Trying to control your imagination on a stroll through the elegant old neighborhood surrounding New Orleans' Audubon Park is like holding the leash of an undisciplined puppy. It will resist all attempts at restraint. Too many flights of fancy beckon beyond dense
hedge walls, from the splash of hidden fountains to images of secret
gardens and jasmine-draped pools. Ruthie and Lou Frierson have lived in
this section of the Crescent City for more than 30 years, and during that
span they have created a cool, intensely fragrant garden that could exist
just as easily in the romantic imagination.
"Our garden has evolved along with our lives,
and many talented hands have helped make it what we see today,"
Ruthie says, reflecting on the patio garden and its columns of mature
jasmine, masses of evergreen wisteria, and the Palladian-style fountain
bubbling gently in a raised pond.
Underfoot, a patio of New Orleans soft
red brick, punctuated by flagstone, pulls together the garden's
structural elements and unifies the whole: the Georgian house, built by the
prestigious New Orleans firm Armstrong and Koch in the '20s, and the
guesthouse, added in the '80s by New Orleans architect Barry Fox. The
patio winds behind the house and leads to a hidden delight: an intimate
secret garden and second fountain, which await discovery just beyond the
kitchen.
In the '70s, when the Friersons moved in across
the street from Audubon Park, they enlisted architect Douglass Freret,
who created the original design for the secret garden, and Baby Hardie, a
much-beloved garden designer who was a legend in a city noted for
flamboyant personalities. "She always wore large, wide-brimmed straw
hats," Ruthie remembers, and "she loved sweeping gardens with
deep, curving beds." Although both are gone now, their influence is
alive and visible in the structure of the garden.
Since the early '80s, the garden has continued
to thrive under the hand of landscape architect René J. L. Fransen,
who designed both the brick patio and the dominant Palladian fountain.
Fransen fit an antique urn that Lou inherited from his grandmother into a
niche at the back of the fountain and planted it with witch hazel that has
grown to fill the overarching space. He created the fountain's
richly layered backdrop by constructing a 12-foot-high wall, adding a
hedge-row, and weaving in showy golden dewdrop, a tree-shrub from the
verbena family, which, he says, "sings for its supper" when its
blue flowers and yellow berries form a canopy over the patio.
Shape and texture, along with a pleasing symmetry,
characterize the garden, which Fransen describes as "loose, but
defined by architectural elements. We clipped the corners of the
raised planters, and the little curves give a bit more interest. We try to
do things in a soft way, and the bands of the planters are made of the same
old brick as the patio surface."
