Go outside and play

Edith Eddleman allows her spirit to frolic in a garden overflowing with perennials.

If the ever-ready grin has vanished from Edith Eddleman's face, it's because she is waiting straight-faced for the moment to unfold for a guest. Her garden is for her delight, but of equal measure is the joy it brings visitors. Here Edith has fun, and the fact it amuses others makes it even better.

This garden designer has studied in England, toured gardens nationally and internationally, fulfilled commissions and presented lectures throughout the country, and been quoted and published in garden periodicals and books. But, despite her vast experience on the serious side of gardening, Edith is remarkably free in her own Durham, North Carolina, backyard. She admits, "There is a difference between my professional life and personal life." No rules of popular taste prevail here. If something pleases her, she probably needs several more. That's how it's been with the gazing globes that seem to have seeded about the garden in many colors and sizes.

Her original one was purchased 21 years ago as a joke, but it started her down a whimsical garden path. As the curator of the perennial border at the JC Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University, she set out to horrify then-director JC Raulston by placing a gazing globe, long a focus of condescension, as the centerpiece of his parterre garden-just in time for a tour group. "That was the same night that the flamingos made their first appearance in the perennial border," Edith recalls.

What began as mischief became a way of life. "JC tried to use reverse psychology, pretending that he liked them," she says. "But because I knew what he was up to, I just kept doing it. And he gradually came to like them!"

Edith didn't put these mirrored balls on predictable plastic or concrete pedestals in the center of the lawn. She accented existing colors in the plantings and nestled them into perennials to prompt a double take. They appeared to float in the tall ornamental grasses. Gazing globes reached new heights on pedestals of Edith's innovation.

Meanwhile, she also planted and nurtured her own garden, which boasts robust clumps of color that grow 8 feet tall or more by summer's end. "When you have plants the size of the ones in my garden, you need a lot a gazing balls," she instructs. "I am of the more-isbetter school of thought.

"I realized that having them on the ground meant they would vanish in summer when the garden grew up. So if I wanted to see them, I had to put them up, hence the PVC pipe." Edith recommends using black PVC so the gazing globes appear to levitate. (She uses black spray paint to cover the yellow lettering.)

In her backyard, Edith is free from the constraints of popular opinion, so other spheres such as roof ventilators were put in place, adding the dimension of movement. Tin finials salvaged from Philadelphia row houses were set atop posts.

One of the latest innovations came

with the help of her young neighbors Amanda and Mariah Dahill-Moore. Edith discovered that swimming pool noodles had holes in the center, allowing her to place them atop short pieces of concrete rebar stuck into the soil. Edith, Amanda, and Mariah made noodle sculptures in the garden, creating arches where rose-covered arbors might have stood.

Gardens have been recognized for their impact on both mental and physical well-being, but the truth came home to Edith when she learned the role her own had played. "When my friend's daughter was very sick," Edith remembers "they would come for consultations at Duke [University Medical Center] and then come over here and walk around the garden laughing." Her friend's daughter got better. "We don't know that laughter did it, but it didn't hurt," she says.

Today, visitors to the garden laugh at Edith's flamingos--Cleopatra and her court, the Statue of Liberty, and Carmen Miranda. Another source of amusement is an assortment of things that are impossibly large or tiny. The gnome village has a life of its own. Then there is a salute to Georgia O'Keeffe-towering flowers made of streetlight reflectors. Edith explains, "Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers really big. I decided we can make things really large because it pleases us. And that is what all this is about. I am offended by people who say, `Obviously you were just trying to do this or that.' I want to kick them. I am just having fun!" LINDA C. ASKEY

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Spring 2003
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