A Sense of Place: The Work of Garden Designer Caleb Davis in Maine
Spending the summer in New England for the first time since moving away as a child, I have been struck by an extreme contrast in gardens: those that look on “old England” as the ideal, and another sort, which are seriously exciting.
Photography by Caleb Davis.
The latter don t bother with neat mounds of clipped boxwood and straight paths thrown like a grid over the landscape instead they are more naturally in tune with...
...the spirit of the place as it is today informed by layers of cultural history that stretch back much further than the colonists while moving forward into the 21st century
Views over Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island are a part of the everyday for people who live here year-round.
“My ideal inhabited landscape does have plenty of gardening, but with more emphasis on the beauty found in process,” he says.
A tough community of plants including ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum, Echinacea purpurea, purple Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’, and green candelabras of budding Agastache nepetoides growing on heavy clay soil, with southern exposure and wind.
Caleb says he has long since moved on from fusspots like delphiniums that need to be propped up.
Self-sowers from the field that come into the garden include Erigeron annuus, Daucus carota (Queen Anne’s lace), Achillea millefolium (yarrow), Valerian officinalis, ox-eye daisy and goldenrod.
A garden can be as simple as stone, trees and ground cover.
A waist-high wall and path made from granite pieces, left over from Maine’s once active granite industry. People think of stone as a static element but when you have it in your landscape you start to realize that it’s dynamic in how it responds to weather.
Round seed heads of Echinops ritro and purple spikes of Agastache ‘Blue Fortune contrast with golden Molinia caerulea subsp.