Design

Tour a Garden That Perfectly Balances Hardscape and Plants

Fine Gardening – Issue 209

Margherita Fabrizio and her husband, Andy Jordan, live in a beautiful historic 1918 home in the heart of downtown Ithaca, New York. When they purchased their property in 2009, they certainly fell in love with the house, but it was the landscape that truly sealed the deal. The steep, north-facing quarter-acre property sits at the mouth of a mile-long gorge. The beginning of the gorge’s shale walls is the backdrop for their garden. The main walkway (built in the 1920s and ’30s) provides a grand view from above and then descends into the garden with stairs that mirror the graceful swoop of the native terrain.

Over the years, Margherita and Andy have worked as a team to curate the nearly 100-year-old man-made landscape into a harmonious garden connected with its natural surroundings. It has been a labor of love as Andy has dug in to rebuild and expand the hardscape into a series functional and beautiful terraces, pathways, and garden rooms while Margherita has used her artistic eye to edit and enhance the captivating softscape plant palette.

 

Learn more about this garden

See how Margherita and Andy’s garden strikes the perfect balance in Fine Gardening #209.

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Comments

  1. cournteyflower 12/25/2022

    Very beautiful, I also like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6rRn9jN-bw

  2. cournteyflower 12/25/2022

    Very beautiful, I also like this video youtube video

  3. wittyone 01/16/2023

    I really like this video. It really gave me a better idea about how this garden was laid out and what changes were made by the current owners. Margherita was very well spoken and her advice about incorporating shrubs and annuals in among perennials is good advice especially for a beginner gardener. Too often shrubs are not initially added as part of the overall plan and annuals are completely absent. Without these two elements there is less structure and the opportunity for filling in with blooms among perennial's non-bloom period is missed.

  4. Lydia 03/16/2023

    This is certainly not a beautiful scene that a human can create. It's all a we become what we behold team effort. So pefect!!

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