“This is a gardener’s garden.” For Tom Phillips it was the ultimate compliment. Made by a visitor strolling through his landscape during the recent Frontenac Garden Tour, it provided a verbal acknowledgement of the constant harmonious interplay of plant colors and textures that line walkways and beds throughout the garden.
Reddish-purple-leaved coral bells/heuchera, barberry and feathery Japanese maples stand out against a backdrop of green-leaved shrubs and ground cover that line the brick walk leading to the front door. Sweeps of "Snow Queen" oakleaf hydrangeas, blooming white in the summer and providing brilliant burgundy leaf color in the fall, line the driveway and draw visitors to the back of the home. Drifts of white, spherical blossomed "Annabelle" hydrangeas shine from the shade garden at the back of the property.
Tom comes by his love of gardening naturally. “My mother was a gardener; all my siblings are gardeners. I am a hunter and a fisherman; I love the outdoors,” he explains. Just loving gardening, he knew, wasn’t enough when it came to creating a landscaping masterpiece. So, 25 years ago, he made a decision that would lead to the garden he has today. He knocked on the Kirkwood front door of the late June Hutson, who was then head of the Kemper Center for Home Gardening at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
“I had grown up in Kirkwood,” he recounts. “I had always admired the home of Edgar Denison (famed naturalist, conservationist and author of the book "A Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Missouri," now in its sixth printing). After June bought the home—following Denison’s death—I knocked on her door and asked if I could see the garden.” The visit went well and Tom ended up by asking June, who had a few private clients in addition to her work at the Botanical Garden, to be his gardening advisor and mentor.
The partnership, which began in 2000 with homes in Warson Woods and Des Peres, was front and center when Tom and his wife Peggy purchased their current home in 2017. The house, with its one-acre lot, already had good gardening bones. The brickwork, courtyard patio and swimming pool existed as did some of the shady walkways through the back of the property. “She (the previous owner) had made a great start to it, but she contracted cancer and had to give it up. I moved things around and added to what she already had done. I designed the landscape myself with June’s help and added the plants I liked the most. June would come over and she would point, and I would start sketching,” Tom recalls.
"June taught me the importance of repeating color and mixing textures so that it is pleasing to the eye. She also taught me the importance of not just doing three or four of something but making a statement, something that is particularly important in a large landscape."
One of the first changes that Tom and Peggy made that affected their landscape was, at Peggy’s suggestion, to paint their red brick house white. That allowed plant leaf and flower colors to pop, adding visual contrast and excitement to the garden. Groupings of hostas with striking green and white foliage provide impact and the perfect design touch to tie the different parts of the front landscaping near the house together. “Peggy is my consultant,” Tom says. “When I need to make a decision, I always ask her if she prefers ‘this or that,' because ”
Some of the other initial steps were more mundane, such as digging out the invasive honeysuckle bushes that lined the back of the property. Tom replaced the honeysuckle with a line of feathery "Green Giant" arborvitaes, creating a permanent, private green screen turning the shade garden into what Tom now calls a “secret garden.” He also added a number of understory evergreen viburnums to the already existing oak, hickory and persimmon trees and reworked paths. For help with the heavier gardening chores, plantings and hardscape issues, Tom called on both Delgado Brothers Landscaping and Gardens of Grace.
Multiple dogwoods, redbuds and azaleas went into the front landscaping. Waves of "Ruby Slippers" hydrangeas, which begin with conical white blossoms in late spring and over the summer transition to deep pink, splash against the south side of the pool area. In late summer and early fall the appropriately football-shaped blossoms of "Limelight" hydrangeas add a greenish white glow to the east end of the same area.
His fondness for hydrangeas lies in his fascination with the different shapes of the blossoms and the fact that they offer “a great presence in every season from spring until fall” with a great many varieties providing brilliant fall leaf color.
To bring brightness to the shade garden he added shrubs and perennials with chartreuse or variegated foliage such as "Francis William" and "Sum and Substance" hostas and gold-leaved "Sun King" aralia. Sun-dappled areas created spots for garden phlox, iris, penstemon and Japanese anemone.
Throughout his years of gardening, Tom has learned certain tricks to make gardening chores easier and provide instant impact to his landscape. Rather than waiting weeks for tiny, six-pack annuals to fill out pool containers, for instance, he buys multiple, already lush hanging baskets of brightly colored SunPatiens and transplants them into patio pots.
With a background in the furniture business as the former owner of Phillips Furniture and Weekends Only, where he was accustomed to seeing how various pieces worked together to create a beautiful space, Tom finds gardening to be an additional outlet for his creativity.
“Gardening is probably a more important part of me than I realize,” he philosophizes. “It is a way to create beauty, and creating beauty is really important to me. When I am out in the garden, I forget all my other troubles and I am totally present in the moment.”
Tom can completely identify with a quotation that he once came across from Thomas Jefferson: “If I am anything, I am a gardener.”
