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Wadleigh’s world
The proprietor of Governor’s Restaurant is not the fat man with the top hat who adorns the well-known restaurants around Maine. That’s Boss Tweed, taken from a cartoon rendition that Leith Wadleigh, the owner and creator of the enterprise, took a liking to when he christened his restaurant.Wadleigh is a tall, thin man who describes himself as “nervy.” He is also a gardener of extraordinary originality. Behind an unassuming house in Veazie is his other life’s work—an acre of elaborate gardens, the product of a restless man’s fascination with all things living. It is a fantasyland of rare trees in expanses of lush mosses with ponds, rocks, pathways, ornamental bridges, and statues.
Asked about his gardening style, he doesn’t hesitate. “Nuts,” he answers quickly. Others might call him an artist, a connoisseur, or at least a collector. But when he tells you that he did almost all the work of building the garden himself, “nuts” seems an apt description
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He started 40 years ago with a swamp and a shovel. The first need was to dig drainage ditches, so after stressful days in the restaurant, “using words I didn’t know I knew,” he drained his swamp. Then came concrete paving blocks, 400 of them at 150 pounds a piece, to make dry paths to walk on. Next his project needed a tree.
“I went to Bucksport,” he says [longtime local gardeners will remember Max Leavitt’s great nursery there] and said, ‘I want a tree.’”
“What kind?” Leavitt asked.
“Just a tree—you know, a green one.”
Wadleigh says he got a pitying look from Leavitt, who took him on a tour of trees—blue ones, yellow ones, tall ones, fat ones, fluffy or spikey, upright or weeping.
“Oh my God, all the different possibilities,” he recalls saying with a sigh. “Pretty soon I had most of them!”
The development of the garden was a similarly ad hoc affair. His strategy was “find it, buy it, make a space for it.” His low grounds invited ponds, so he dug them and installed fish. (He gave up on that when he realized this was just another catering job—feeding an appreciative flock of blue herons, except with no money coming back.) He built bridges over the ditches. Then came statues, from the 20th-century whimsical—Snow White and her seven dwarfs outside their cottage—to the classical—draped Greek goddesses carved in stone. Wadleigh even ran a model train through the garden to provide action and entertainment. (No surprise here to those who have seen his restaurants’ toy trains tooling around near the ceiling.)
Building an acre of garden was not enough to soak up his excess energy. For over 10 years his backyard housed a small zoo, where he raised kangaroos (two “joeys” born in Veazie!), Muntjac deer, a miniature horse, and all kinds of exotic fowl, including a rhea—a bird that he says had a “very pleasant personality.”
The demands of wet snow on netting cages led him to part with his zoo 12 years ago, but not the fish tanks in his house. In tanks and ponds holding over 6,000 gallons of water, Wadleigh keeps fresh and saltwater fish and a collection of turtles. He points to a large red-eared slider resting on a rock, watching as the other turtles dive into the pond at the approach of footsteps. Her name is Big Mama, and she came to him many years ago, damaged and sick, and cost him hours of time as he researched and experimented with treatments.
“Now look at her,” he says proudly. “She swims a bit lopsided, but her eyes are clear and her shell is hard and her appetite is great.”
But the garden and, specifically, trees remain Wadleigh’s longest project. He collected trees from all over the state, finding rare plants wherever he could. Japanese umbrella pine, dawn redwood, ginkgo, and Japanese maples are all there and thriving. When he discovered weeping trees, he found room for weeping beech, crab apples, and spruce. Each one has a story. The weeping beech started out puny, “and my German shepherd ate it,” Wadleigh recalls, but he points through the window at the 30-foot specimen that survived and grew.
The renegade gardener has one last confession. “I talk to my trees,” he admits, and recounts a five-year dialogue he had with a lilac.
In its first year, with no blooms to be seen, he delivered an ultimatum: “Hey, Charlie Brown, we need a flower. We’ll give you two years or the saw gets you.” The next year he got one flower.
“Don’t play games with me,” Wadleigh told the tree. “I need more than that.”
So he got two flowers the next year, and not much more the following one.
“You think this is funny?” Wadleigh said. “You need to show me a lot of flowers if you want to stay here. That’s my last word.”
“So what do you know?” he says, smiling. “The next year—covered with blooms!”
