GEORGE SCHOELLKOPF returned from a 1979 trip visiting English gardens inspired to do some garden-making of his own. His canvas was a Northwestern Connecticut hillside and not the Cotswolds, and the home he just purchased wasn’t a grand manor house, but a simple 18th-century farmhouse.

Nevertheless, George brought the feel of an English garden to life at the place that became Hollister House, which today is a much-visited destination garden, and also the site of a rich offering of educational programs throughout the season, including the popular Garden Study Weekend early each September.

In the gardens at Hollister House in Washington, Conn., he has contrasted the formal and informal, made room-like spaces to explore, and experimented with a wide-ranging palette of plants over the years.

George will be talking about the making of Hollister House on Saturday, Sept. 6 at the annual Garden Study Weekend there, along with several other noted speakers on a diversity of topics. Some of the design ideas that went into the garden’s making were what we talked about together recently.

Read along as you listen to the July 14, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

the making of a garden, with george schoellkopf

 

Margaret Roach: Hi, George. You’re going to be joined by some other noted speakers as well on Sept. 6, as I said in the introduction.

George Schoellkopf: Yes. We’ve got Cassian Schmidt coming all the way from Germany, and we’ve got Bill Cullina, who used to be the director of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. And we’ve got Joanne Vieira, who’s going to be speaking about The Trustees of Reservations, who have that exquisite garden up in Massachusetts—Naumkeag.

Margaret: And so it’s going to be a real diversity of topics, from the ecological to I think native shrubs and trees to use in our gardens to, as you say, some of these historic sort of grand estates that have become enduring gardens that Joanne’s going to be speaking about.

So as a visitor to Hollister House: I’ve been a number of times over the years, and I’ve always been especially struck by the contrasts, the feeling, the enclosed and sort of safe, cozy feeling you’ve created on this very open rural Connecticut hillside—these distinct formally defined gardens within the garden, these sort of rooms. And I wanted to start there. I mean, that was, I presume, one of the big inspirations from that English trip.

George: It was indeed. And you used the word cozy, which is very apt because it’s a formal garden. The English gardens that inspired me, like Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, are formal gardens, but they’re not formal in terms of Versailles, of rigidity. It’s a formality which is formal in terms of an architectural format. And that’s what I tried to do here. I didn’t want  the garden to overwhelm the house. It’s an 18th-century with 19th-century additions, a New England farmhouse, and the garden should be in scale with that. The garden is too big for the house. But I think the way we have organized it that you don’t feel that.

Margaret: Well, all of our gardens are too big for our houses, George [laughter].

George: My friend Betsy up the road, years ago—and I think she meant this as a compliment; I always took it as compliment—but she remarked that this garden is a permanent battle between order and chaos. And I like that. I think it’s a good way to put it.

The architectural format, the right-angle plans, the distinct rooms: They allow us to have a style of planting which is looser and more naturalistic than we could do if we did not have the framework. It’s like a landscape picture from the 19th century; it’s got the gold frame that holds it all together. Our hedges and our walls are very important in defining the structure of the garden. And then the plants can romp and have a good time sort of attacking, overwhelming the structure. And it seems to work. People seem to like it.

Margaret: Yeah, it’s different because again, in this area, in this rural area where you are, and I’m not so far away, it’s unexpected to be in these almost enclosed rooms like what you said with the walls, the hedges, etc., and to be inside each kind of garden picture, and then you can move to the next space and explore something else entirely.

George: Yes, the different rooms allow us to have different color schemes from here to there. There’s a yellow border, there’s a red border. Color is very important to me. But basically, most of my color decisions are just about what works, and I worry about what doesn’t. And of course, we are venturing now into personal taste. It’s fingernails on the blackboard for me if I see taxicab yellow combined with magenta; I just hate that. [Laughter.]

And yet somebody else’s garden, if I visited, I’ve gotten mature enough in my old age that I can appreciate someone else’s taste. If someone is visual and see things very differently than I do, I like that. I can enjoy somebody’s vision if it’s different than my own. But my own vision, I like harmonious colors that feed off each other and contrast.

