Cheryl Dorris
It took Deborah and Bob Noerper five years to find their dream home.
They knew what they wanted: Some property with landscaping that would satisfy Mrs. Noerper’s gardening itch. Check.
A screened porch. Check.
A finished basement. Check.
A five-car garage to house Mr. Noerper’s collection of cars? Sorry, no…
When push came to shove, the lush garden and the screened porch and the view of the shimmering swimming pool from the master bedroom outweighed the need to house Mr. Noerper’s cars. By a lot.
“We’re the only people we know who upsized” after the children moved out, Mrs. Noerper says. That goes for the house and its gardens alike.
The house didn’t just land in their lap. In their search for the perfect home, the couple had looked at a house off Geyer Road in Frontenac in 2006. It was too large for them, but as they nosed around outside, Mrs. Noerper spied a beautiful garden next door.
“The screened porch and pool also caught our eye,” she recalls. Alas, that house was not for sale. Undeterred, Mrs. Noerper kept her eye on the neighborhood for a year. When her target went on the market in 2007, she immediately scheduled a walk-through.
“I loved the house as soon as I walked in,” she says of the two-story Colonial. The 1.6-acre lot, with its lush, mature, four-season gardens, cinched the deal.
“What I love so much about it is the trees,” she says. “They’re older, full-grown—incredible.”
There are towering oaks, hackberries, tulip poplars, river birches, pines, spruces, and hemlocks—even a sassafras with its oh-so-cute mitten-shaped leaves.
The landscape could be a demonstration garden, but it’s not showy in an ostentatious way. It artfully shows how to combine textures, such as ferns and broadleaf evergreens, spring and summer bloomers, sun and shade lovers, and single specimens with massed shrubs and repeated specimens. Carolyn Blackmore, who had owned the home with her husband, Cyrus, for 28 years, gets the credit for the graceful design of the gardens.
“I tried to make the garden interesting from a textural approach and to have something blooming all of the time,” she says.
That it does. The garden is at its peak in the spring, when the red buckeye sports glorious red blooms on branches that reach for the heavens. Waves of ‘Karen’ and ‘Cascade’ azaleas, ‘Roseum Elegans’ rhododendrons, and ‘Little Princess’ spiraeas move the eye through the garden. Redbuds, ‘White Cloud’ dogwoods, crab apples, and a stunning neighborhood star magnolia offer wisps of contrasting color.
In the summer, ‘Wine & Roses’ weigelas, ‘Pink Knock Out’ and ‘Happy Chappy’ roses, ‘Diana’ roses of Sharon, and hydrangeas, both bigleaf and oakleaf, form the staples of long-lasting color. A bed east of the screened porch is home to such blooming perennials as meadow rue, monarda, ‘Caesar’s Brother’ Siberian iris, queen of the prairie, Russian sage, ‘Goldsturm’ rudbeckia, ‘Husker Red’ penstemon, ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum, ‘Johnson’s Blue’ cranesbill geranium, and ‘Helene von Stein’ lamb’s ear. Nestled in the shadier spots are ‘Pumila’ Chinese astilbe, Lenten rose, gooseneck loosestrife, and lots of hosta. Masses of the variegated ‘Francee’ hosta make a calming statement near the pool. Elsewhere, ‘Krossa Regal,’ ‘Royal Standard,’ and ‘August Moon’ hostas and plantain lilies lend variety. Mounds of impatiens in shades of pink, fuchsia, and lavender undulate through the garden, lending more than a touch of unity from May to October. Amazingly, neither Mrs. Noerper nor Mrs. Blackmore has planted the annual in more than a decade.
It reseeds. Abundantly.
The explanation for that is simple. Mrs. Blackmore eschewed mulch in favor of a top dressing of leaf compost throughout her gardens. Adding this type of organic matter to the soil year after year has rendered the soil uncommonly fertile. So much so that impatiens are growing in some areas where they were never planted.
“It’s just moved on the whimsy of the wind,” says Mrs. Blackmore. Ferns grow happily among the impatiens—Christmas, Japanese painted, ostrich, and royal ferns.
Some of the garden has developed through trial and error. For many years, a hedge of yews spanned the front porch. But that horizontal design and monoculture didn’t suit Mrs. Blackmore.
Eventually, she replaced the yews with a more integrated grouping that harmonizes with the gray cedar siding and spruce-colored shutters.
Now the landscape gets a little seasonal color from viburnums, spiraeas, and azaleas, while a smattering of other stalwart plants produces greens, blues, and yellows year-round. There’s Steed’s holly, boxwood, arborvitae, false cypress, and ‘Fat Albert’ and ‘Montgomery’ blue spruce.
Two “islands” in the front lawn’s broad expanse repeat many of those species and add a few spices of their own.
One island is anchored by a ‘White Cloud’ dogwood, with a surrounding cluster of ‘Pink Knock Out’ roses and a swoop of ‘Wine & Roses’ weigela. The other is designed around a clump river birch. Azaleas, a ‘Globosa’ blue spruce, and mugo pines distinguish this island. Repeated in both are boxwood, ‘Fat Albert’ blue spruce, globe arborvitae, and barberry. Mrs. Blackmore explains that the repetition was intentional.
“I tried to repeat things so it didn’t look too polka-dotted,” she says.
Neither woman is a fussy gardener. Creeping euonymus, which many gardeners battle in their mature landscapes, grows unimpeded near the pool. It’s even been allowed to scramble up and over the trunk of a long-dead tree, almost kudzulike. The effect is sculptural.
The gooseneck loosestrife can also be invasive, but that section of the garden is casual enough to permit it to ramble a bit.
Part of the garden’s design also grew out of practical considerations. In the early years, the Blackmores’ neighbors had young children, and Mrs. Blackmore wanted to screen her view of their plastic toys. A grove of hemlocks fit the bill. Now the garden has come full circle. The hemlocks provide cover for the Noerpers’ three grandchildren when they play hide-and-seek.
Mrs. Blackmore may have been the architect of the gardens, but she had professional help in tending them. Because of the richness of the soil, most of the plants grow bigger than they would under other circumstances. “It takes a lot of pruning,” she says with a rueful chuckle. The new mistress of the garden, Mrs. Noerper, gets some help from time to time, but she enjoys working there regularly. She calls herself an amateur backyard gardener, but she’s being modest. She’s actually a master gardener with the Missouri Botanical Garden, and she’s considered investing in more training through the horticulture program at St. Louis Community College at Meramec.
She’s looking forward to adding personal touches to make the gardens her own, including planting more roses and some ornamental grasses, replacing the day lilies, creating a bed on the west side of the driveway, and expanding the eastern bed to add more sun perennials.
The couple has enjoyed the wildlife that finds a welcome refuge in the Noerper gardens—a wild turkey, warblers, possums, chipmunks, and an interesting owl. In fall 2008, they even cared for a sick raccoon.
And how has Mr. Noerper adjusted to the three-car garage? Just fine, thank you. He’s taken a fancy to motorcycles. The oversized garage nicely fits four motorcycles and the couple’s three cars.
“He’s always been a motor head,” his wife, the nature lover, quips.
