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Introduction: The Path to Brandywine Cottage
Gardening often brings me to my knees. By this I mean more than the planting, weeding, and fussing, the bended-knee, manicure-destroying grunt work that all of us do. The beauty and diversity of plants often stop me in my tracks, and I am never satisfied to simply gaze at these wonders from above. I get down on my knees to get a closer look, touching the plants and the soil they grow in, a communion that connects me to the earth and to life on Earth in an immediate, almost electric way. Many of my favorite flowers are tiny, their differences minute and seemingly inconsequential to the average observer, but I love examining all the facets of their intricate beauty. I especially love when someone kneels beside me, so I can share my fascination with a kindred spirit. Over a lifetime of varied horticultural pursuits, I have learned that the closer I look, the more astounded I become, and the more in love I fall with plants and the gardens in which they reside.

I have been a passionate plantsman and collector since I was a child, and Brandywine Cottage, the 2-acre garden I tend with Michael Alderfer in southeastern Pennsylvania, is home to unusual plants from all over the world. The collector in me thinks each individual specimen is beautiful, of course; otherwise I would not bother growing them. But the designer in me wants more than a botanical garden with each genus grown in its separate bed. Plants are the basis of my garden artistry, serving as pieces in a design puzzle, as colors in a palette, as elements of a sculpture. As with artists in any medium, the more we learn about these vehicles for our expression and the more passionate we are about them, the more ways we will find to use them and the more beautiful our gardens will become.

Combining plants in a multitude of ways, based on their habits and moods, how they live and even how they die, gives my garden successive layers of interest that extend into every month of the year. I use the term “layers” as shorthand for a design process by which I try to maximize the beauty and interest from each planted space, by combining complementary plants that either grow and bloom together or follow each other in succession. While succession planting is part of this design approach, my idea of layering goes beyond just the plants to encompass the development of each bed and how the beds relate to each other and the garden as a whole. More than just making sure one blooming plant follows another, layering is the art of creating a series of peak garden moments, the anticipation of which gets me out of bed in the morning.

Trying to describe something visual in words is like trying to write about the taste of a complex food. How would you describe the taste of a curry? I could list all the spices that go into it, come up with a few adjectives like hot and spicy, but none of this would tell you exactly how it makes you feel when you first taste it. A layered garden like mine is complex, like a curry, with depths that are not all apparent at first glance and which can be savored in many ways, at many levels. My hellebores can be seen as simply beautiful; but my hellebore breeding can be an exercise in mathematical probability that I will explain to anyone who wants to listen. And in my layered garden, my hellebore bed is more than just hellebores: otherwise why would I want to look at it once these flowers were done blooming? Layering allows me to use all the many plants I collect in exciting ways that highlight the individuals while melding the collections into a coherent and cohesive whole.

Countless people have provided me with the ideas that, sifted and composted in my mind, ended up in the ground at the Brandywine Cottage garden. Not all gardens are designed in layers, but layering is a feature of many of the gardens I love and is practiced by many of the gardeners I admire. I certainly make no claim that the “layered garden” (or anything else in this book) is my own invention. What I hope to offer, in the text and especially in the photographs and captions, is an intimate look at how one such garden has been conceived and constructed. Just as we can learn much by the peering into individual flowers, the close examination of any good garden, along with insights into the minds and the methods of its gardeners, can teach many lessons.