Symphony in their Garden

Moving from planting a nice garden to creating an inspired garden, is like a violinist elevating her playing beyond perfect bowing and perfect tune to sweet art by adding something uniquely hers to each note.

Holly and Carl Socolow have all the technical gardening skill anyone would ever need plus a dose of creative talent to jazz things up.  Carl describes their garden as, “an atonal symphony,” but I find very little dissonance. Striving for continuity, they reach a balance of simplicity and interest.

Carl and Holly Socolow under climbing roses in their Camp Hill, PA, garden

Landscapers often rely on repetition to achieve simplicity. Multiple spirea in a row, backed with even more stella d’oro daylily, finished with alternating Russian sage and autumn joy sedum. That effect can be sterile.  There are few surprises or framed views that make you stop and look closely.

Backyard gardeners can constantly fall in love with new plants and rather than planning a cohesive look, they try things here and there.  That effect can be charming, but it’s not the continuity that the Socolow’s are creating.

To keep harmony but ensure that funky rhythms run throughout, the Socolow’s studiously mix texture and sizes of leaves and flowers while avoiding sudden changes.   They also mix foliage colors and choose plants that are interesting even when they are not in flower.

There is a fine bladed grass punctuated with red shrub roses.  There is the tiny orange flowered butterfly weed with large-flowered burnt orange echinacea sundown popping up behind and in it. There is a hosta with an extra delicate, yellow-blooming bleeding heart, corydalis lutea dancing through it and grounded with yellow green sedum angelina. This works extremely well because the color is the same green, keeping the pairing simple, while the difference in texture and leaf size with the spark of small, charming yellow flowers give it that extra added interest.

The scale of the plantings is balanced. On the west side you have a bubbling large pond banked by a few tall plants of similar texture in different colors. They use spiked-leaved tabletop pine in grey blue, sea holly in blue with red Japanse maple on the north end of the pond.  At the back of the property, a curving border leads your eye to a bank of dark leaved exbury azaleas and up to a tall thin Japanese maple. A mix of plants with similar leaf shapes provides visual weight to the east side. Here, they used a yellow spotted-leaved acuba next to several rhododendron ascending in height to a nice sweet bay magnolia.  Underneath all the shrubs with elliptical evergreen leaves is a variegated hakone grass that pulls yellow from the acuba through the planting.

All this is lovely to view from their elevated deck covered in new dawn climbing roses and wisteria.Years ago, when the Socolow’s decided to add the deck, they designed it around a wisteria plant they’d had for years.  The deck was built so the stout vines of their beloved plant could go up through an area between the stairs and the deck, then lace through a pergola covering part of the deck.
Upon completion of the deck, something almost unthinkable happened.

To plant lovers, a death of a plant can set off a period of mourning.  But the almost immediate demise of their wisteria, incited a bit of indignation because, well, wisteria is pretty vigorous.  Some would say it’s impossible to kill.
The Socolow’s were already savvy gardeners. As with most impressive gardens, their’s is not a result of a recent mass planting.  Over 20 years time, plants have been established, moved, yanked out and plants have died.  So as gardeners do, they tried again. They replaced the wisteria and it now covers the roof of the outdoor room they enjoy on their deck.  The good news is that wisteria number one never bloomed. Wisteria number two blooms freely.

Perennial begonia

Unlike some of the plants in their garden, the wisteria does not have a name.  Holly names her plants.  That’s love.  And the Socolow’s are dedicated. In the growing season, they spend all free moments maintaining the music in their gardens.

Their talents beyond the garden?  Holly works in human services in crisis response in Lancaster and Carl does commercial and advertising photography and was the 2006 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography.  They live, surrounded by gardens, in Camp Hill, PA.

Plantings surrounding the pond on the west end of the gardens