Cultivating a Colonial Garden

Traditional in style, this garden’s air of graceful maturity belies its youth.

Written and photographed by Carole Ottesen

A tiny garden pond, encircled by boxwoods, is bright with daffodils and the white flowers of creeping mazus. For Winston, the resident King Charles Spaniel, the garden is his playground.

Parker Jennings and Chuck Prillaman share a love for the classic beauty of centuries past that is evident in their house and in their garden. Their furniture is mostly American antiques from the Federal Period that might easily furnish a museum. Fitting that collection into the house they bought in Clifton in October 2001 required, says Jennings, “an addition designed around the furniture.”

Although the addition involved numerous alterations such as deleting windows, it was by far the easy part; it harmonized the inside of the house with the furniture in one stroke. Far harder was the creation of a garden in keeping with their traditional style. Despite obstacles, Jennings and Prillaman have managed not only to bring the garden into line with their taste for the traditional, but to give it a look of graceful maturity. In just four short years, they have succeeded so brilliantly that their garden was one of five included in the 2005 Virginia Historic Garden Week in their area.

It was quick, but it wasn’t easy. Evoking the 18th century on what was basically a seven acre field was an effort that took a lot of imagination and even more work.

Chuck Prillaman and Parker Jennings make good use of their outdoor room,
often dining on produce from their vegetable garden.

“We didn’t inherit much of anything,” says Jennings. The house’s former owners “had several horses and used the whole property as horse pasture.” There were no flower beds. There was no lawn and no patio. There were no shrubs and “only a few mature trees.” And before the men could even think about planting anything, they had to clear away the detritus of equestrian husbandry.

“We had to take down barbed wire fences. I brought in dumpsters and burned trash,“ says Jennings. It was an undertaking that would have daunted most people. But Jennings and Prillaman are not most people. They came to the project with unusual talent and qualifications.

Both are horticulturists with a combined store of expertise that can be measured in spades. Jennings has worked in nurseries and collected boxwoods since he was in high school. He studied horticulture at Virginia Tech and, today, manages the nursery department at Lowe’s in Chantilly. Prillaman attended Du Page Horticultural School in Illinois, where he “took a specialty greenhouse course.” For the past 15 years, he has run his own interior plant maintenance business, C.P. Plantscapes in Sterling.

The pair put their expertise to work immediately. Even as he cleared the land, Jennings was mentally “mapping out beds.” Once sited, the beds served as the repositories for green yard refuse. Being able to dump “leaves and grass clippings” simplified clean up while it defined the beds and added a valuable mulch of organic material to the soil.

From the beginning, Jennings and Prillaman agreed that they needed “a space outside that was large enough for a gathering,” says Jennings. Today, there is a spacious patio just steps from the front door. Necessity dictated both the location of the patio and its composition-pea gravel and brick.

“The patio ended up there because it is the only level area” near the house, says Jennings. As for the surfacing, says Prillaman, pea gravel and brick “were an easy way for us to do a big area.” But, he adds, the brick they used isn’t just any old brick.

Some of the property’s few original trees anchor a shady retreat.

“The patio is edged in antique brick that’s been tumbled to give it old-looking character,” says Prillaman. The brick may be unusual, but its installation was decidedly do-it-yourself.

“The brick has been tamped into place real tight,” says Prillaman, explaining that the brick edging keeps the pea gravel from spilling out.

“Pea gravel was affordable,” adds Jennings. And, in addition to its being an inexpensive surface for a large area, pea gravel has Colonial antecedents: “Mount Vernon uses pea gravel for surfacing,” adds Jennings. And the tumbled brick augments the historical feel.

So, too, does a white colonnade that borders one side of the patio. It lends the house the symmetry of a Georgian edifice. “The colonnade is in line with the front edge of the house,” says Prillaman. “It balances the other side of the house where we have the garage.”

The colonnade, festooned with two varieties of wisteria, adds to the notion that this house and garden belong to a gracious and bygone era. It compliments the patio, while its columns frame views of the spacious and rolling front lawn. The columns provide, as well, a sense of enclosure that is enhanced by the planting of shrubs around the patio’s perimeter. Framing a fountain are camellias, azaleas and magnolias, choice, but climate-appropriate subjects that one might expect to find in a Virginia garden. But not all of the shrubs around the patio are hardy.

A graceful colonnade lends symmetry to the house and a comfortable
sense of enclosure to the outdoor room.

“In the patio we’ve planted Chinese fan palms in the ground for a Charleston look. One year the Chinese fan palms went almost to Christmas time before they folded,” remembers Prillaman. Through his business, he is able to replace the tropical Chinese fan palms cheaply and is thus able to use them expendably as one would annuals. Other luckier tropical plants are housed in containers that allow them to be taken inside over the winter.

“We have 50 pots of tropicals sitting here,” says Prillaman. “There are Australian tree ferns, fishtail palms, standard gardenias, and taro type caladium relatives.” The potted plants add to the lush and luxuriant vegetation encircling the patio, making it a wonderfully private and protected place to entertain.

“We love to have people come over” to share a meal on the patio, says Prillaman. And when they have guests, he says, we “serve produce right out of the vegetable garden.”

A spring-blooming camellia is part of a privacy layer
that shelters the outdoor living and dining space.

“We eat out of the garden constantly,” he adds. “Last night it was beets.” Other home grown specialties include an heirloom long-headed pumpkin that they like to serve roasted with lamb. There are cucumbers, and heirloom tomatoes‹yellow, striped Roma and orange ox heart, all grown from seed. “There is fennel, celery root, asparagus, cabbages, and I don’t know how many varieties of peppers,” says Prillaman. “Even in the dead of winter we’re still eating stuff from the garden‹butternut squash and corn salad.”

The vegetable garden is as pretty as it is productive. It’s a Williamsburg pattern with four quadrants separated by paths around a central circular bed. The crushed clam shells that line the paths were transported from Lewes, Del. In a small pen adjacent to the garden, fancy-feathered heirloom chickens add another old-fashioned touch.

On a May afternoon, the vegetable garden brims with the green of burgeoning vegetables. Highlighting that green are the bright colors of flowers in full bloom.

“Larkspur, nigella and poppies‹all self seeding annuals,” says Jennings, provide an abundant and spontaneous show. He chose these particular plants for their ability to produce quick and opulent blooms that have the added advantage of repeating every year. The effect is of an old-fashioned cottage garden that has taken years to mature.

Adjacent to the outdoor room, the fountain is a focal point that provides
white noise and a cool drink for the owners’ puppy.

Not far from the vegetable garden is Jenning’s and Prillaman’s latest project: the pool garden, which surrounds a pool installed by Maryland Pools. Begun in the spring of 2005, the pool garden has already grown beyond the just-planted-new-garden look of oceans of mulch around islands of plants. Jennings chose “quick-to-establish, ’American style’ plants” such as ornamental grasses to develop this area rapidly and make for easy maintenance. In another year, the pool garden, like the patio and the vegetable garden, will look like it has always been there.

In just four short years, Jennings and Prillaman have worked magic, turning seven acres of horse pasture into elegant gardens that seem to wear the patina of age. To do so, they employed horticultural sleight of hand, masses of imagination, endless hours of work, and, adds Jennings, “plenty of manure.”