desire for geometric layout — a mark of Greco-Roman civilization in the eyes of an expanding and preponderantly urban in-between class only just discovering the pleasure of a second home , the leisure time to garden , and an ever broadening idea of what it was potential to grow .
Although visitor often equate Wooster ’s garden to a museum — there looks to be one of everything in his expansive assemblage of industrial plant , which extends inside the house to the fancy - folio begonias and other houseplant displayed all around — nothing seems out of place . Exotics like banana , castor noggin , and jungly foliage all thrive in this temperate - geographical zone garden , continents away from where they originated . They ’re a reminder that hardiness ratings are simply rules of thumb that use to a wide geographic area . Recognizing microclimates and plotting plants properly have allowed Wooster to “ push the zone ” as effectively as collectors of tropicals did 150 geezerhood ago .
Like Wooster , 27 - year - old farmer Annie Novak has a knifelike understanding of what it means to test the boundaries of nature , though her immediate surroundings are far less bucolic : an industrial block in the Greenpoint neighbourhood of Brooklyn , New York , which fronts the East River . You have to climb up three stories to get to the 6,000 square metrical foot that comprise Eagle Street Rooftop Farm , now in its 2d year . In that inadequate time , the aerie has become intact to community house physician whose longing for connecter to the land is something any priggish urbanite would have know . Locals shop at Eagle Street ’s Sunday market and patronize neighborhood restaurants that feature the farm ’s produce on their computer menu . Some are members of Novak ’s squad of volunteers . “ To secern you the verity , ” she aver proudly , “ I ’m growing more Farmer than veggie . ”
A “ green - roof ” garden is tricky , Novak says , first of all because of the requisite soilless growing sensitive , which is lightweight and efficient at keep water but too shallow for many veg . “ What plants really want is soil that ’s alive , ” Novak adds . Unable to produce the kitchen range of produce that supported the domestic economy in the puritanical geological era , when an average kitchen garden might control 40 different vegetables , Novak oversees a more tightly curated listing of harvest that includes organic tomato , cultivated carrot , cucumbers , hot peppers , eggplant , lettuces , arugula , kale , chard , radish plant , and herb . This time of year , the buyers of contribution in Eagle Street ’s CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture ) group will offer literal seed money for the forthcoming growing season ; in return , they ’ll have regular assignation of the freshest produce imaginable .
During my sojourn , an Eagle Street bee graze among the calendula , then heads in an unwavering line back to the hive . This farm may be securely rooted in its immediate neighborhood , but its bee are not . “ When you take a frame out of the beehive , ” Novak say , “ you’re able to tell where the bees are suffer pollen . ” canvass the honeycomb within the figure , she says , is like looking at a map . “ Once I pull one out and it was all red . The bee had gone over to the maraschino cherry tree factory in Red Hook , several miles away , and gotten into the dumpster . ” Steampunk bees .
Redrawing the lines between urban and rural was , of course , a major preoccupation of the Victorian age . The map of the Great Western Railway published inCassell ’s Weekly Dispatch Atlasin 1863 shows lines branching out like so many capillary vessel from major cities into formerly isolated parts of the countryside . Along with increased leisure time , this railway system of rules allowed urban indweller aching for the scent of sodomist and the sight of thing grow to make excursions , often to places of corking smasher .
Only the most fortunate among them would have been capable to build a retreat on the scale of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden , spread out over three moist , shady Akka overlooking Puget Sound in Washington State . Here , conservator Richie Steffen supervise a collection of 240 or so native and nonnative ferns . “ There is something about ferns , ” he sound out . “ They are so intricate . Their feathery , soft look summate a unequalled grain to any garden . ” And , as any pteridologist will tell you , it ’s just a slippery , gametophyte - covered gradient from a calf love on fern , the plant most associated with the Victorians , to an fixation with stumperies .
These artfully arranged snarl of uprooted tree stumps call to mind nothing so much as the gothic fantasies of Tim Burton . Being very thick , soapbox take a long time to decompose , and in the meantime , their profoundly fissure bark cater the pure home ground for fern , mosses , lichen , and small woodland creatures . A period conceit , perhaps , but the Victorians knew how efficacious the enveloping semiwilderness could be in shut out life ’s static . The Pacific Northwest , with its forests of western carmine cedar tree , Douglas fir , and Western California fern , is a treasure trove of stumps — logging drove the economy here through the 1970s — and of woodland spot in which to site them .
Almost three years ago , Steffen and fellow dining table members of the Hardy Fern Foundation , based at the Rhododendron Species Foundation & Botanical Garden in Federal Way , Washington , create a stumpery by upcycling nine dump trucks full of erstwhile stumps destine for the Grant Wood chipper . Encompassing half an acre , it is one of the big stumperies now in existence . Catch it at the right time of day — or by moonlight — and it projects a primeval timber that is both striking and vaguely disquieting .
One of the thousand ferns that colonize the same garden is the delicate shield fern ( Polystichum setiferumvar . Bevis ) . “ It ’s one of the most graceful and delicate of the old tight-laced cultivars , ” Steffen explains . “ And it ’s usable , thanks to tissue culture . ” Unlike most ferns , Bevis does n’t reproduce by spores , and it does n’t separate readily , either ; that ’s why case-by-case specimens have up to now been costly and hard to come by . But these days , laboratory micropropagation yields a bumper crop of steel - novel small plants . “ This can chance with lots of different species , ” suppose Steffen . “ Totally unsung but really swell plant are finally within reach of the horticulture public . ”
What ’s more , you do n’t need a half - crazy Accho in which to grow them . In fact , all you demand is a terrarium . This type of industrial plant - filled microcosm , studied by contemporaries of third - grader , was once call a Wardian guinea pig , after its inventor , Nathaniel Ward . A London doctor and ardent amateur natural scientist , he bewail the toll pollution accept on his garden ; in 1829 , he circumstantially discovered that a common fern ( Dryopteris filix - mas ) boom in the humid surroundings of a plastered methamphetamine bottleful . He set out experimenting in earnest . His Wardian cases , idealistic for keeping delicate plant alive on long sea voyages , were instantly espouse by plant hunters ; at last they could transport tropical species , including fern , with a high enough rate of succeeder to make plant hunting profitable and plant life take in feasible .
The pet of the DIY crowd , terrariums are everywhere right now , from the crafty websiteEtsy.comto New York ’s Museum of Modern Art , where a plant - fulfil installation create by artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes is on view through February 28 , 2011 . And just 26 blocking northward , at the American Museum of Natural History , you ’ll find Hazel Davies , handler of keep exhibits , who will soon be reprise a democratic toad frog exhibition in one of the museum ’s picture gallery . In the workshop where she get together living tableaux to satisfy the abiding urge to get the outdoors inside and the faraway nearer , Davy has created a striking terrarium expressly for GARDEN DESIGN .
Housed in a 38 - gallon pet store fish tank , the terrarium is an integral ecosystem in illumination . A abbreviated survey of its leafy hillock and mossy ravines reveals dwarf umbrella tree aboriginal to Taiwan , Kentia decoration from the Solomon Islands , maidenhair fern ( New Zealand ) , rubber plants ( north - east India , southerly Indonesia ) , and bromeliads ( South America ) . That flash of sapphire ? That ’s a blue poisonous substance batrachian from Surinam . peer into this lavish landscape painting , you begin to grok what it was to survive in an era when our sympathy of the innate world and admittance to far - flung parts of it were expand by leaps and boundary . And our sense of wonderment at it all is as powerful as ever .
