Raleigh, Chapel Hill clubs host upcoming garden tours

An ancient oak grows by the driveway of the Coker/Burns house in Chapel Hill. The university is nearby, as is the busy heart of Franklin Street, but it’s quiet and calm here. There’s an old-style see-saw and a wooden swing that hangs at the proper height for a young child, though the child in question is likely long-grown.

For all its early 20th century charm, elements of the landscape are wholly 2016. Tastefully tucked at the base of the tree is a small sign with a QR code: scan it with your smartphone and a page with a short biography of this at least 108-year-old tree appears. Similar signage accompanies the other plants on this 3-acre lot: a Norway spruce with graceful down-swept branches, or a massive cedar of Lebanon, the sheer size of this slow-growing tree a testament to its age.

“That it could tell its story,” says Chapel Hill Garden Club tour chair Ty Elliot while wistfully looking up through its branches.

For its biennial tour, the Chapel Hill Garden Club has embraced modern technology. The members are actively increasing their use of social media streams like Facebook and Twitter, and they’ve seen online registration grow since the previous tour in 2014. With QR codes to be found throughout the eight gardens in the 2016 tour and in its literature, this year’s event is especially interactive.

Tradition meets modernity in Raleigh, too, at the Oakwood Garden Club’s Annual Garden Tour and Victorian Tea. It’s a hip enclave filled with young professionals and tastemakers, but also a historical, established neighborhood: the Oakwood tour seeks to include both.

A garden tour, as these two clubs believe, should celebrate both the established and the innovative – old growth and new.

“We have members in the (Oakwood) Garden Club who are in their late 20s and early 30s, all the way up to people in their 80s,” says Anita Blomme Pinther, a former club president. “The membership changes as people move in and out of the neighborhood.”

Oakwood’s gardens, both on and off this year’s tour, include a modern mix of edible and ornamental plants: one neighbor, Pinther says, planted an herb bed beside the sidewalk and encouraged her neighbors and people walking by to take what they needed. Through the years, tours have featured a wide spectrum, from upscale lawns with koi ponds to homes with rain gardens.

“There’s one very large home with a beautiful lot – it’s like a park,” Pinther says of this year’s tour featuring four gardens. “There’s another home with more of a side yard than a backyard, and it’s really neat to look at how people plan a side yard as opposed to a backyard.” Even the largest properties, she says, can provide small, digestible ideas – people may find specific plants, say, or edging ideas that have not occurred to them.

Back in Chapel Hill, for instance, native flame and pinxter azaleas offer brilliant, assertive shades of orange and softened pinks at the Coker/Burns house; homeowners can’t rush ancient oaks, as tower over this yard and the nearby Fitch-Sweet garden, but they can take note of appealing or unexpected flowers or design features.

“This is a collector’s garden,” Chapel Hill Garden Club member Christine Ellestad says, pointing out the Fitch-Sweet garden’s sheer variety of plants. Take a closer look, she encourages as distinctive flowers catch her practiced eye: this garden deserves close attention.

It’s a carefully planned plot, sketched by noted landscape designer Chip Callaway. The garden falls away gracefully behind the house and toward Bolin Creek. Tall oaks offer cooling shade, and the eye is drawn to a single bench at the far end. It’s tidy and organized like a classical European garden, but asymmetrical, too, like the reined-in and refined cousin to a rambling Southern lawn. Here low brick walls pay homage to Chapel Hill; at Coker/Burns, enormous granite boulders do so.

“There’s a sense of graciousness and relaxation here that’s rare in most modern landscapes,” Ellestad says, walking toward the park area designed around the outcropping. There’s history here – the Coker of Coker/Burns refers to early 20th century botanist William Chamber Coker, who lived here. His hand is still felt at UNC, where he was the first professor of botany, at this garden, and in the Chapel Hill Garden Club: Louise Venable Coker, his wife, was an early club president.

“Not only is it the 20th anniversary of our tour, but it’s the 85th anniversary of our club. Furthermore, it’s the 50th anniversary of the Botanical Garden,” Elliot says, standing among ancient trees but holding a smartphone: celebrating the past doesn’t mean abandoning the present, after all.

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 2:45 AM with the headline "Raleigh, Chapel Hill clubs host upcoming garden tours."