Very important, with the color in the garden, I don’t just depend on flowers, because in the north here, we’re lucky if something stays in bloom for two weeks. Very few flowers, unless they are annuals, go through the whole season. So I’ve used foliage for color. Variegated plants are very important to me. Variegated trees.

My favorite is Cornus controversa ‘Variegata,’ the variegated version of an Asian dogwood. It’s got pale cream variegated leaves. It’s like a flowering tree the whole season. The other color that’s very important in the orchestration of the contrast in the garden is purple foliage, and Japanese maples are good. Other purple, there are barberries; I like barberry a lot. I know that at this point, there’s a campaign to outlaw barberries in certain states, which is really a shame. The one that grows in the woods is a definite menace, no question about it.

Margaret: Thunbergii, Berberis thunbergii.

George: No question about it. But I’ve had a purple-leaved one growing in the same spot for 35 years, and it’s never seeded itself. It’s utterly harmless, and does nice things in my garden. So that’s one of the purple leaves that’s very important in the way I plan the rhythms of the colors, how you balance out colors, right?

Margaret: The invasion ecologists would say—the biologists who specialize in invasive plants—they would say you don’t see it because the birds took the fruit and flew a mile away and pooped and planted the invasive barberries in the woods a mile away. That’s what they would say. But I’m just saying that for the record; I get what you mean.

George: Yes, I’ve heard them say that, but I’ve never seen one a mile away.

Margaret: No, no, I understand. But the point you’re making is that colorful foliage, including from our woody plants—so not just to rely on flowers—is critically important to making a garden that really hangs together in a longer season than just that two-week period of something.

George: Yes. We need to keep the interest going. The other color that I use a lot is chartreuse foliage, yellow foliage. And one of my favorites—and it does seed itself all over the place, but it doesn’t seed itself out in the landscape—is Spiraea japonica. I’ve got a nice yellow-leaf version with pale pink flowers, I forget its name. I have at least 50 plants, 49 of which are seedlings from the mother plant. And we like it and we allow it to pop up here and there.

This garden is very much about self-seeded plants. And of course there’s a distinction between plants that are dangerous and self-seed into the landscape and those which are just invasive in your garden. And we have a lot of those. And they’re useful because this is a big garden. They don’t cost any money. And there’s something about the way nature self-seeds around, which is I can’t do it myself. There’s an energy about the way nature does it.

Margaret: A spontaneity. It has a spontaneity.

George: It’s wonderful in a garden, and it’s the only way I know to get it.

Margaret: So color-wise: You were talking about colors. You were talking about chartreuse and colorful foliage and variegation and so forth, and you have some borders that are dominated by a particular color, a red border, etc. Are there color combinations that are “very George,” any combinations that are particularly sort of signature-y to you at all?

George: Silver foliage and white flowers I love. We have what we call the gray garden [above], it’s one of the gardens here. It’s really a white garden, but I allow some blue flowers in it occasionally, and so it’s easier to call it a gray garden. And we have silver foliage, various Artemisia, and there’s a wonderful silver-leaf tree that towers above the garden called Salix alba sericea, if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s a wonderful more silver version of the white willow. It is a very good accent plant for that color.

Margaret: So the silver, silver with white, and maybe a little blue thrown in.

George: And a little blue. Yes, yes.

Margaret: It’s so cool.

George: Blue is a wonderful color, but hard to get blue in the garden after spring. We have forget-me-nots; they’re true blue. And Virginia bluebells. And then the blues turn kind of what we call Campanula blue. It’s almost blue, but with more red in the color than true blue. And they’re good, too. But delphiniums, of course, are wonderful, but hard to grow here. They don’t like to return.

Margaret: Yeah. One other thing that I think of about Hollister House is that you use water. You have some natural water—a stream, I think that comes along part of the property—but you use water, as I saw when I visited English gardens years ago, and was very impressed by the use of water juxtaposed against the plants and as an element of the garden design. You have various water elements in some of those gardens. And I think that’s a very striking part of designing a garden, to include water into the design.