Leith Wadleigh claims that it is a good thing he is getting older, as he is “less dangerous” now. At his wife’s urging, the Wadleighs are downsizing and simplifying their own living quarters, to a new house he has built on the site of the old animal pens. With the help of aquaculture students from Orono, he is relocating and upgrading the whole fish and turtle collection—tanks, ponds, equipment, and inhabitants.
He is keeping most of his garden, as the new house’s front yard. His favorite tree is a weeping, threadleaf Japanese maple, planted 15 years ago.
“I couldn’t part with that,” he says. “They told me I couldn’t grow it here.” The tree is not considered hardy inland in Maine, but like the man who planted it, it seems to prefer to make up its own rules.
No-mow Paradise
Robert Shaffer has an unconventional approach toward landscaping. He calls it “Redneck Wabi-Sabi,” and practices it at his home and business, the Trebor Mansion Inn in Guilford, a restored Victorian “painted lady” on three sloping acres in the center of town.Wabi-Sabi is the complex Japanese aesthetic that embraces the loneliness of living in nature, the beauty that comes with age, and the impermanence and imperfection of all things. Redneck is—something else, but definitely not that.
The combination is an odd collision of cultures that makes sense when you meet the man and his family. Robert, his son Zarvin, and teenage twin grandchildren run the inn and the three-acre property as a family enterprise. They describe themselves as eccentric, widely traveled, and interested in everything. Their approach to landscaping is as idiosyncratic as they are.
Robert Shaffer’s contrarian landscaping style starts with his aversion to mowed lawns. He says that mowing is “terrorizing grass” and that he has better uses for $20,000 over the next decade (his estimate of the cost of 10 years of lawn care). It makes no sense, he adds, to mow an expanse of grass on an area that would feed a family of six, using a tractor with more horsepower than his car. So, with the exception of the ball field (the kids are enthusiastic athletes), the area immediately around the house, and a web of meandering paths, the property is unmowed.
Much of this is a steep slope toward the main road in town.
“You just don’t mow hills,” he says. “You need deep roots to hold soil in place, especially this close to the river.” Instead, they have encouraged native perennials, apple trees, daylilies, and lupines to colonize the slope.
“They are taking over and making it beautiful,” Shaffer says.
As for the parts of the property that do get mowed, sort of, Shaffer insists on cutting the grass to a height of four-and-one-quarter inches. This presented a problem when he could not find an American-made mower that would cut that high. He eventually located a push mower in Indiana that met his needs. It mows the paths and the ball field, and can be shoved through longer grass that gets cut once a year in the fall. When asked how in the world anyone can cut unmowed grass with a push mower, Shaffer explains blithely, “It works as long as the grass is dry. You need to go over it a couple of times.”
Giving up mowing does not mean giving up all maintenance. Looking after the meadow communities that surround his home takes some hand work, as unwanted invasive plants must be removed and the natural process of succession toward scrubland and forest must be controlled. Getting rid of the burdocks and thistles that had taken up residence before the Shaffers moved in took two years of hard work—double, in Robert’s estimate, what just mowing would have needed. But gardening his way pays off in the end. He uses no petrochemicals, and now that the invasives have been fought back, he says that maintenance costs are 10% of what they would be under a more conventional regimen. Best yet, his yard is full of bees, birds, and plant surprises. Shaffer mentions with pride the 21 black walnut trees that have appeared in his yard since mowing was banned. He believes they are the product of the former owners’ squirrel-feeding, and had been surviving in the sod in rough-cut areas. He has plans for more unusual trees, preferring species such as butternut and American chestnut that once provided sustenance for earlier inhabitants.
Shaffer admits that his methods are not catching on fast in Guilford, but he hopes that some of the neighbors are coming around. When the family offered to help friends who had fallen behind with their mowing, Zarvin carefully mowed around all the wildflowers. The horrified owner assumed insanity or intoxication was behind the deed until the asters bloomed—at which point, Shaffer believes, she understood.
The Princess Maker
“I’m looking for a pretty face with hardy feet,” explains Don Church. Well, aren’t we all? Possibly, but Church, in contrast to almost any other Mainer, is looking for these qualities in a daylily.
