Photography by R. Todd Davis
June Hutson sits on her flagstone patio, sipping from a small glass of merlot and looking out on a neat sweep of hostas. They are seriously green and grow beyond an equally calm curve of lawn. All is quiet in her Kirkwood neighborhood on this warm, late-summer night.
Unless, that is, you consider the riot of color to Ms. Hutson’s left.
Yellow heads of brown-eyed Susan, also known as thin-leaved coneflower (Rudbeckia triloba), dance in the breeze, just underneath the emerging purple petal-like rays of New England Aster (Aster novae-angliae) and above the pinkish perennial phlox (Phlox paniculata).
“People have a passing interest in this part,” Ms. Hutson says, motioning to the cultivated, green-on-green hostas. “But what they want to see is over there, because Edgar fiddled around with a lot of native plants.”
And that is an understatement. “Edgar” is the late, great Edgar Denison, former owner of the Hutson property, a German-born engineer who taught himself about Missouri’s native plants and then built a small garden monument with some 1,000 different varieties. A little-known fact is that he also left behind family, including a famously brilliant cousin, Albert Einstein, when he departed Stuttgart, Germany, to make his way to this country in 1927.
When Mr. Denison got around to publishing a book about native plants in 1972, his volume of Missouri Wildflowers was so exquisitely organized and illustrated that it went into five editions and has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Published by the Missouri Department of Conservation, it is still considered a seminal work.
Clearly, not just anyone could inherit Edgar Denison’s garden.
More than a few Kirkwood gardeners and Denison fans thought so, upon his death in 1993. His adoring nephew (Mr. Denison and his wife, Ruth, had no children) concurred.
“I wanted the garden to continue,” says Dr. Robert Israel, an internist, wildflower hobbyist and Mr. Denison’s nephew. “I couldn’t think of anybody else who could do it other than June”—a senior horticulturist at the Missouri Botanical Garden and supervisor of that institution’s Kemper Center for Home Gardening.
“She wasn’t very wealthy at that time,” Dr. Israel recalls. “It seemed more appropriate to let the property go to her for under market value.”
Indeed, in an era of McMansions taking over humble lots in St. Louis’ better neighborhoods, Ms. Hutson says that the reaction of Mr. Denison’s nephew was remarkable. “He was thrilled to death because I worked at the botanical garden and had a garden background. The family didn’t want to see the garden turned into a garage,” she says. “It’s not quite two lots—someone could cut down vegetation on the second lot [home to the wildflower garden] in order to expand. Dr. Israel understood I wouldn’t do that, that I was very much interested in living with it as a garden.”
But even for Ms. Hutson, the legacy of Mr. Denison’s genius weighed heavily.
She bought and slowly renovated the little “wreck of a house,” as she puts it, while just watching the garden for two full years.
Even now, her only changes outside are modest ones—the elegant water garden next to a refurbished patio and fountain. In building these structures, no native plants were harmed—only a bit of Mr. Denison’s unusual choice of bent-grass lawn.
“I knew it was a native jumbly garden; I never dreamed I’d own it,” Ms. Hutson says. “I knew it had an incredible reputation based on everything about Edgar,” who was an artist, a pianist, a gardener, an author and a naturalist. “When I saw the garden, I knew I wanted to live here,” she says. “I didn’t quite know what that meant.”
It came to mean, in part, that a golden larch (Pseudolarix amabilis) became a big part of the attraction. It is a somewhat rare deciduous conifer and living proof that Mr. Denison wasn’t a native-plant snob. He was ahead of his time in feeling free to plant such cultivated varieties alongside all of his wildflowers.
The stately larch, which grows on the garden’s street side, has a remarkable history of its own. Kirkwood resident Mary Ott, a longtime friend of Denison’s (whose garden was featured in the May/June 2007 AT HOME), says this larch is an offspring of one “that came over from China to St. Louis for the 1904 World’s Fair. Seeds of that one,” she adds “were also dropped outside of a garden on Sappington Spur.”
Sitting near her remarkably tall and exotic tree, Ms. Hutson says, “Everything sort of comes together. This is a daughter of a tree that lives on Sappington Spur, and she has a sister tree that is growing in front of the museum building at the Botanical Garden, east of Henry Shaw’s mausoleum.”
Another nonnative in the garden includes an unusual vining clematis (Clematis x triternata “Rubromarginata”) with rose-lilac margins to its white flowers. “It’ll bloom off and on all summer,” Ms. Hutson says. There’s also a range of Mr. Denison’s shade-loving, colorfully plumed Chinese astilbes.
Even his meadowsweet, also called queen of the prairie, is a hybrid (Filipendula rubra "Venusta”) of the native. “He had a penchant for Filipendula Venusta,” says Ms. Hutson. “It’s a plant that seems to be able to hunker down after it blooms and just be there. It’s a thing unto itself. As a horticulturist involved in ornamental gardening, I would say it’s limited—it blooms for a week or so, and that’s it. Otherwise, it has nice dissected foliage.” She shrugs. But she’s kept it, she says, for Mr. Denison’s sake—and for the lovers of his garden. Many of them showed up earlier this summer for a rare tour sponsored by the native-plant group appropriately called Wild Ones. Not to be missed—if there’s ever another tour—is this all-blue garden that blooms first in spring and then again in fall.
In spring, hundreds of tiny, electric-blue squills (Scilla siberica, native to Russia) bloom as the ground cover that Mr. Denison planted beneath the hostas and other larger perennials. The squill foliage dies back just as other plants take over.
For late-summer blues, there is the violet-blue nonnative aster (Aster tataricus), complete with fat yellow centers and a more compact form (2 to 3 feet tall) than gangly asters.
“But the highlight of the garden in late summer,” Ms. Hutson says, “is that it turns completely blue with native lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), which proliferates in this garden for some reason.” It sprouts up to an impressive 3 feet above the hostas, preferring soil that’s moist but drains well.
“I think with all of his composting,” Ms. Hutson says, “Edgar created a perfect ground for lobelia, moist with a lot of organic matter.
“It turns the garden blue,” she repeats, pausing and looking out from her patio perch.
“It’s just phenomenal. This is all Edgar.”