George: I would agree with you on that. We’re very blessed here because we are at the junction of two natural little brooks, but there is Sprain Brook, and the other one is so short and small, it doesn’t have a name, but we use the water. There’s a pond, dammed up before I got here. They don’t let you do that anymore, but it’s grandfathered in and we take water from that. We’ve got a rill [above], where we pump the water into it. It’s moving constantly. And then we have a reflecting pool with a little fountain, which is entirely by gravity. It’s right from a little stream above it, and it runs all the time. It’s icy cold. So it is a great place to swim on a very hot day.

But yes, I think water is terribly important. There’s a certain magic about running water. It’s wonderful to hear the sound. It’s wonderful to see. It makes a garden, makes a place, special.

Margaret: Definitely brings in the birds, too. I mean, a lot of the creatures also appreciate it, not just the human visitors.

George: Yes. Frogs. The frogs spawn in our reflecting pool. They don’t seem to matter that the water’s cold, and they’re the biggest attraction for children.

Margaret: Yeah, yeah. Now, plant-wise, I mean, I may be recalling incorrectly, but you do like daylilies, for instance. That’s one plant that I think that have an impact, add a lot of color to the garden, in their season, I mean.

George: Well, they’re very important for the summer.

Margaret: Yes.

George: Spring is full of really spectacular flowers like peonies that are showstoppers. By midsummer, there are flowers, but they’re not too many big, important, impressive blossoms. Daylilies can give you that. I have lots of different varieties.

I prefer basically the ones that are more like the wild species, or that still look like a lily. I have said critically that daylily breeders at one point seemed to want to make the daylily more like a pansy than a true lily. And those varieties are not. And I suppose they could be wonderful in another place. We try to make our plantings look more or less natural.

I always say that I want it to look as if it was the plant’s idea to grow there, and not mine. Often that’s true if they self-seed, but we try to give a look, which is a natural sort of… We don’t want it to look self-conscious.

Margaret: Again, I think there’s a spontaneity to the plantings within each of the spaces at Hollister House, a sense of spontaneity.

George: Thank you. That’s a very good word.

Margaret: And I know that that spontaneity, to achieve, it took a lot of work [laughter]. I mean, it’s not that you just let it all hang out and let the weeds take over and whatever. I don’t mean to say that.

George: Well, sometimes we do, but then of course, you have to wade in. I always say that you have to be judge and jury in a naturalistic garden. You have to protect the innocent, punish the guilty. I want it to look as if it’s one big, happy, horticultural family. That’s the illusion we are after. Sometimes it is. Sometimes we have to protect plants. The plants are always trying to kill other plants and take over, and as I say, you have to protect the innocent from the marauders. But we want to look as if everybody’s happy and there’s balance. That’s the appearance that we’re after.

Margaret: Has it been a good rose season? You like old roses, too, yes?

George: We don’t have too many old roses.

Margaret: Oh, no?

George: And the hybrid teas and the floribundas, we’re just a little bit too cold for them to prosper. I have a few old roses that I like, one of which is not a 19th-century or 1920s one, it’s called ‘Clair Matin’ French rose; it means clear morning in French. It’s a good pink rose. It’s a rebloomer.

Most of the rugosas are good. There’s a particularly nice deep red rugosa, a Grootendorst hybrid, the Grootendorst hybrid called ‘Grootendorst Supreme,’ which is one of my favorites.

Margaret: I don’t know that one. I’ve been besieged by the rose rosette disease that’s been coming in from all the invasive multiflora roses around the woodlands and so forth here, and it’s being transferred. So I’ve had to get rid of some of my remaining roses. So that’s always frustrating, because they provide so much color at that sort of transition season into summer, the late spring and into summertime typically.

George: And then of course, roses are intrinsically romantic. There’s just something about a rose which reaches the psyche like no other flower. They’re magic, roses—or can be.