Church is a landscape designer and daylily breeder in Blue Hill, and for him beauty lies in the depth and clarity of color, the quality of the ruffles, and the openness of the face of the flowers he is working to produce. The problem is that these attributes are usually found only on tender varieties—southern belles bred and raised in Florida, ill-equipped to withstand cold Maine winters. “I was tired of seeing people spend $150 on a fancy daylily which then dwindles and dies,” he says.
So he set out to fix the problem—to breed daylilies for northern gardeners that would rival the tender varieties.
Don Church has not always been a daylily hybridizer. Born in Maine, he grew up in Connecticut, but came back to Sangerville to spend summers with his tree-farming grandfather, who, he says, first instilled in him a love of plants. Coming back every summer, he says he knew he had crossed the Maine line when he caught the smell of the pine trees.
He became a “tree climber,” with his own tree and landscape business in Lincoln. After a bad fall, he turned his business toward retail nursery sales, and that’s when he began to notice daylilies. (And not just daylilies. Miniature conifers had also taken his fancy, and a collection of unusual dwarf versions of exotic evergreens began to grow in his gardens in Lincoln.)
But the quest for better hardy daylilies had truly caught his imagination. He liked the ones he was selling, but he thought he could do better. His efforts at hybridizing began to produce lines with promise, but he had to face the fact that not many people would drive to Lincoln to look at a daylily garden, and he needed a larger venue from which to introduce his plants, and in 1998 he and his wife, Sue, bought a 22-acre property on Route 15 in Blue Hill that has become Blue Hill Country Garden.
Church is a self-taught landscape designer who has never stopped learning. “I read about plants every night before I fall asleep.” He names Beatrix Farrand, the celebrated landscape gardener from Bar Harbor, as one of his major influences. He mentions her again when he describes the Herculean task of moving his conifers, many of which had matured into considerable, and valuable, specimens, when he relocated from Lincoln to Blue Hill.
“They moved 50-year-old plants from Reef Point to the Asticou Gardens,” he says, referring to the dismantling of Farrand’s gardens after her death in 1959. “I figured if they could do it, so could I.” Aside from the conifers’ rarity and value, he needed the strong shapes of the conifers as accents and anchors in his new gardens—structural elements against which the daylilies could be appreciated.
Church’s goal was to create display gardens, where people could be inspired and educated, and see mature plants in a landscaped setting. Moving all 144 conifers, some of which were large, mature specimens, turned out to be a three-year project.
“I would work at my business all week,” Church recalls, “and then move plants all weekend.”
Some weekends a truckload was just one plant; others it might be a dozen. But bit by bit his paper blueprint became a one-acre garden of curving beds and specimen conifers. Daylilies followed, planted the way Church thinks they should be grown, in large groups, making use of all their variations in size, color, and season of bloom. A measure of the success of his efforts is that the garden is registered by the American Hemerocallis Society as an official daylily display garden.
Two years after they started moving plants, Don and Sue Church moved themselves to Blue Hill. The business now includes Don’s landscape design service and Sue’s container-grown lilacs and conifers, but Don’s attention stays on his daylily breeding program, and he now has two acres of production beds, where seedlings are maturing for evaluation and sale.
Now, after years of hybridizing work, he thinks he may have found—indeed, created—his princess. In the summer of 2006, in the pouring rain, he spotted a new flower in his seedling beds. “I was giddy when I saw it,” he reports. The flower was a brilliant pink, with just that amount of flair and character that he has been after. The problem was, it was also the last flower left on a small, new plant—and daylily flowers last, as their name indicates, just one day.
“I grabbed Sue [he is fortunate to be married to a photographer]. She kept saying ‘I can’t take a picture—it’s pouring out there,’ but I said ‘Come on—I’ll hold the umbrella.’” They got the money shot—a glowing, rain-glistened portrait of a very pretty face.
But there is more waiting to do before he knows if the pretty face is also hearty through Maine winters. In Florida, where huge flower farms generate the bulk of America’s daylilies, you can go from a seed to a flower in nine months. Like so many things, breeding a hybrid daylily is a little harder and takes a little longer in Maine—three years to get a flower, two more before you can evaluate the performance of the whole plant. The debutante is not quite ready for her coming-out party yet, but the Churches are waiting anxiously to see how she will perform as she grows up.
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