Hello GPODers! Today we’re escaping the midsummer heat by visiting a beautiful Pennsylvania shade garden posted by Eric Sternfels. Between lush ferns, colorful containers, blue garden accents, and tranquil seating areas, this garden feels like a cool retreat on a hot summer day. Eric says:
I’m posting photos from a friend’s garden in Windmoor, Pennsylvania. Her name is Lucrecia Robbins.
Turquoise seating pads are associated with a series of glazed pots placed throughout this long garden with winding paths of wood mulch.
This is the side of a one-car garage that owner Lucretia has turned into an art studio or gallery for local painters to exhibit on special weekends. A large hosta ‘Thumb and Substance’ (Hosta ‘Thumb and Substance’, zones 3 to 8) adds scale to small pots with geraniums (Pelargonium cv., annuals) and tuberous begonias (Begonia cv., zones 9 to 11).
This is what the art studio looks like. A few years ago, Lucrezia held summer art-making sessions for young girls from a nearby private girls’ school. But now a local artist is exhibiting small, unframed landscape paintings.
The thin flowerbed on the left contains sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis, zones 3-9), black fern (Athyrium niponicum var. pictum, zones 3-8), hay-scented fern (Dennstaedtia punctilobula, zones 3-8), and fall fern (Dryopteris erythrosora, zones 5-8) A variety of ferns live there, including: Fasting yew (Taxus cv., zones 4-7) helps protect the table and chairs from the wide path to the left.
The front of this home welcomes a cobalt blue pot that mirrors the front door color and a wicker chair in a pale blue hue with a navy and white striped pad.
Seashells collected from a nearby seafood market rather than from the beach provide an interesting visual path into the Madonna sculpture.
The 4- to 5-foot-tall Madonna Trumpet Lily (Lilium candidum cv., Zones 6 to 9) is studded with decorative posts of cobalt blue birds.
Pots of annuals decorate beds filled with ferns and yews. A stone path and wooden mulch chips frame the scene on the left.
Thank you, Eric, for sharing this cool and peaceful summer retreat with us!
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