Margaret: How big is the property—is it about 25 acres or something?

George: The property is around 25 acres. I should measure it sometime and figure out how big the garden is. People ask, but I don’t think that way; I don’t know how big the garden is. It appears probably bigger than it is because when you divide space, you make it seem larger.

Margaret: Right, right. And you’re on a hillside—that’s another thing. I mean, I’m on a hillside also, and at first, when I came here years ago, and it was like, “Oh, well, wait a minute. This is more complicated. How do you make gardens on this uneven terrain and on these different levels and so forth now?” So that was another challenge that you faced.

George: It was indeed, because I don’t mind being on a slope if I’m going from here to there, but once I get there, I want it to be flat. I want it to be the level ground. When I bought the house 45 years ago, the only flat space on the whole property was the driveway, and of course there’s no garden there.

So we got in the bulldozers and we got in the wall-builders, and we terraced the garden, which is terrifying when you do it because there’s no living thing that’s left after the bulldozers come through. You’ve killed everything, but it’s worth it in the long run.

It also provides a great deal of drama in the garden, to have it terraced. You look on one section, you look up at another. Terracing is wonderful. It’s expensive to begin with, but it’s worth it, and you only have to do it once. You have to mow you lawn every week. So that was an added opportunity for garden-making here.

Margaret: And you really couldn’t have done the formal rooms and so forth, erected those hedges and walls and whatever on the original terrain. You had to create these landing pads for those types of gardens.

George: Yes, I think so. A sloping terrain is not really congenial with a formal plan.

Margaret: And so as if this is not enough, you also have another garden in California, right? [Laughter.]

George: I’m afraid so, yes. Glutton for punishment.

Margaret: Is it addictive? Is that the problem?

George: Of course. The great thing is I can grow all of the things that I can’t grow here. At least many of them; even the English can’t grow the things that I can in California. One of the great learning curves for me, wanting to make an English garden here in Connecticut, I came back and at least half of the plants that I was in love with that I’d seen in England do not like Connecticut.

So it’s taken many years to discover what likes us and what doesn’t, and what allows me also to grow plants chockablock closely together, which the garden books often say you shouldn’t do. It’s probably true the plant would be happier if you gave it a foot of space around each plant, but on the other hand, that doesn’t make a beautiful garden. So we grow a lot of plants here maybe not in an ideal way for the plant, but so that we paint pictures with the plants. And that takes some experimentation, because not every wonderful plant will allow you to grow it chockablock close to its neighbors to create that kind of intense horticultural experience.

Margaret: Right. I just want to sort of invite people to kind of partake. So this is really a wonderful destination, again, in Northwestern Connecticut, in Litchfield County. And you’re open a couple of-

George: We’re open three days a week: afternoons, Wednesdays and Fridays, and then most of the whole day Saturday. Also for private groups, if people would like to make an appointment; we do garden tours.

Margaret: Oh, great. And there are frequently educational or sort of extra events that people can come to, art events and other educational sort of events.

George: We do. We have a very large 18th-century barn that has been rebuilt for human habitation. It’s air-conditioned and it’s heated, and we have lectures, we have demonstration classes, mainly in the spring and the fall. In the summertime, people seem to be busy, but we have a full, full schedule of lectures. And even plant sales.

Margaret: I think I’ve binged a little bit at some of your plant sales [laughter]. Oh my goodness.

George: I like to see the garden when it’s cool and pleasant to be in. Once every month during the summer months, we have an evening with wine so that people can come and enjoy the garden in the cool of the evening.

Margaret: Well, I will give all the information about visiting, and especially about upcoming programs, especially Garden Study Weekend, which is the weekend of Sept. 6. And you have sort of a day of talks-

George: Lectures, yes, and then we have a garden party, and we have garden tours.

Margaret: On Sunday, the day after, you have tours of nearby gardens. So it’s a great destination event.

(Photos from Hollister House.)

more from hollister house

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the July 14, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).