Community gardens are amenities that residents boast about, but there’s a secretive aspect to the new garden at Serenbe, a Chattahoochee Hills community. The garden was created for the Serenbe Playhouse summer production of “The Secret Garden.”
After the performances end Aug. 2, the garden will remain for residents to enjoy, as a public green space near a creek.
"If you've spent any time at Serenbe, you definitely get a feeling of the importance of sustainability and blending into that natural landscape. The residents there just have that natural inclination to visit and use a space like this," said designer Cameron Watkins, of C. Watkins Garden Co., who works in Atlanta and Knoxville, Tenn. "The community has gotten behind the project and really kind of adopted this as a cool location for them to enjoy in the future."
The setup: "The garden is a circular design around these two huge amazing sycamore trees," he said. "We started designing around the trees." Materials such as vines and branches were pulled from the woods for arbors and an English wattle fence. Watkins said he appreciated the beautiful natural, woven pattern of wattle fencing when he spent time in Wales and how it protected the gardens from critters.
The design influences: The book, "The Secret Garden," takes place in a traditional English garden. "From the beginning as a landscape designer and as a gardener myself, I had kind of an issue of placing this English garden in the middle of these Georgia woods." He substituted English plants with Georgia native woodland plants. For example, boxwoods are common in English gardens, but a bottlebrush buckeye or ninebark offered a similar size and weight. Blooming perennial beds incorporate different types of plants, such as trillium and echinacea.
The challenges: Being set in the woods can create a beautiful yet challenging setting for blooming plants. If you have a shady garden, Watkins recommends choosing plants that show off leaf size and texture. Native plants also tend to be more loose and wild. He lined pathways made of wood chip mulch with logs. "I saw this in a client's garden once and I just loved it. You bury the logs halfway into the ground," he said. "It has the effect of a stone border. It's so organic, but yet there's a structure to it." Some stone paths will contrast with the other hardscape materials.
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