Gardens, Pools & Spas
Self-Reflection
A Chesterfield gardener combines her love of color and texture, sun and shade, to create a garden of variety
BY
Lucyann Boston
PHOTOGRAPHY
Rob Grimm

Those who know Karen Koehneman would tell you that her garden is a perfect reflection of her personality: bright, creative, and full of life and energy.

Urns of purple-tinged taro/elephant’s ear and cascading, chartreuse sweet potato vine flank the front door of her country French, two-story home. On one side of the entrance a marvelous mix of sun-loving shrubs and perennials — including summer sweet, spirea, black-eyed Susans, Russian sage and sedum — spill down a sloping terrace. On the other, the varying leafy shapes and shades of lustrous boxwood, dainty, upright epimedium, and trailing, purple-tinged ajuga mingle along a shady walk. But all that is just an hors d’oeuvre for the banquet of floral color and texture flowing from the 150-foot-long, four-foot-high rock wall that curves around the side and back of the house. Salvias, phlox, bee balm, black-eyed Susans, yarrow, hollyhocks, cone flowers and flowering tobacco tumble together from the natural flower pots created in the spaces between the large rocks. Creeping sedums trail between the rocks, soften the hard edges and tie the spaces together.

Koehneman estimates that more than 100 different perennials and annuals brighten the landscape of the Chesterfield home she shares with her husband Mike and three sons. The garden was featured on the recent Chesterfield-area garden tour.

The rock wall was a Koehneman inspiration, created during the building of the house. “I knew we were going to have a swimming pool,” she explains. “The rock that they had blasted away to make the foundation for the house was sitting in a high pile. I had the builders use a Bobcat to move a lot of the rock to create a wall in back of the pool fence. It was cheaper to use that rock on the property than to haul it away.”

Koehneman added a mix of topsoil and compost to the naturally-occurring spaces between the rocks. “I put a few little things in one year, then a few more the next year,” she recalls. Before long the original plants began to reseed, sprouting up spontaneously in even small crevasses and providing a lush backdrop for the annuals and tropicals she adds each year. Where the rock wall ends, Koehneman has used columnar, evergreen arborvitaes to define and screen the one-third-acre lot. One stand of arborvitae creates a privacy wall for an intimate patio just off the kitchen. Accented with fragrant flowers such as heliotrope, lilac and night-scented nicotiana, the area is connected to the rest of the garden by a wrought-iron, morning glory-covered arbor. The other stand of arborvitae, near the pool, provides a dark green background for a dramatic floral wall composed of massive flower- and foliage-filled terra cotta pots layered two and three deep. “I used to use small clusters of three or four pots,” she explained. “When I was at Disney World I got the idea of using numerous containers with one or maybe two plants in each container rather than trying to mix a number of plants in each container.”


Karen's Fundamentals

While Koehneman has a flair for unusual plants, her gardening advice is practical. Here are some of her fundamentals:

-You have to start with the soil. You have to amend it and add organic material. People hear this advice over and over but you have to do it to be successful.
-You have to put the right plant in the right place; pay attention to how much sun and shade and moisture plants need. Plants won’t do well in areas that aren’t suited to their needs no matter what you do.
-Don’t be afraid to pull something out if it’s not quite working. Take out what’s not working and try something new.
Many of the pots are filled with the tropical plants Koehneman loves for their exotic blossoms and colorful and unusually shaped leaves. “Plants like the chenille plant (Acalypha hispida) with its fuzzy, tube-like flowers are so exotic looking; you look at them and wonder how do they get a flower that shape,” she marvels, “plus tropicals do well in St. Louis when it gets hot. They’re not as finicky as some annuals can be.” Other Koehneman favorites are the firecracker plant (Russelia equisetiformis) with its sprays of small, bright-red, tubular flowers and needle-like leaves, which she acquired in a plant swap with her sister who lives in Houston, and a desert rose (Adenium obesum). She discovered that exotic African native with its bulbous body and deep pink, azalea-like blossoms at a nursery in Alabama. “When I travel I like to go the nurseries and buy something I haven’t seen before,” she explained. Koehneman overwinters many of her prize tropicals under grow lights in an unfinished part of her basement.

A whimsical, ornamental potting bench festooned with everything from birdhouses to mushroom sculptures accents the area of the pool next to the house. Acting as a three-dimensional garden still-life, it rests in the midst of a flower bed that once held a struggling hydrangea. “When I moved the hydrangea I was faced with a large, empty white wall,” Koehneman explained. “A friend made this for me to fill the space.”

As long as she can remember, Koehneman has been interested in gardening. “My grandmother in Bloomsdale, Missouri, had a glorious vegetable garden surrounded by peonies,” she recalls. “My mom and dad (Don and LeAnn Louis) have an acre in Bellefontaine Neighbors that is half vegetables and half flowers. I’m a registered nurse and when I took time off to raise our three boys I took classes at the Missouri Botanical Garden, became a Master Gardener and took horticultural classes at Meramec (St. Louis Community College).”As part of the volunteer commitment required by the Master Gardener program, Koehneman joined the Flora Conservancy of Forest Park, a hands-on horticultural group that works free-of-charge with the St. Louis Parks Department to provide plants and plantings for some of the most beautiful areas of Forest Park, including the gardens around the Jewel Box and The Muny. Currently, she is volunteer coordinator for the 90-person organization that works both outdoors and in the park greenhouses. Recently, the Flora Conservancy has branched out to assist volunteer groups tending gardens in Lafayette and Carondelet Parks.

Koehneman credits her work in Flora Conservancy with greatly expanding her gardening knowledge and the variety of plants in her own garden. “There are 25 Master Gardeners who are in Flora and we all share our favorite plant stories. We all take cuttings for each other and pass plants along. We all have ideas on what we should try and what has worked for us.” Two of the more striking and unusual annuals in her rock wall, creeping zinnia (Sanvitalia procumbens), which resembles tiny, trailing black-eyed Susans, and abelmoschus (Abelmoschus moschatus), a bushy, 18-inch plant with small, bright pink, hibiscus-like flowers, are plants she has worked with at Flora Conservancy.