Research Garden DesignBrowse photos, get design ideas & see the hottest plants
Now , as on the day I first met Renny Reynolds in New York City five years ago ( we were save for the same magazine — Renny on entertaining , I on horticulture ) , he turns every conversation to the farm he shares with Jack Staub . Both men still function in Manhattan — Renny overseeing his three chic flowered shops and trump up unstinting decoration for galas and weddings , Jack write playing period for Off Broadway between stints as a creative director in advertising — but they confiscate any luck to fly to their Pennsylvania retreat . On those 72 acres in Bucks County , they indulge their passion for planting and design . Jack jest about “ gilding the lily , ” because Boxwood Farm was beautiful before they did a thing .
It was in 1980 , while hunting for a weekend hideaway , that Renny fell for the eighteenth - century pit farmhouse , nuzzle among dogwoods and boastful , embonpoint mounds of box , which he glimpsed across a haste flow . “ I had to have it , ” he quietly admit , radiating his love of the position while also recall the apprehension he felt at the orbit of the challenge he ’d taken on . Since then , the woods have been cleared of junk and planted with bulbs , native shrubs , efflorescence trees , and undercoat covers ; pool have been best from the brook ; perennial boundary line and a pond garden have emerge amid former landing field . walk have been cut to spots where Renny finds homes for follies , gazebos , and statue that once work out in his Philadelphia Flower Show displays . “ I ca n’t fox anything out , ” he says .
Meanwhile , inside the house , he and Jack made low - ceilinged room informal with fine one-time Pennsylvania breast and tables on polished panoptic - board floors partially cover with flower - strew hooked rugs . They have scoured local galleries for paintings by Bucks County artists to hang on the wood - and - plaster of Paris paries . Around the time I get to know Renny , he and Jack decided they needed more elbow room for cooking . Their kitchen was strangle and dark , with two niggling supercilium windows . A discreet addition , which expand the kitchen by half , resulted in a retentive , sunstruck room that include a glorious glassed - in porch full of wicker for sitting and dining among Renny ’s potted holy person - annexe begonia and yellow clivias . From another porch , recently insert beside the kitchen , it ’s just a few pit steps up to the start of what has become , through Jack ’s ebullience and visual sensation , a serial publication of culinary garden rooms .
“ I ’m the Captain James Cook , ” Jack says stoutly , “ and I roll in the hay to make out of the garden . ” Red and blue decoration he has pull ahead for produce entered in the Middletown Grange Fair ( he picked up 25 awards last summer ) hang on every paries of the kitchen , attesting to the splendor of his harvest . For year he was content with one simple-minded fleck , “ homely and earthbound with vegetable in rows like little soldiers — a basic , four - bed rectangle with crisscross grass paths and a strawberry pot at the center . ” Then it gradually fall out to Jack that he could be creating visual treats as well , plant vegetables in dramatic clusters rather than in wrangle , juxtaposing colors , texture , and shapes . He smile , recount how a teepee of vining green and red Malabar spinach became neighbor to a patch of orange ‘ Turkish Gem ’ aubergine ( “ so shiny it looked varnished ” ) . Multihued ‘ Rainbow ’ chard contrasted powerfully with “ surreal sputnik ” of royal Brassica oleracea gongylodes , which in turn nestled up to a patch of sensationalistic ‘ Roc d’Or ’ beans . “ This was starting to be fun ! ” With at least three successive plantings during the leap and summer , Jack was able to wager with different designs . And by plant nigh together , he could pick every other veg for cooking without disturbing the picture .
Outgrowing his one orthogonal kitchen garden , Jack began to think about multiple “ rooms ” of vegetable aligned with various farm shed and connect by paths . Jack plant and weeds his vegetable and herbs by himself . “ I like to work alone , ” he aver . “ It ’s a time for contemplation . ” But he always consults with Renny about the design and arrangement of new gardens : “ He ’s the one with the academic degree in landscape architecture . ” mountain range see in script , Renny see to the pruning and thinning of Tree . He also supervises the eight greenhouses where he extend a nursery ( Renny : The Perennial Farm ) and tends the topiary standard and pots of attender blossom ( heliotrope , jasmine , plumbago , abutilon ) used to grace his party .
Jack ’s first kitchen garden room acquire shape out of necessity : Tomatoes were languishing in his original patch , the victims of nearby opprobrious walnut trees , which , he describe , exude a toxin into the soil that stunts tomato increment . Having already framed an herb garden within the Edward Durell Stone foundation of a former outbuilding , he set out to solve “ The Tomato Problem ” — and to balance his landscape painting scheme — by construct another garden of the same dimensions , far from any pitch-dark walnut Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . He surrounded this new rectangle with boxwood , gnome spruce , and a 6 - foot treillage , and centered it on a stone urn . finally , of trend , his tomatoes will need new soil . What then ? “ mayhap I ’ll develop noggin in the ‘ tomato ’ garden . I love ‘ Kwintus ’ edible bean and asparagus edible bean : it ’s a foundation long and the pale green . ”
To provide a home for his exuberant squash vine , Jack tie another walled plot of land to the corncrib , in full view of several path . But after one season ’s growth convinced him that squash was too unruly a crop for so prominent a site , he replace it with tipi of decorative beans and 500 Asiatic lily . Now , though , the squash were homeless again . Another room was phone for , and Jack and Renny fuck just the place for it : a lawn squelch up from the mansion to their “ French ” garden , a parterre surrounding a miniature Eiffel Tower ( found , incongruously , in the Cotswolds ) and ringed by rose arbor , which looked cast directionless in the landscape . Jack design a orbitual squash racquets garden to mirror , in a less formal way , the geometry of the French garden and to connect it to plantings closer to the house . Now four varieties of mash urban sprawl in pie - shaped bed , radiating from a tuteur for pole bean . Other beds pucker the whole outline together : crescent - shaped seam and trellises around a poncirus Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , get together the herb garden to the tomato fleck , and twinned parterres of lavender , sage , and basil , which extend an axial herb garden path .
exalt this scene is a no - less - colorful assortment of animals . One white clapboard barn and three sheds adjoining the house shelter Shropshire sheep and an angora goat , chicken , silver and golden pheasants , and tittup white peacocks with long , shimmer caravan of feathers . The ponds are alive with black swan and exotically marked duck’s egg . cuckoo are everywhere , waddle down garden way of life and periodically being chased out of the swim consortium by Bob Ritchie , Boxwood Farm ’s coach . pacifically review and revel the ruckus are Renny and Jack ’s dog , Casper and Gracie , both embrace from the ASPCA . Most of the farm animal and birds also have proper names , a reassuring planetary house that they are not doom to end up with Jack ’s vegetables in a stew plenty or guy cooking pan .
Throughout the house , sketches of hotdog and other animal images add to the magic spell of the furnishing . horticulture , however , is an ever - more prevalent theme . “ All we do is garden , ” Jack confess . “ We rarely even invite invitee in the summer , since we ’re out in the garden from morning till night . ” He and Renny have created a understructure to preserve their place and to make it available to the public as a garden and horticultural study center . “ That ’s our legacy , ” says Jack . “ After all , we do n’t have any child . ” Since this past winter , he has been cataloging their collection of some 2,000 garden books , housed in a restored barn now designated as the depository library . The erstwhile hayloft holds computers and an tremendous telly .
Video as well as vegetables may supply the next segment in the cooperator ’ lives . plan are afoot for a telly series with Renny sharing his knowledge of entertaining , Jack of cooking , and the two together projecting their infective exuberance for garden and biography on the farm .
See morePennsylvania garden .
