A Garden That Takes the Long View

HOCKESSIN, Del.

Bill and Nancy Frederick came to the 17 acres of stream valley they call Ashland Hollow in 1965 when it was a bare and hilly pasture. The livestock and the farmhands were gone, but the Fredericks arrived determined to breathe new life into the landscape in the shape of a garden they could grow old with.

As we look across the hollow, distant maples, hickories and dogwood trees have formed a tapestry of autumn color against the far hill, the 19th-century springhouse is half-veiled by the land, and a sense of rustic tranquillity has settled over the place. The couple walk their dogs past trees and hedges that have grown to stately maturity alongside their keepers.

"I've been very fortunate that I could stay in one place," said Bill Frederick, who turned 80 last month. "We had that ideal when we moved here. It's a wonderful thing."

Ashland Hollow has developed over the past four decades as one of the most admired private gardens on the East Coast, but what has brought me here (other than Frederick's invitation) is the realization that beyond its calm grandeur lie some truths about how to make a garden, big or small. Don't fight the site. Have a vision and let it unfold. Plant a fabulous tree for your dotage.

This garden in particular is not merely a decorated landscape, it is a journey of changing vistas and experiences that may take two hours or more to savor. It borrows from the idea of a Japanese stroll garden, where locations along a path create contrived scenes, "except here," Frederick said, "you're going through a variety of horticultural experiences."

It is also a journey through time, or at least through seasons. A key part of the garden is a large area devoted to plants that shine in winter. At the edge of a wood, a free-standing painted door announces winter in brass letters, and leads into Frederick's Winter Garden. In the waning fall, the promise of what is ahead can be seen: The fruited deciduous hollies, the blazing witch hazels and the grove of five paperbark maples, whose decorative peeling takes a good decade or two to show.

In February, the place is a carpet of flowering bulbs, including winter aconites, adonis and snowdrops, while the redtwig dogwoods shine and the witch hazels burst into fragrant color. "Bill has an inner time that doesn't feel 21st century, where everything is immediate and hasty," said Chris Woods, garden director of the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Bill Frederick set out to be a lawyer but felt the tug of plants instead. "I've been gardening since I was 8," he said.

Soon after he and Nancy married, they enrolled in horticulture classes at Cornell University, then returned to the Wilmington area to start a nursery, which they ran from 1952 to 1976.

Among his early mentors Bill Frederick counts Henry Francis du Pont, who was Nancy's cousin. Du Pont famously made Winterthur, his home north of Wilmington, into a museum of American decorative arts, but also as a place of sophisticated (and, for years, unnoticed) naturalistic landscaping. "He was very good to Bill," said Nancy Frederick. "He would call up and say, 'I want you both to come over and see something.' And there was some part of the garden he felt was glorious at the time."

The Fredericks worked with two Wilmington architects in making a home for the rolling site, designing a stuccoed house that actually spans the brook downstream from the springhouse. The main room of the house, and its balcony, are on an arched bridge, the floor 15 feet above the water.