Planters' Passion

Muffin Evander, the owner of Cultivated Designs, creates container gardens as a profession. But in the four-acre Baltimore County garden she and her husband, Dixon, tend out of love, it’s all about experimentation and evolution.

Eighteen years ago, when the Evanders bought their home on Cuba Road, there was no lawn. “It was a sheep pasture,” Dixon remembers— full of multi-flora roses, a barbed-wire fence and woods. The few outstanding features were a collection of native dogwoods and tulip poplars and an ancient red oak, whose majestic canopy shades shrubbery, perennials and annuals.

After Roland Harvey of Natural Concerns installed the “bones” of the Evanders’ shade garden— rhododendron, hollies and hosta— Muffin decided she wanted flowers. So Dixon, a retired insurance executive, designed a classic, American four-square garden with four beds around a central axis of bluestone paths and octagonal center. “I was really dumb. I wanted roses,” says Muffin. Roses are difficult in Baltimore, both because of the warm humidity and the fertilizing, spraying and dead-heading required.

“When Muffin does something,” says Dixon, “she does it right.” Indeed, she joined the Maryland Rose Society and collected more than 80 choice hybrid teas and grandifloras. But as an avid birder, Muffin became concerned that spraying the roses was adversely affecting the warblers, phoebes, orioles, bluebirds and hummingbirds that called the garden home, so in 1998 she pulled out all the roses except two pink shrub roses that don’t require spraying. The four-square then became a riot of perennials and annuals in unusual shades of burgundy and chartreuse with plenty of white, framed by a border of disease-resistant Korean boxwood and deep red barberry.

By the time the Evanders developed a boomerang-shaped garden to connect the four-square to the back woodland garden, Muffin was studying horticulture at Longwood Gardens and at John Sanders’ legendary program at Dundalk Community College, and her concentration had shifted from flowers, to texture and design.

The boomerang garden reflects that evolution. High maintenance flowers were replaced by lower maintenance, elegant shrubbery, in- cluding a purple smoke bush and many fine cultivars of hydrangea such as ‘Blue Billow,’ ‘Limelight’ and ‘Preziosa.’ Stands of deep burgundy and purple coleus flow into a wide swell of large-leafed, mature perennial begonias and unusual plants like beauty berries. In the deep shade, where the woodland garden begins, is an unusual variegated Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) that emerges from the ground pink.

Over the years, the woodland garden has deepened and become more diverse. When a truckload of native rhododendron and 30 hemlocks was delivered, Dixon set about planting them himself and ended up with a double hernia. But that didn’t slow his gardening. He divides the many varieties of hosta, ferns and hellebores, which Muffin intersperses among fall peonies with fluorescent blue and red seed pods, bought from Seasons Past Farm and Gardens in Littlestown, Pa., where the rare plants found in many of Baltimore’s finest gardens originate.

The connecting shade garden runs the entire length of the property, almost to the front entrance. Years ago, the Evanders cleared and thinned the trees there and they continue to limb them up to allow light to filter through. “But we’re not fighting the landscape. I’m going with the shade,” says Muffin, now a consummate horticulturist who has served as a judge at the Philadelphia Flower Show, president of the Maryland Horticultural Society and chair of the elite garden committee at Ladew Topiary Gardens, where she is a trustee.

As an enthusiastic plant collector, Muffin relies on Dixon, a painter by hobby, to keep their expanding gardens cohesive. Dixon spent time in Japan during the Korean War, an influence reflected in the collection of delicate, evergreen bonsai that he fastidiously shapes, root prunes, fertilizes, waters and displays on wood benches. Several winters ago, deer reduced his prize collection from 30 to 12, so he constructed a simple but effective, wire, cage-like enclosure to protect the pots, which he sinks in the ground during winter to protect the roots and ceramic from freezing, while giving the plants a needed cold cycle for growth. To help protect the other plantings, Dixon invented his own invisible deer fencing: 50-pound monofilament fishing line strung at waist height beside the driveway.

For design inspiration, the couple visits gardens in the United States and abroad. “See this?” Muffin asks, displaying a photograph of a breathtakingly simple Canadian water feature— a floating island of moss in a small, perfectly round pond. “That’s what I want next.”

RESOURCES
Muffin Evander: Cultivated Designs, 410-771-0534, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Seasons Past Farm and Gardens: Littlestown, Pa., 717-359-0028, http://www.seasonspastfarm.com
Roland Harvey Natural Concerns Inc.: Sparks, Md., 410-472-6860