Desert Island Gardens

In Desert Island Gardens, a game started by Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle and posted about by danger garden, players choose 5 gardens, 1 book and 1 item to take with them on a desert island. I'm hopelessly provincial so most of my garden choices are local.

1) The sisters' garden in Chapel Hill is the quintessential Southern Garden with dogwoods and lots of azaleas, along with hundreds of tulips and many other flowers. It's locally famous and hundreds of people visit every Easter.

2) Blogger Carolyn Aiken's garden on beautiful Prince Edward Island. It's the ultimate romantic style garden.

3) The Coker Arboretum on the UNC Chapel Hill campus in Chapel Hill. It's a scenic and peaceful oasis in the middle of a beautiful campus. Originally it was a swampy area where the faculty grazed their cattle (I've actually seen pictures in the alumni magazine of this) but the swampy areas have been turned into a stream and the area into a lovely garden with many interesting plants.

4) The NC Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, set in the piedmont of NC. There are display gardens featuring mountain and coastal plain plants by the older buildings, as well as a medicinal garden with some non-native plants, and more display gardens by the newer buildings. They have a seed distribution program for members (non-members can also buy the seeds for a small price) and it's just a great place for learning about native plants. There are also hilly trails that are great for bird watching and even seeing flying squirrels.

Plymouth Rose-Gentian

Grass pink orchids

Pitcher Plants

5) My own, because I made it and I love seeing all of the wildlife thriving in it.

OK, in case 5 is against the rules, I'd pick somewhere that isn't really a garden but looks like one on a grand scale: Enlow Fork, Pennsylvania. Large glades full of blue-eyed Mary under an open canopy along a river, with Virginia bluebells, several species of trillium, Mayapple, violets, and wild native geraniums.

Picking one book is difficult. Very difficult. But in the end I would choose A Southern Garden by Elizabeth Lawrence, and the item a shovel. If I got off the island I'd want to visit Longwood Gardens because Dirr mentions them often in his Manuel of Woody Landscape Plants.

Changes in the Gimghoul Road neighborhood, Part II

The Gimghoul Road neighborhood in Chapel Hill is surrounded by Battle Woods, which has
never been developed and is a place of natural beauty, with hardwoods, Piedmont azaleas,

and fringetrees.

The Gimghoul Road neighborhood has always had beauty and character. Each house is unique and many on Gimghoul Road have lush green lawns and beautiful specimen trees.

This house has a much larger stretch of lawn than most of the others.

American Beech

White Oak

Glandon Road, the second road that forms the loop that is the neighborhood, is shadier than Gimghoul and most of the yards are wooded.

There have always been dogwoods and some azaleas here, their fallen petals
like a brilliant reflection of the flowers above on the sandstone paths.

In the last few years there have been the addition of more gardens in the neighborhood.

Baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight'

Iris pallida

Euphorbia

Japanese roof iris and woodland phlox

I like the cottage garden in front of this small yellow house, with its rosemary and salvias.

Baptisia australis

The residents were no doubt inspired by the famous Sisters' Garden, which is colorful in both spring and summer.

Larkspur

and lilies in the sister's back yard.

I hope you have enjoyed this tour of the Gimghoul Road neighborhood. It is a wonderful place.

Changes in the Gimghoul Road neighborhood

I started this post with the intention of publishing it for last week's Blooming Friday theme of "Metamorphasis", but obviously I am late. I have been visiting the Gimghoul Road neighborhood over the last 30 years and it's my favorite place in Chapel Hill.

Like all neighborhoods, the Gimghoul Road neighborhood is changing and evolving. Gimghoul Road is home to the garden of twin sisters Bernice Wade and Barbara Stiles, which itself has undergone a lot of changes in the 57 years that Bernice Wade has lived there. A children's book has been written about the garden, but I wish there was a book for grown-ups documenting the changes in the property, with photographs and interviews with the sisters.

Originally the Gimghoul Road neighborhood housed many faculty members from UNC. Now it looks as though many of the houses have changed hands and work is being done on several of the houses which had started to look a little run-down.

The plaque on this freshly landscaped and manicured yard reads: "The last residence of Frank Porter Graham, February 16, 1972" (the date of his death). Graham was a graduate, professor, and 19-year President of UNC.

This new house was built where St. Thomas More Church used to stand.

Some of the houses maintain their patina and compactness of use

while others have been extensively but tastefully renovated and expanded. This house was always in beautiful shape but must be twice as big as it was originally. The expansion was almost seamlessly executed though

starting with the breezeway-type room and 2nd storey addition and extending to the right.

Over the years more azaleas have been added too. :)

All of the lawns in this neighborhood are like green velvet.

Chapel Hill is famous for its stone walls, both mortar and dry stacked

and along with house remodeling there has been a lot of new stonework, brickwork and landscaping.

In addition to the house expansions and other construction, there has been in a change in the yards of this neighborhood. Inspired by the twin sisters, more people in the neighborhood now have gardens than they did several years ago.

Who wouldn't be inspired by this?

Front border in the garden of Bernice Wade and Barbara Stiles

back garden

to be continued...