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Designers pair vintage gardens, vintage homes
Sunday, July 16, 2006
By Terri Finch Hamilton
The Grand Rapids Press

The yellow yarrow is in bloom, nodding its head in the breeze off Lake Macatawa. Elegant pink roses, frilly lady's mantle and ivy scramble all around this 1928 English Tudor. Let yourself through the ornate black gate. Repose on the hedge-lined terrace.

It could be 1928, except for this guy with a clipboard striding across the lawn in a blue polo shirt. It's Chris Heiler, who makes a living matching just-right gardens to homes that have a history. Live in a home inspired by a French chateau? He'll set you up with a parterre -- a formal, geometric garden the French love. Got an Italianate? He finds cool terra cotta pots. Very Italian. Live in a little English cottage? He'll tell you all about how the English love gardens with color themes. You'll be sipping lemonade in your Yellow Garden in no time.

Heiler, 31, owns Fountainhead Design Group and specializes in creating vintage-look gardens to go with older homes. At the 1928 Holland home of David and Linda Wesselink, Heiler created a stone and slate terrace that looks like it's always been here, using the same materials that grace the house. He designed fencing and arbors that echo detailing on the stately old home. He created gardens of flowers the way the English do, with color themes. A great old house deserves a garden with the same sense of architecture and style, he says.

Heiler graduated from Michigan State University's horticulture program with an emphasis on landscape design. For three years, he co-owned a landscape company with his parents in Traverse City, where he did everything from designing gardens to lugging soil to planting. He moved to Grand Rapids in 2002 and worked for Greensward Landscaping for two years, often ending up at old homes in East Grand Rapids and Ottawa Hills. He fell in love with their unique architecture. "I thought, these homes should have gardens with the same unique style," he says. "What kind of garden should a French chateau have? What kind of garden would an English Tudor have?"

He hit the books to do research, and now period homes are his passion. He started his business, Fountainhead Design Group, two years ago. About 70 percent of Heiler's business is creating gardens for vintage homes. The other 30 percent is designing gardens for new houses built to look old. Heiler designs gardens, then acts as the general contractor, managing everything from the antique-style fence to the planting of hedge roses to finding the perfect vintage urn.

"Your home is your house and your garden together -- that's how it was back in Italy and France," he says. "Gardens and houses were designed together." To think like Heiler, who charges $75 an hour for his design work, first define the boundaries of your garden so it has a frame. It might be with fencing or with plants themselves -- formal hedges or masses of shrubs. "So when you're in the back yard you know where your property starts and ends," he says. Think about structure before you hit the nursery for plants.

He designed a trellis for the Wesselinks 7 feet high and 40 feet long for privacy and to mark the property line. Painted the same brown as the trim on the Tudor home, it blends perfectly. Eventually, glossy green ivy will cover it. If you're handy, you can build one yourself. Or buy pre-made sections of trellis.

Heiler is big on matching materials in the garden landscape to the home. It ties the two together and gives a sense that the garden always has been there. If a home has a black slate roof, Heiler might use black slate in a front walkway or a back patio. He used salvaged bricks from the Wesselinks' remodeled garage to build 7-foot brick columns at the driveway entrance, topped with the same limestone that surrounds the front door. If you can, take a sample of your brick for matching to a brick company like Belden or Lincoln.

Wayne Visbeen's house isn't old. It was built a year ago. But the architect was inspired by history when he designed the shingle-style home based on houses built in the northeast in the late 1800s. He hired Heiler to make the garden match. Formal boxwood hedges and stately limestone urns abound. Flowers march in long lines. A brick wall hosts crabapples grown up a brick wall in a style called espalier. It screams old garden.

Espalier is the art of training trees to branch in formal patterns along a wall or on a trellis. It was popular several hundred years ago in the walled Medieval gardens of Europe, where space was at a premium. There was no room for sprawling fruit trees, unless they were trained to grow two-dimensionally, up a wall. Heiler loves the look. He plans to train a berry-laden firethorn shrub on a steel trellis in the same diamond pattern as the Wesselink's leaded glass windows.

Landscape designer Stephen Rosselet worked with the Heritage Hill Association in the early 1980s on its master plan, offering garden ideas for the hill's classic beauties. He's still at it. He just got back from an arts and crafts style home in Saugatuck perched on a hill in an oak forest. Arts and crafts-style homes, popular in the early 1900s, (and plentiful in Grand Rapids) are suited to loose, natural gardens, Rosselet says. He stocked this garden with lots of ferns, hemlocks, dogwoods and oakleaf hydrangea. In Victorian days, people were fascinated with exotic, tropical plants. Take advantage of the current craze for tropicals outside and plant banana trees and elephant ears in the yard of your Painted Lady, he says.

Back at the Lake Macatawa Tudor, Linda Wesselink planted English topiaries in resin urns that look like the lead ones popular in England decades ago. A big-time Anglophile who lives in a home with a turret, massive wood beams and secret rooms hidden behind bookcases, she's thrilled with how Heiler created the classic English look outside. "The British call their yard the garden -- that's how they think of it," Wesselink says, looking at her patio edged in a circle of neatly clipped boxwood. "Wherever you go in England, you see beautiful gardens, and I really wanted that feel." When all else fails, go for clay, Rosselet says. "You can't go wrong with a classic red clay pot," he says. "It looks good with everything. A plain red geranium in a clay pot -- how much more classic can you get?"

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