American Roots

Midwest

Nick and Allison Mccullough

Columbus, Ohio
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“Gardening is my sport,” says Nick, the plantsman of this husband-and-wife design duo. “It is what I love to do. It’s how I innovatively express myself.” Luckily, Allison is happy to join in the adventure, especially when it comes to styling spaces.

Most of the McCulloughs’ days are packed, between leading their landscape firm’s design and maintenance projects, and managing their kids’ activities. So, in their off time, the couple refuels by reimagining their own Ohio backyard with new plant combos, Midwest antiquing accents, and designs inspired from their family’s travel adventures.

When the couple built their modern farmhouse outside Columbus in 2015, they envisioned the black-and-white home would make a striking backdrop for their gardens. They began by creating a formal landscape framework around the house, with garden rooms to rotate new plants and design ideas. They created modular spaces, including a lawn, an adjoining gravel terrace, and rectangular perennial borders. They added structure with carefully pruned hornbeams, massive evergreen hedge walls, and oversized boxwood globes.

The exuberant play (or, as they call it, “organized chaos”) happens within these contained spaces.

“I like creating garden rooms, and within these rooms, I can play and change things up,” Nick says, explaining that the landscape’s bones are influenced by his English garden training, and the style’s impressive rigid forms and green walls.

Along a massive hedgerow of Spring Grove arborvitae, he’s loaded a perennial bed with swaths of salvia, bronze fennel, mountain mint, allium bulbs, blue switchgrass, and baptisia. He gave the space a Midwest flavor with three sculptural rings of rusted wagon wheels.

For the limestone terrace just outside the back door, Nick lined one side with four pleached hornbeams, and uplit them for a dramatic nighttime effect. On the opposite side, a perennial border overflows with repeated clusters of salvia and alliums, as well as calamint, geraniums, and feather reed grasses.

More garden play enters in a new all-silver border, veggie planters, bowls of succulents, containers of mature agave, and rotating seasonal designs in a faux bois planter outside the back door.

Nick and Allison love telling the story of this planter they discovered on a backroads detour during a family trip from Minneapolis to Chicago.

“We were literally driving 60 miles an hour down this road, and Allison spotted this old airplane over in someone’s yard!” says Nick.

The McCulloughs stopped to check out the plane, and discovered the place was a “junkers’ paradise.” They ended up buying the large concrete planter, plus two galvanized drums, and squeezing the treasures into their already packed car. The trip home was spent dreaming of where to place their finds in the garden.

“Everywhere we look in our garden, there is a memory of a trip, an outing, or a friend we’ve met along the way,” says Nick. Their Midwestern finds include a rustic grain bin repurposed as a tool shed, an industrial metal cart turned into plant stand, and a collection of vintage watering cans. Most recently, they purchased historic cobblestones from a nearby home and set them along their front walkway. Rumor is they came from the family of former President Grover Cleveland and his farmhouse.

“We really love keeping the heritage of the space intact, and even though we have a new build, we love filling it with local artifacts,” says Nick. “You know, we’re the first generation creating this story.”

The element of surprise is another part of their garden play. Around a corner of the carport, Nick hung a hidden collection of staghorn ferns like antler trophies in hayracks.

“I also love creating mystery in the garden,” Nick says with a grin. “I like to go around corners, set aside back-of-house areas, and create secret garden rooms.”

Allison embraces her back-of-house cutting garden in a room all her own behind the arborvitae hedge. Here, she plants zinnias, sunflowers, and hyacinth bean vines that climb modular trellises built by her dad.

Even farther from the home, Nick creates less formal spaces, like a restored woodland and an allée of birch trees filled with native midwestern perennials like sedges, alum-root, and goatsbeard.

“As you radiate away from the house, the less design you get and more blending in with nature,” says Nick. “Beds right up against the house are more formal, and feature higher maintenance plants, but areas farther away are wilder and can be left alone for two to three weeks.”

