Terracing the China Terrace

One of the first projects I undertook at Glen Villa was the China Terrace, a contemporary folly that honours an old resort hotel that once stood on the property.

I first wrote about it as a conceptual garden. Following that, I wrote about it sporadically, focusing on the changes I made —  the bed that shook off its annuals in favour of a moss quilt,

Moss forms a quilt on an old iron frame bed.

and the staircase leading to the imaginary second and third story that changed, from this …

This version of the staircase dates from 2009. It’s hard to tell from the photo but the posts curved slightly, to suggest a circular staircase.

to this …

Copper tubing outlining the ‘staircase’ that led to an upper floor didn’t have enough weight visually.

to this …

Combining wood and copper tubing linked the staircase to the window frames on the China Terrace. While it may look ok in the photo, I found this version too heavy visually.

… and, finally, to this.

Using two narrow strips along the sides rather than a single wide one lightens the appearance of the staircase while outlining its form.

These tweaks were necessary but relatively minor, and didn’t get at the main problem — the plants. There were two areas that bothered me, one on the bank (shown behind the staircase in the photo above) and the other beside the entry. I identified the problem at the end of 2013.

“This area and the entry bed it is part of simply don’t work as they should, which is to announce the presence of a ghostly recreation of a Victorian era hotel. Plus the deer like too many of the plants …. Plus [I need] more terracing and a re-shaping of the edges. “

Over the last five years I’ve tried to correct the problems in various ways. I thought about fencing the whole terrace but discarded the idea — to do it the way I wanted to would have cost a fortune. So I took smaller steps. I enriched the soil, added rocks to stabilize the bank and planted shrubs that were said to be deer proof. (Why do the deer never read the labels?) But nothing I did truly satisfied me.

So a few weeks ago, we attacked the problem head on.  We dug up the plants and heeled them in. We removed the rocks that were spotted on the hillside and we began to terrace the slope.

This is how the slope looked a few weeks ago. The entry to the China Terrace is at the right.

The rocks we added several years ago had been large enough to stabilize the bank but I wanted real terraces with clearly defined edges that would suggest the three floors of the old resort hotel. I wanted flat planting beds, so that the plants wouldn’t look like they were sliding down the bank.

Making those changes seemed straightforward. It meant using bigger rocks than we’d used before, and those rocks would be too heavy to be placed by hand. To complete the project, we’d have to rent heavy equipment, but only for a few days.

On an old farm property, there are rock piles everywhere so we didn’t have to buy any.

Funny how things take longer than you think they will…  Finding and hauling the rocks, building the terraces and getting the beds ready to plant took ten days of steady work.

Early on in the project, I realized the walls had to be higher. That meant more rocks, and more time.

But the result is all I could hope for: three terraces, each three feet higher than the one below and each slightly shorter and each about six feet wide.

We started planting last week. We are re-using the shrubs that were there before: Weigela ‘Wine and Roses’ on the lowest terrace, a few Aralia ‘Sun King’ on the second, and Persicaria polymorpha, or giant foamflower, on the third. At the very top where it is almost full shade, we planted ferns dug from the woods and spotted some indigenous thalictrum around the rocks. Finally we rescued some rooted bits of Stephanandra from the Lower Garden and planted them along the side slopes where they should tumble nicely.

The weigela look pathetic but they are beginning to leaf out.

So far I haven’t bought any new plants but since the area is larger than before, I will have to. New plants will include some low growing ground covers under the Weigela, one of which should spill over the rocks in front. I may spot some perennials here and there — epimediums are growing well in one section so I’ll probably add more. I want to keep the plantings simple, though, so I don’t intend to use too many different types of plants.

The question that remains is what to plant on the second, or middle, terrace. I could plant more Aralia but that seems boring, as does spirea. The wispy plumes of Filipendula would be nice but the deer like them, and choosing a shrub that is deer-resistent is a must.  I want the shrub to have light-coloured leaves so that the dark-leafed weigela stands out against it. The plant needs to be tall — around 5-7 feet would be fine. Ideally it would be a ‘country’ shrub that people used in the 1900s, but this is less important than finding one that will grow well in an area with soil that tends to be dry and that gets just under six hours of sunlight.

Suggestions, anyone?