On Friday, with anguish and a broken heart, I said goodbye to Eartha, the dog of my lifetime. I have loved and cared for many wonderful dogs and cats, but this attachment was the most profound. Thousands and thousands of hours as true companions— a life together so entwined that it sometimes felt like it was just the two of us in the world, our beautiful Waterperry world, enjoying the sheer lightness and gift of being, and the tenderest joy. Rest In Peace, my dear and darling girl. Your love was the sweetest blessing.

When Katherine Kane and her husband, Olin West, first viewed the property that is now Waterperry Farm, Kane’s creative side took the lead. “I knew I would make a garden here. We loved the mountains and the age of the house, but there was only pasture in all directions, hardly any trees,” she shares. Like many artists and designers, Kane found the “empty canvas” of the land to be inspiring. She decided to build her own English inspired garden oasis on the property.

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A hauntingly beautiful, five minute film by Naz Melconian, shot at Waterperry Farm, featuring the jewelry of designer, Suz Somersall. Somersall began her love for jewelry and adornment at an early age in her hometown of New Orleans. Living in this carnival city with French and Spanish influences, the opulent architecture, costumes, and environment of New Orleans filled her with a great appreciation for design. Her interest in form and shape grew as she studied the silhouetted artwork of Kara Walker as an undergraduate at Brown University, and then as a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. She went on to pursue her passion for design in ateliers in Tuscany and on her own in Japan.

In 2017, we hosted a lovely group of thirty donors from the Chicago Botanic Garden President’s Circle for a late afternoon tour of the gardens followed by dinner in the greenhouse. The event launched the group’s several day tour of the area’s finest gardens. It was an immeasurable delight to share Waterperry with enthusiasts and experts from the CBG community and to note the pleasure they took in the experience, especially given their immersion in one of America’s premier public gardens. It was a thrill for us, and we treasure the thank-you letter shown below from Fred Spicer, the Executive Vice President and Director of the Garden.

Katherine & Olin,

Thank you sincerely for our recent tour & dinner of your marvelous farm & garden. Rarely is a singular garden vision so well-expressed, not to mention loved (which was obvious)!

Your articulation of spaces, and passage, was memorable and surely the result of careful study, and an intimacy with the land. I was captivated by the restrained repetition of circular forms amidst so much rectilinearity– it was most welcome to my eye, and never gratuitous. I wish I had had more daylight (and less hunger!) in which to examine your plant diversity more carefully. It was impressive!

Please visit us in Chicago if you can, & don’t hesitate to contact me for a tour.

Cheers!

Fred Spicer

Virginia Home Grown’s Amy Barton-Williams visited Waterperry Farm and interviewed Katherine Kane. VHG is hosted by Peggy Singlemann, Principal, RVA Gardener.

Enjoy the show.

About his friends he understood so much: our ranges and requirements, our limitations– just as he had an aptitude for horticulture and how to nurture plants. We used to talk, as people in their fifties will, about the transience of everything; the seeming randomness of disaster and disease; and more than once he remarked that it takes sheer courage on everyone’s part to simply get out of bed in the morning. In a sense he was right of course.

Something else he said that has stayed with me and helps when I am feeling ‘excessive-compulsive’ as I like to call it, particularly in my acquisition of plants: that gardening should be a big, extravagant experiment. I miss you, Joe.