How one garden’s most challenging area became its most intriguing feature.
A steep lakefront property with its requisite layers of retaining walls provided designer Dabney Peeples with an opportunity that he had wanted for decades. The team at DabneyCollins designed the main driveway to curl up and over the property’s highest point before embracing a plunge towards the water, but with this dramatic gesture also came one drawback: the very point of arrival coincided with the largest, most visible section of retaining wall. “There was one piece of wall that your eye would continually hit on,” explains Dabney. “I don’t know of any single plant that would have given enough interest to balance out the scale of the wall and provide an appropriate counterpoint to the lake view opposite.”
His answer: a vertical garden on a rock face, with a bog garden at its foot. “The feeling of being at the source of something has always been exciting to me,” he continues. “How dynamic would it be for guests to arrive and see water trickling out of the huge wall as it does out of rock faces in North Carolina near the Blue Ridge Parkway?”
Helping the Vertical Garden Grow
Mimicking nature requires time and effort. Multiple wall layers consisting of a poured-in-place concrete wall, waterproof liner, and a visible boulder wall fixed to the concrete with rebar, mortar, and geotextile complete the construction. “That one required some brain cells to make happen,” quips project engineer Nathan Newsom. Water flows from seven separate water sources hidden in the stone, all calibrated at different volumes. It was important that the wall not present a flat face; setting the stones at varying depths creates an unpredictable, interesting water flow. “The crew put a tent up for me for two months to sit and direct the process,” remembers Dabney. “I picked every single stone for the drool wall; five kinds of stone—dressed, sedimentary pieces, and rougher pieces. It was a huge amount of trouble to look really simple and elegant.”
The combination of sun and constant moisture creates an opportunity for pioneer plants to colonize, and in the mountains, there is often a bog at the bottom. A rock strip divides the two in-ground planting zones. The kinetically wet area at the bottom of the wall is essentially a marsh, and the plants selected needed to be ones that thrive in standing water. The light splash zone in front is the bog, which requires a high water table and low pH. Specialty farm Marble Branch provided the carnivorous and bog plants for the project. Grower Mark Reinke has bred and sold rare plants for decades, and interested gardeners can find him each weekend at downtown Greenville’s Saturday Market.
When asked about the experience of constructing the bog garden, project manager Skip Briggs smiles. “The bog was fun because I’ve never built anything like it before, and this was my first experience capturing Dabney’s vision and making it reality. Small details like the sedums and the moss give it a feeling of natural age. It’s nice to see the evolution of what it looked like when we built it two years ago to what it looks like now.”
Photography by Aaron Greene
