Meet Jill Nooney of Bedrock Gardens (Zoom presenter on 02/18/2025)

Jill, let's start with inspiration. Which garden has influenced you most and why?

I am drawn to designers who think big. I may not love the gardens they create but I admire their experimentation and verve: Roberto Burle Marx, Charles Jencks, Edward James’ Los Pozas, Martha Swartz, Isabelle Greene, Andrea Cochran, Richard Hartlage, and Beatrix Farrand’s amazing work at Dumbarton Oaks to mention a few.

That's a great list of a "few"! Seeing what makes you tick, we bet you've had some big plans, too. Could you tell us about something you thought would work but failed miserably?

I have one persistent problem area in the garden that just will not solve itself. It is good enough but does not sing in the way I am hankering for. It is a 30ft gently sloping mound of about 3 feet surrounded by a privet hedge clipped in an undulating wave pattern. We call it The Pate, a bald head. On the top sit our collection of bee hives painted in an assortment of bright colors making them look like stripped condo towers. The problem is that with the animation of the sculptural hedge and the hives themselves the space in-between looks wrong. Like the hives are a picture placed in way too large a mat for the hedge frame. So I came up with an ingenious solution. I placed 105 rectangular hay bales end to end to make a spiral winding its way to the top. I liked how walking it slowed time down. My vision was to smother the bales with the tiny-leaved silver trailer, Dichondra argentea, making a long silver wooly bear caterpillar contrasting nicely with the green grass and hedge. I had 300 plugs grown for me and planted them in the bales. To start, I soaked the bales for a long time from overhead sprinklers, but sitting proudly in the sun, they were not decomposing and retaining moisture in the way I planned. I even tried some fertilizer which I almost never use and focused hand watering from a spackle bucket. (We are on a well and I am very careful about water use.) All that produced a few thready trailings. In addition, folks did not like being blocked from direct access to the bee hives and once I saw a small boy who was crying because he was lost. Mid-season I cut my losses and looked the other way. They gradually decomposed enough that I could mow over them. Too bad. It was such a great idea. Maybe one of you can try it and demonstrate how great it could look.

Oh, wow, that is an epic undertaking. Thanks for sharing. Love that you went for it. Not all great ideas are destined for reality. Speaking of ... what is a new technique that you find useful?

Read Linda Chalker-Scott on the use of arborist wood chips and root washing. You will not be disappointed.

Do you have a favorite plant or tree in your garden?

I don’t know how I missed this plant until three years ago -- Patrinia. I now grow P. scabiosifolia, P. monandra, and P. gibbosa. They all are great. They self-seed in a not bothersome way. The seedling clump of the basal leaves in spring looked like a weed to me so the first year I pulled them out. You are no doubt smarter. They have flatish flower heads in bright yellow (P. scabiosifolia) or pale yellow (P. monandra) on stiff bright yellow stems from 3 – 5ft tall creating a see-through look. P. gibbosa is shorter and more of a facing plant. They bloom for months, and the ripening seed heads look as ornamental as the flowers. The foliage even turns a nice burgundy in the fall. It also makes a great cut flower.

Can you tell us about a garden that you would most like to visit?

We travel a fair amount to visit gardens. One garden in Scotland we were so close to seeing that it makes me cringe because I know we will never go that way again. It is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It was 1996 and we were on a house exchange. Before the internet we belonged to a home swap organization, which listed folks across the globe who wanted to exchange homes. You swapped houses, cars, their DVD collection, what was in the pantry, and pets. One swap was in Dornoch in northern Scotland within reach of the amazing Orkney Islands and equally memorable garden of Little Sparta but sadly not Charles Jenck’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation. I called on any meager contacts I had to get us an invitation but no go. I admire Jencks’ and his wife’s taking on such a bold theme and expressing it so originally on the land. Thankfully it is one of those gardens that probably reads better in photographs than on the ground. I will never know.

What a great choice, that is an amazing place few ever get to see but on one day a year. Just stunning. You have a book coming out soon, so this seems like a fair question: What gardening book NEEDS to be written and who should write it?

I like learning from others' mistakes. I would like to read a compendium of examples from different designers about what went wrong and how it was remedied, if it was.

Definitely. In closing, let's bring this discussion closer to home, as you are a frequent visitor to the Pacific Northwest, and arguably THE Hortlandia volunteer who commutes the farthest. What has brought you to the PNW over the years ?

When we visited Portland in 1998 on a college tour with our son, I left weak-kneed. The trees, the landscape, gardens everywhere, the plants. He matriculated at Lewis and Clark and on my first October visit in 2000, I joined HPSO. I visited him twice a year in October and April. The April visit coincided with Hortlandia where I began to volunteer. Packing up my purchases for the flight home became our ritual. I continued to visit and volunteer after he graduated and got a job in town. In 2019, he moved to LA, the bum. I have continued to volunteer and have met some great people, gone on a couple HPSO trips, visited a lot of your gardens, and we were even a stop on one of Bruce’s fabulous tours. In this case, "Fall in New England."

A-ha, so that's the origin story on Hortlandia's volunteer from New Hampshire. Great chatting, Jill. Thank you for presenting for us over Zoom about your book and garden -- "Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden."