First-time visitors to the home of 66-year-old radiologist John Merkle always ask him who maintains his gardens.
It’s a fair question—the backyard is designed as a series of elaborate verdant rooms, each a canvas for the owner’s creativity, and Merkle gets the credit for tending to it all.
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“I do the work because I’m picky. I want it done right,” he says. “I have a staff of three here: me, myself, and I, and the only one who can do it right is myself.”
Three decades ago, Merkle purchased a historic Compton Heights home, then had to spend his first two years in it getting the infrastructure sound before he could turn his attention to the backyard, which held just two beleaguered trees. “It was pathetic. It really was,” he recalls, “but as a visual person, I could see what it could be.”
Near the property’s northern perimeter, marked by a 120-foot-long cedar fence, Merkle installed a Japanese garden after returning from an inspiring maiden voyage to Asia.
“I can look at this kind of stuff all day,” he says. “I love to travel, and wherever I travel, there’s always a botanical garden or some kind of major botanical feature to see.” Merkle says he’s always been fascinated by Asian gardens, and that first trip to Asia, in the early 2000s, moved him to base a garden on his interpretation of the aesthetic.
Carpeted in mondo grass, the garden features seven types of Japanese maples and a blue atlas cedar. Merkle says St. Louis is about the farthest south that the conifer will grow. “I have to do a fair amount of trimming [of the cedar] to keep things in check,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s too shady and the ground cover is not going to grow.” Ever the treasure hunter, Merkle—also known for his extensive collection of antiquities—found garden-specific decorations, including 18th-century carved marble lotus bowls, Japanese lanterns “that you could light up in the evening with candles if you wanted to,” and antique marker stones, weighing 300 pounds each, that flank the entrance to the garden. “I needed a little help getting them back there,” he says. “I also wanted a teahouse. My buddies and I put that together.”
South of the Japanese garden, just past a ginkgo tree that turns a brassy yellow in the fall, is an English woodland garden, embellished with Lenten roses and tricolor beech trees. Further on, a small rock garden gives Merkle space for experimentation in the shadow of a palm tree, fashioned of scrap metal, bearing coconuts that light up at night. But the side yard’s boxwood knot garden may be the pièce de résistance—though Merkle says he doesn’t like to pick favorites, exclaiming, “I love it all!”
Like other areas of the yard, travel inspired the knot garden. Merkle had recently visited England for the first time and spent time at Hampton Court Palace, where the grounds were undergoing a massive restoration to what they’d have looked like in the time of William and Mary. “I thought, This would be a great space [for a knot garden], because the side yard isn’t really what you would ordinarily call a useful space,” he recalls. Merkle had a friend render the design, 35 feet square, with the use of CAD; he then set stakes, connecting them with rope to ensure straight lines throughout.
The knot garden is adorned with 19th-century Carrara marble sculptures, two Victorian water fountains, and a spiral boxwood at the center of three pool half-spheres, which are lined in red brick to complement Merkle’s Mediterranean house. The “floor” is blanketed in ajuga, a ground cover plant that prevents weeds from sprouting; a hedge of European hornbeam adds height. “You need something vertical. If I didn’t have these, it would just be flat to the street. You need variety,” says Merkle, noting that he climbs a ladder every couple of months to give the hornbeams a clean shave.
Over the years, Merkle says, he’s relied on “mulch friends” who drive to St. Louis from Perryville, Illinois, for special projects: delivering mulch, helping build the retaining walls that define the yard’s rooms. In 2005, he and the friends spent seven hours installing 400 boxwoods, assembly line–style, with one person manning the auger and another handing off shrub after shrub to Merkle, who set them carefully into position.
Merkle prunes the boxwoods once a year, after the spring rains turn them a dark green. (They’re short enough for him to step over.) He selected the Green Velvet variety because it thrives in the St. Louis climate, grows mostly vertically, and takes just two or three seasons for discrete plants to meld into neat hedges. “In March, April, and May, they’ll put on several inches,” he says. “I clip that off.”
At nearly an acre, the yard is large enough to accommodate multiple garden styles, but for Merkle to consider adding a specimen, it must have color, texture, or blooms. “I want it to do something different, depending on the time of the year. I mean, it’s okay if it’s got nice autumn color, but what else can it do? Maybe it’s got beautiful leaves or foliage, or it flowers in the spring or flowers in the fall, or it’s got funky bark,” he says. The English woodland garden meets all of those benchmarks: astilbe, acanthus, iris, epimedium. “I’m trying to get a ground cover called mazus to grow in there. It’s very low lying, but it produces, in the spring and then in the early fall, a purple orchid-like flower.”
Like all gardens, Merkle’s has evolved with age. The dianthus, planted in limestone containers that meander toward the teahouse like boats along a river, need to be moved. “Unfortunately, the stuff that’s in the back there isn’t getting enough light,” Merkle says, so he planned to take them out, plant them elsewhere in the yard, and install colorful coreopsis instead. But coreopsis needs more sun, so he realized that his scheme wouldn’t work. “The best I can think of so far is to look for miniature hostas in various colors and textures,” he says. “There’s a hosta society in St. Louis, so there’s a lot of interest in them.” A touch of the Midwest in a garden holding such worldly delights would be welcome. “It could be very pretty,” says Merkle. “It could be very pretty, very interesting.”
If the home’s next owner isn’t a gardener, Merkle says, that person will need to remove a lot of elements, because his gardens are high-maintenance work: “I like the physicality because my job as a physician—I’m not saying it’s sedentary, but it’s not what I would call physical work.”
