Buffalo-Style Gardens. Sally Cunningham
One of the most popular gardens on Garden Walk Buffalo (and you can see why here) has more plants in pots than it does in the earth.
The Element of Drama
If a garden faces the Hudson River, or has a mountain in the background – voila! – you have drama. Frame it. Feature it. Complement it. But if the garden is in a city or town, with neighbors and fences and sidewalks – then what? Drama can be created with a few calculated choices.
The Umbrellas of Hamburg
The garden of Linda Washut and Kathy Kelkenberg
This garden is featured on the Buzz Around Hamburg, a small-town garden walk with 30-some gardens that attracts repeat visitors year after year because the gardens are so charming and the people are so warm. Hamburg is not far from Buffalo. You could call it Buffalo-adjacent. Linda and Kathy’s beautiful garden is situated on a corner lot. Lots of great gardening is done here, like hundreds of other fine gardens. But this one is unforgettable because of the dramatic sense of the gardeners. It’s about the planters and perennials, but especially those umbrellas… Definitely Buffalo-style!
This garden starts at the street with a vibrant pollinator garden. It’s the only spot with full sun. Once inside the gate it’s mostly a shade garden, filled with hardy plants and hundreds of annuals, as well as a few tomatoes. All very nice, but perhaps this yard wouldn’t elicit exclamations like “Wow… Oh my… Look at this!” if Linda and Kathy didn’t know that a garden walk is a performance. So, before the people show up they add some drama and even decorate the stage.
The first dramatic touch: These gardeners plan and plant containers with huge tropical plants. (We’ll tell how you keep the plants all winter in a USDA Zone 5 region, in Chapter 5.) Then the gardeners place them strategically. In this garden a show-stopping planter with a towering banana or Colocasia greets you. And everyone takes that picture.
They set the tables: When guests arrive, the tables are laid out, practically insisting that you sit down. (It’s difficult not to look around eagerly for appetizers and wine, or morning coffee with croissants…)
Those umbrellas! Lots of gardens have a round table with an attached umbrella and some chairs, but here there are four, overlapping and touching each other. They make the space the most festive, inviting place ever for lingering. With special candles and lanterns, socializing can go on into the darkness.
The Kelkenberg/Washut Garden in Hamburg is defined by its umbrellas – a clever, inexpensive and creative way to define sitting areas in the garden.
Creativity Unbound
The garden of Sue Hough and Miro Sako
What do you get when an advertising art director marries a trained woodworker/carpenter? The ultimate DIYers, that’s what. Sue and Miro have a joyful garden of handcrafted projects, many of which focused around the life of their two young girls. You’ll find no big-box store garden art in this craft gallery of a garden.
Some of their projects are most likely a bit beyond most DIYers’ abilities, but the originality and sense of adventure with each project (like not knowing how the end result will turn out!) is something everyone can appreciate.
A unique treehouse
Problem: one single large tree dominates the yard. Solution: a colorful and charming tree house with a slide, rope swing, planter boxes, a vertical garden – all above a sandbox. It even has a ladybug-looking mailbox. Though the daughters are a bit too old for a treehouse now, it defines the backyard and is a visual treat for visitors. Ask anyone in Buffalo about the garden with the treehouse, and they’ll know exactly what house it is.
An extraordinary wall of wine bottles
A feature you’ll not find in any other garden, this colorful wall of wine bottles was an obsession for Miro to figure out how to make happen. After much experimentation (and the obligatory wine bottle emptying) he started with figuring out how best to drill into glass. He concocted a system of vertical cables onto which the wine bottles were strung. Under Sue’s artistic eye, they strung colorful bottles in random but purposeful positions on the cables.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a garden with more joy (and wine bottles) than the Hough/Sako garden. Gardener Sue Hough is an advertising art director and a past chairperson of Garden Walk Buffalo.
Uncommon accessories
Nearly every feature added to the garden was handmade, or made by people Sue and Miro know. A quirky peacock with wine bottle tail feathers, plant “ladders” for hanging baskets, tree stumps as planters, curvy window boxes on a fence, tall painted wooden flowers forming a lattice for climbing plants, and a stump cleverly forming a wine bottle tree (we’re sensing a theme here!).
Not everyone has the talents of Sue and Miro, but don’t let that stop you! Start with a small project you can do in a day or weekend – something that will give you some immediate gratification – and build from there. It’s the creative process that’s a thrill to experience. Dig in. Make something original. And do it big. Drama makes a garden memorable.
Many Ways to be Remembered
Incorporating some surprises, building in the whimsy, choosing unusual furnishings, adding dramatic effects: just a few of the ways talented gardeners have made their gardens special, Buffalo-style. We will be showing you several other paths toward the coveted comments… “Wow… I don’t believe it. Unforgettable!”
How have our Buffalo-style gardeners left their imprint on our visitors’ memories?
It’s about the gardeners themselves: Integral to many garden visits are the people who created the gardens – certainly true of the gardens you’ll encounter in these pages. It’s one thing to walk in and out of a well-designed garden; it’s another to hear Helen tell about her birdhouse collection on the side of the garage, and meet Carol and Tom (who explain the library ladder and tomatoes on the roof).
Creative gardeners Carol Siracuse and Tom Palamuso used a library ladder to make this rooftop vegetable garden possible.
You won’t forget talking with longtime gardeners like the Habermans (in their 80s and 90s) who still grow thousands of annuals from seed – and have for decades. And you’ll laugh at Peter Loomis’s chagrin, evident from his sign saying “This garden is tended by a sailor (this was his boat) turned reluctant gardener. Take pity on him!”
The Loomis garden is nautical but nice. Cindy is a former Garden Walk Buffalo president,