And the kids only add to the garden play, as their son James joins in Nick’s projects and takes breaks to examine insects and frogs, while daughter Charlotte uses the lawn as a dance floor to entertain her parents. “Hanging in the garden is really second nature to them,” says Allison. “And we love that they choose to be there.”

Erin Schanen

Belgium, Wisconsin
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Yes, the summers may be shorter in Wisconsin, but that doesn’t keep Erin Schanen from making the most of the gardening season at her cottage home just steps from Lake Michigan. After 20 years of gardening, she’s developed an exuberant flair for color and an impassioned quest to learn and share more about the plant world.

“When you live in a place with a short summer, you end up packing in and savoring every moment of season,” says Erin, explaining that the area’s biggest challenge is its cold, delayed spring. “You feel like you have three weeks of spring, then you have summer come so quickly.”

It’s no wonder she adopted “The Impatient Gardener” as the name of her popular garden blog and YouTube channel with tens of thousands of subscribers. Impatience—or perhaps eagerness—seems to be her hallmark. In March, she jumpstarts the gardening season by planting hundreds of annual seeds indoors under grow lights. By April, she’s potting up dozens of dahlia tubers in a popup greenhouse with hopes of earlier blooms. Come May, she’s weaving the sprouted dahlias and annual transplants among a tapestry of perennials.

“Wherever I can, I just shoehorn one more annual in,” says Erin.

Her energetic style results in a wonderland of personal garden projects she’s pursued since she and her husband Rich Reichelsdorfer moved to the 1¹/₃-acre property in 2002. They were drawn to the 90-year-old home’s setting among mature maple, oak, and beech trees, seeing potential in the landscape. They divided the outdoor chores, with Rich taking on the lawn and Erin the existing gardens. Her first task was to rip out the tall, flopping ornamental grasses taking over the patio beds, and from there, she carved out beds in sun and shade areas. She also completed master gardener training at the nudging of her mother, a master gardener herself.

“The master gardener training started me down the path of learning about gardening,” says Erin. She used her own backyard to experiment. In 2009, she began journaling her daily gardening activities in blog form—a good fit with her professional background as a writer and third-generation editor of her family’s Sailing Magazine. A surprising number of followers soon fueled her efforts.

Along the way, she created an enclosed vegetable garden with raised beds to grow food while keeping the deer away. Another summer, she revealed a formal circle garden where she annually experiments with planting combos in four quadrants. More recently, she installed an informal woodland area inspired by visits to Chicago’s Lurie Garden and New York’s High Line, and their naturalistic planting style. All of this she shared with her blog followers.

Perhaps Erin’s most popular posts relate to her passion for growing annuals by seed. Her favorites, like chartreuse flowering tobacco and pink globe amaranth, spill along the sides of a walkway. Honey orange, blush, and fuchsia dahlias bring pops of color to a perennial border. And more annuals fill a patio bed packed with large dinnerplate dahlias, red begonias, yellow sedum, blue lobelia, and white euphorbia.

“I started using annuals as a temporary fix to fill holes in big new garden beds as I looked for plants to finish them,” says Erin. “What I ended up with is all these annuals!” Now, she’s developed a love of starting annuals from seed, and says it’s difficult for her to live without them.

Sweet pea is where it all began. In 2015, Erin was deep into a British gardening binge when she learned about these plants, their fragrant scent, and their cut flower appeal. But when she looked for sweet peas at local garden centers, she came up short. She ended up buying seed online from sources in the United States and England, and researching how to grow them herself. Now, each spring, Erin orders multiple sweet pea varieties, including scented heirlooms and showier Spencer varieties in pink, blue, and salmon. Some years, she’s planted so many, she’s had extras to give away.

The sweet pea experiment inspired Erin to try her hand at more seed-sown annuals, including flowering tobacco, globe amaranth, nasturtium, and signet marigold. Today, she grows more than 500 annuals from seed, and teaches YouTube followers along the way. The forever challenge remains to find more places to squeeze in one more annual.

“I’m not great at editing, but life is too short to limit yourself,” says Erin with a smile. The projects are endless for this impatient gardener, and her followers couldn’t be more grateful.