Hello! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. I spent the last week in Philadelphia and Boston with Charlie and Nick, looking at colleges. It was a bit hot and humid, but we managed to have a lot of fun. I highly recommend the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. What an astounding collection of art! You also won't be disappointed in her house and interior courtyard garden.
At Patina Farm, we did manage to put our bedroom together before I left...
Our focus at the moment is completing the gardens around the house. We are thoroughly enjoying our collaboration with landscape designer Margie Grace and her team headed by John Oberholtzer!
We've separated the areas closest to the house into a few different gardens. Outside of Steve's office, we've placed the rose garden. Originally, this space was going to planted with only roses, until we were inspired by this charming garden at one of our favorite local restaurants, Suzanne's Cuisine.
Suzanne's garden is a spectacular combination of roses and companion plants.
A soft Germander hedge surrounds the planting area and is a bit less formal than a boxwood edging.
Lamb's ear and various lavender varieties add silvery green and texture as well as a delicious aroma.
Here is our Suzanne's inspired garden. We planted several different varieties of David Austin roses with geranium, morning glory groundcover, lamb's ear, Santa Barbara daisies, and lavender.
Margie's team is also finishing the installation of our kitchen garden. If you look closely, you can see that our bunny, Hector Fuzzbottom, is enjoying this enclosed (and yummy) space...
The kitchen garden is between my office and the chicken coop.
In back of the house, we envisioned a cool green garden, using a limited palette of boxwood, campanula, wisteria vines, and blue hydrangea.
Here is a view from the other side of this garden. We are still in searh of the right farm table and pots to soften the large expanse of Hanley Gold gravel.
The guest house entrance will soon be covered in roses.
In the front of the house, we chose white floribunda roses, catmint, little ollies and lavender as the main plant material. A few cypress as well as a Meyer lemon tree were planted in this area and will quickly provide shade for the glass hallway by the tower.
Rose vines and Parthenocissus (Boston ivy) will eventually cover the walls.
Here is the view of the front of the house from the pedestrian gate. Seeing the house between the Sycamore trees is a dream come true!
It's hard for me to believe that it was only a year ago when we started to build Patina Farm on around our tree...
As always, please feel free to ask questions in the comment section of this post!
Have a great week!
xo
Brooke
