I’m still shaking out summer’s pockets for keepsakes, before the memories get cold. I may have stalled on documenting this HPSO-sponsored tour of Gene Rozenboom and Randy Patton’s De Tuin Bij Montmore aka The Garden at Montmore, which I visited in early August, because I left with only a very small snapshot of this complex garden. There’s a horticultural layer of decades of building a rare conifer and maple collection, which immediately surrounds the house. Then a very recent layer only a couple years old when an opportunity arose to acquire an adjacent property that slopes away from the house. Meadow planting ambitions were let loose in the naturalistic style of Piet Oudolf, to whom Rozenboom feels an especial affinity through his Dutch heritage. Most of my photos are of this recent naturalistic layer rather than the beautifully curated collection of maples and dwarf conifers.
Something that occurred to me looking over the photos, which are admittedly very light on maples and conifers: plant collections are vivid to the collector. Garden landscapes are vivid to everyone else. But unless gardeners experiment and try out plants, you can’t have one without the other. Collections and collectors feed horticulture. It was a unique experience to visit both a collector’s garden and a new enthusiasm for naturalistic planting. No reason both can’t co-exist, of course.
A surprising garden playing with new ideas, new plants. And in what seems to me a rare twist on traditional privacy concerns, not only were neighbors welcome to wander the garden’s paths, but their dogs were too. More soon, AGO
