Flying trillium – Artisans of resilience

Reading time: 8 min

Flying Trillium, Garden and Preserve is both a garden and a wildlife reserve, nestled in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, located about two hours’ drive north of New York City. Carolyn Summers is a landscape architect. She is the one who created the place and manages it with her husband. The garden takes its name from a bulbous plant, the Trilliums, which can be found in the humid underbrush of the region.

But before arriving at the creation of this place, Carolyn Summers had different experiences that built her gaze on gardens and plants.

After completing and obtaining her degree in landscape architecture, she began her atypical career at the Trust for Public Land. Since 1972, this association has set itself the mission of providing access to and protecting wild nature for the general public.

Carolyn Summers wrote a report and created an open space for herons in a harbour. This project then created an urban wildlife refuge on Staten Island (New York City).

Then she continued her career at the New York Department of Environmental Protection as director of the natural resources agency.

In continuation of her work, she went to the Natural Resources Defense Council to initiate a regional plan for the restoration and preservation of habitats for wildlife. All these experiences allowed him to acquire solid knowledge and skills on ecosystems and particularly on native plants. She even wrote a book, with her daughter Kate Brittenham.

Carolyn Summers is still an assistant professor at the Go Native U Community College to teach her knowledge of indigenous plants.

Designing Garden with Flora of the Native American Eastern

In this book which is an ode to wild nature and indigenous plants, Carolyn first proposes to make us aware of the ecological value of these plants. She takes the time to explain to us why she prefers to use the term plant ‘native’ rather than that of ‘wild’ or ‘local’. The indigénat translates a presence and co-evolution of plants with their biotope over a long period. This is an important clarification because a plant can germinate spontaneously and become wild but it will not have co-evolved with the biotope in which it is found over a very long period. Although ecosystems are in perpetual evolution and adaptation, these changes occur over rather long periods. Man, with his movements around the world, has modified this dynamic and allowed many plants to settle in places where they did not exist before. Some have naturalized and integrated into the local flora. This is for example the case of the apple tree and the chestnut tree in France. For others (1/1000), the new soil and climate conditions were very favorable to them, to the point that they colonized large areas. At this stage, we are talking about invasive plants. Without wanting to digress too long on the invasive nature of plants, which in the end is only a reflection of our international exchanges, I invite you to read the little book “éloge des vagabonde by Gilles Clément who praises these vagabonds and offers a more humanist look at the subject.

After a 5 and a half hour drive from our base camp in Massachusetts, we ended up arriving in the Catskill Mountains, more precisely in the town of Liberty.

The Flying Trillium Garden is located just near the Neversink Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to New York City.

It was early June and a storm greeted us with a heavy shower. The visit started badly, then finally the clouds dried up, and we were able to get out of the car and go meet Carolyn Summers.

The contrast of temperature made the river smoke, thus creating a hushed atmosphere in the garden. Like most North Americans, Carolyn gave us a warm welcome and we took her step to start the visit of her garden.

The first theme addressed was the protection of the garden against whitetail deer and fallow deer. True scourge for gardens and forests, the “deers” feed on everything that is tender and green.

As much to tell you that when they enter a garden, few plants are spared. To avoid this massacre, Carolyn and her husband began by building a fence worthy of the name.

On a whole part of the fence is composed of a magnificent pergola, completed by a set of climbing plants (Bignona, Clematis…). By going a little deeper into the garden we passed a pond surrounded by Iris sp and covered with Nympheas. The next path was punctuated by young oak trees and massive ground cover. What is striking in this garden is that we see the hand of the designer in the arrangement of spaces and massifs, but one is far from suspecting that the compositions only use indigenous plants. It is all the more disturbing that as Europeans, a large part of our horticultural perennials happen to be native to North America.

The continuation of the visit took us out of the protected enclosure to reach the hillier and wilder part of the garden. Carolyn pointed out that during the ripe season, black bears come to feed in this part of the garden – what a chance to be able to observe these animals so closely!

After walking along the mowed paths and admiring the collection of dwarf conifers, we arrived at the foot of a magnificent log house with stunning views of the valley.

Two small greenhouses are used to prepare the seedlings. Just behind, a surface covered with stones and colonized with plants attracts our attention.

Well sheltered from the sun, the space is ideal for the altitudes (Heuchera sp) that Carolyn observes and lets evolve freely because it allows her to observe the hybridizations of plants with each other. The results obtained randomly are quite interesting from the point of view of the foliage color. Our walk ends along the house where we could admire a magnificent massif of rodhodendrons (Rodhodendron sp) and wild violets (Viola odorata). We left each other on a few words of exchange and thanks for the visit.

This garden is very inspiring in different ways. First of all, the ecological and systemic approach to the garden allows for the creation of a very rich ecosystem.

The objective of composing only with indigenous flora is achieved and at no time there is any aesthetic loss. The richness of the American flora contributes to this magnificent result.

We left Liberty with plenty of ideas to evolve our massifs by changing paradigm. So far I propose in my projects to leave a place for spontaneous plants among horticultural compositions.

Space more or less important depending on the soils, the maintenance capacity of the inhabitants of the place and their relationship to the wild. This balance is in my opinion essential and quite subtle: if the wild flora comes to take up too much space, it can give the sensation of a loss of control, and one risks obtaining a counterproductive effect and a reversal.The use of horticultural plants (which, as we said above, are for a large part native to this region of America), offers greater diversity in flowering and especially reassuring. Their horticultural origin suggests that they are more domesticated and that their control will be easier than their wild counterparts.

What Carolyn Summers explains to us in her book on indigénat and co-evolution is also valid for the European continent. If you have plants, consider observing what is happening there and I invite you to practice what Gilles Clément calls weeding by subtraction. That is to remove plants that have grown spontaneously only in certain places of the massif.

These plants may not meet all the aesthetic criteria you expect, but they make your beds much more useful by providing valuable habitats for wildlife.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but ask some questions related to the adaptation of our gardens. The speed of climate changes that human has caused imposes a rate of adaptation that is very fast for living beings in general. Can we simply rely on the wild flora and think that it will adapt to new conditions? Faced with the complexity of the problem, there can only be one answer. This question, in any case, divides landscape designers and ecologists. From my point of view, it is obvious that the local flora that will have the ability to adapt will be part of the gardens of the future. On the other hand, I am not sure that this will be sufficient. To compensate for the reduction in flowering time due to winter cooldown, some garden horticultural plants have a role to play in compensating for these changes. Now, be careful, let’s not play sorcerer’s apprentice, and not go in all directions. Acclimatization and the creation of new varieties are avenues to explore. We will have the opportunity to discuss it again at future meetings.

You May Also Like

Landscape interaction