A Little About Jeff and his garden

Art and antiques dot Van Nortwick garden

excerpts reprinted from The Reminder Hastings, July 12, 2005

Jeff Van Nortwick's garden is one of four gardens open to the public this Saturday, July 16, 2005 as part of the Thornapple Garden Club's "A Day in the Garden" event.

He is an environmental landscape designer, and his gardens have been developed to reflect his uniue focus on gardening. "For the most part, it's a landscape I allow to take care of itself. I'm not the finicky type. The big fashion trend now is I've seen a lot more people want more of a green landscape; in other words, we're seeing people come our way. Less work, but good show."

Jeff's goal is to have groups of plants, or what he calls plant 'colonies'. He doesn't have any favorite plants, but "instead of seeing a plant, I like to see 10 of the same thing. I like bold statements, and this has enough space where you can do that. That's been my primary thrust. Give me yellow, but a bed of yellow. I try to develop patterns."

Another goal has been to develop a wildlife habitat. There are deer, flying squirrels, and in August a hatch of baby milk snakes, turkeys, and a reclusive bittern, which he said has probably led to the demise of several hundred goldfish in his pond.

An intriguing assortment of plants, flowers and trees grow on Jeff's property. For instance, he has a smoke tree garden. He has a burgundy smoke tree and several other varieties. He also has an area he calls an 'arid' landscape, with prickly pear cactus, different types of sedum and "a lot of volunteer plants that have blown over from my other garden." Crabapples and old apple trees are part of the landscape, as well as bayberry, which he said makes a wonderful hedge.

Visitors will see white bleeding hearts, cone flowers, ghost ferns, ostrich ferns and other types of ferns, plus globe thistles, blue oat grass, yucca and a host of other plants and flowers. He noted that because of a lack of mature trees when he moved there, it was "pretty much an open-air place" and quite hot to be outdoors on warm summer days. Now, "the trees have matured a lot... the forest keeps maturing. It's a lot of fun."

Speaking of all the work he has done to the property, Jeff talked about a three-year project of building a large pond. "Being a landscape designer, this was just a little too flat for me, so I took out the tennis court aond put in a pond," he said. The former tennis court has been recycled into a driveway on the property. "A lot of the landscape was kind of a recycle project. We made everything balance so nothing ever went too far. It's been kind of a labor of love."

His property is nicknamed Northforks by his friends. "It's a takeoff on the former 'Dallas' TV show, which had acreage called Southfork." Since Jeff formerly lived in Battle Creek, his friends coined the nickname because they had to drive north to see him.

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