A Garden in the City

• What was once the front of the house is now the back, and a woodland garden is filled with massive plantings of 'Frances Williams' 'Krossa Regal' (with a lavender flower) and blue-green 'Blue Angel' hostas beneath walnut, beech and cedar trees.
• Close to the house, garden rooms are more formal. Inside clipped boxwood hedges tall white 'Casa Blanca' lilies, like lanterns, retain light during evening parties. An antique astrolabe makes an elegant focal point.
• A large, multi-stem beech tree provides canopy for underplantings of yellow 'Hyperion' and peach 'Catherine Woodbury' daylilies, white-blooming hosta 'Blue Angel' and an urn overflowing with pink million bells, silver falls and 'Cambridge blue' salvia.
• A long stone staircase is softened by the textures and colors of 'Blue Princess' holly, 'citronelle' coral bells and dwarf fountain grass, plus climbing hydrangea vines on teh wall. Urns brighten the gray tonality of the stone with pink and red annuals: dragon-wing begonias, coleus, petunias and million bells.
• A multi-colored zinnia border and stands of blood grass, cattails and Russian sage create a more casual look around the patio by the pool.
• The way to the pool house is brightened by an allee of white-edged 'Patriot' and chartreuse 'Frances Williams' hostas as well as white-blooming Shasta daisies, petunias and a butterfly bush.
• One of the dozens of urns on stone walls and terraces overflows with variegated English ivy, dragon-wing begonias, coleus and a spiky dracaena for vertlcal interest.

Sometimes first impressions are correct. That is certainly true of the plants flanking the entrance to “Stonehouse,” Marla and David Oros’ six-acre estate near the city-county line north of Roland Park. Vivid pink, purple and yellow ‘knockout’ roses, dahlias, perennial sunflowers and salvia play fancifully against the formal, black ornamental fence and the strong green bones of hundreds of trees. These colorful blooms planted at what could be an imposing entrance reflect the property’s owners: friendly, welcoming, accessible.

“We bought the property because of the trees,” says Marla Oros, president of the Mosaic Group, a health and human services consulting firm. “We took out 310 diseased and declining trees and planted 250 new trees before we moved in,” adds her husband, David Oros, founder and chairman of NexCen Brands, Inc.

The first stage of the garden’s development was the creation of an evergreen perimeter. Designed by landscape architect Mark Willard, a tight hedge comprised of 175 mature evergreen trees was planted three years before the couple and their two children moved into the 1920s stone house whose 21st-century renovation and expansion were designed by Baltimore architect Jamie Snead of Ziger/Snead.

“Mark gets a lot of credit for the hardscape and the topography,” says David Oros. Willard changed every grade of the property to create stately lawns, gardens, terraces and stone walls around the house, swimming pool, pool house and teahouse. He transformed a flat backyard (once the home’s entrance) and a steep front yard with a dog run into multi-level, undulating, tree-filled gardens.

When Marla told him she did not want to look out at the adjacent golf course, Willard took a former railroad right-of-way and built a hillside. He planted it with dozens of mature trees and continued the evergreen perimeter plantings: Norway spruce, Cryptomeria japonica, ‘Nellie Stevens’ hollies and magnolia ‘grandifolia’ trees he found in Georgia. “The owners wanted us to establish a landscape that felt like it had been there for a long time, but with the benefit of using modern plant material with long seasons of interest,” says Willard.

In wide island beds and borders below and between the trees around the house, Willard planted massive swaths of leafy, blooming plants: hostas, liriope, ferns, grasses, azaleas and perennials, such as daylilies, gaillardia and coreopsis. “Mark made it park-like,” says Marla.

In the formal garden rooms outside the front and back of the house, trees like clipped hollies and fastigiate European hornbeams stand beside boxwood hedges and rectangular green lawns, with underplantings of bulbs and white-blooming perennials that light up evening parties.

Away from the house, the plantings gradually become more casual. In back, terraces lead to a pool that has the natural look of a rock waterfall, a koi pond filled with lotus and iris, an allée of European hornbeams lining the way to an enchanting white teahouse and a shady woodland garden that connects the pool to the tea house.

The steep hill in front includes wide beds that lead to a curved driveway bordered by native grasses and daylilies and a sloping area planted with swirls of ferns and hostas that complete a circle of broad, textured green ribbons around the house.

When Marla found herself wanting more color in front of the house, she filled in the green plantings with annuals and seasonal plantings. “Every year we had to tear those out and replace them. Many were dying because the underground sprinkler system needed supervision,” she says. “When my good friend Bunny Hathaway said the entrance looked like a hotel, I knew it was time for a change.” 

Hathaway, an experienced gardener, took Marla to Fieldstone Nursery, which specializes in rare and unusual trees. There they bought trees whose barks and leaves featured different textures and colors: red Japanese maples, blue spruce, golden variegated Himalayan pines, as well as flowering trees such as a large weeping Kousa dogwood and a variegated ‘Wolf-eye’ Kousa dogwood.  Hathaway also encouraged Oros to add vines like climbing hydrangeas, mandevilla and clematis to soften and enhance vertical interest both on stone walls and the walls of the tree and pool houses.

Then, because Marla’s mother-in-law knew the owners of the landscaping firm Azaleas to Zinnias, Marla hired them to add bold splashes of color and a looser, English country garden accent to the original beds and borders. Designer Claire Jones replaced white tulips with thousands of colored ones, planted more rhododendron, a Kwanza cherry tree, roses and colorful perennials. In the borders she installed hundreds of perennials to bring four seasons of color to the gardens and created massive containers that overflow with bold plantings of annuals. Dozens of hardy ‘knock out’ roses now punctuate the gardens, along with fragrant and flowering shrubs such as lilacs, daphne, viburnums, rhododendron and tree peonies.

“Enjoyment of the garden is not just a visual experience, it is something that should bring memories of your mother’s old-fashioned flower garden,” says Jones, who has pushed back the edges of some beds, divided others in half, eliminated some and filled in with swaths of green lawn to create a continuous, curvaceous look. The pool area has also taken on a Tidewater flair with grasses and heathers. “Everything now has a wilder, more natural look,” says Marla.

Her next projects include an herb garden and a cutting garden for her mother-in-law to use in making the arrangements that always brighten the first floor. “We need to redo the formal garden off the back terrace. The white lilies are nice, but they look straggly all at a different height,” says Marla. “And we are going to continue putting more flowering shrubs and perennials around the house.” Although Marla claims to be a novice, she is beginning to sound like a more experienced gardener, one who knows for certain that color and texture are the keys to giving “Stonehouse” its welcoming signature.

RESOURCES

Plants Azaleas to Zinnias, 410-828-0509, zaleastozinnias.com;  Fieldstone Nursery, 410-357-5114, fieldstonenurseryinc.com; Landscaping Mark Willard & Associates,  410-377-0703, mwa-us.come