Winn Frankland’s beautiful garden at 122 High Street is a perfect spring garden, with
abundant flowers as well as buds and shoots appearing with the promise of more to
come. Frankland has gardened in this spot since coming to Ashland 16 years ago. She used to do all but the heaviest lifting herself, spending at least one hour a day. Now she has help in the garden four hours a week, while she practices Energy Medicine as developed by Donna Eden. Before coming to Ashland, she was a professional landscape designer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and transformed gardens in Tampa,
Florida.
Among the profusion of plants are many roses throughout the garden, including a hedge
of Simplicity roses and a climbing Peace rose which, at ten or eleven feet in height,
affords lovely views from a high deck and breakfast room. There are also David Austen roses and several Cecile Brunners.
Seeking equal-opportunity blessings for the garden, she has statuary of Buddha and
Saint Francis, and many smaller pieces, including a great frog who often wears a
charming hat of a blossom from the huge camellia nearby (the bush and its blossoms
are huge). There is a large tiered fountain in the back yard.
Frankland has custom-designed fences, screens, and gates—adapted from others she has seen—that allow views of the lovely garden, but keep the deer out. Because the crafty deer had discovered they could leap between the top of a gate and the bottom of an arbor that topped it, she designed a secondary section to the gate, creating an airy and clever Dutch-door effect.
The two largest trees are a huge spruce in back and an artfully-pruned deodar cedar
in the side yard. There are prolific fig, apple, pear, and cherry trees, including her first
foray into espaliering. She has a “grandfather” peach that doesn’t have a huge crop,
but that which it has are delicious, and remind her of her southern roots. There are many Japanese maples of varying ages, size, and varieties. The large tree to the left in the front yard is a maple with burgundy leaves. A dogwood along the driveway has been protected from deer with a wonderful wooden screen that matches other garden hardscape features. In addition, there are elderberry, madrone, and she recently added
a Hinoki cypress to the front yard for its architectural shape.
Vegetable plants are primarily on the left side of the fenced area in front, but placed
so carefully as to appear purely decorative. Among the many herbs throughout
but concentrated in back are sage, thyme, lavender, rosemary, sweet woodruff, and feverfew. Other plants include Korean forget-me-nots, euphorbia, lilac, butterfly bush, rose of sharon, lamium, tulips, hydrangea, gloxinia, wallflower, star magnolia, hellebore,foxglove, stewartia, peonies (including tree peonies), heuchera, daphne, cotoneaster, bleeding heart, columbine, viburnum, spirea, and forsythia. Laurels of several kinds as
well as photinia, Oregon grape, and a mugo pine add interest.
This is a lush and beautiful landscape.
