Featured Gallery: Carmel Garden

For the last fifteen years of my professional career I lived in Carmel, Indiana — a residential suburb of Indianapolis. And we lived on a street named Ridge Road. It was named Ridge Road for a reason. Our side of the street had precipitous drops to the houses and street below. In our case, the drops were both in front and back of the house. We were sixty feet from the street in front and some fifteen to twenty feet above street level. There was no lawn in front. We had built decks in the back on eight levels from one end of the house to the other. Most of the decks extended out over a rocky, scrub-brush covered, tree shaded decline to where we knew were other houses but which we could not see because of all the trees. In the middle of our decks was one very large one that sided a forty-foot square of ground that was mostly bare when we moved in. Over the course of the fifteen years we lived there, we turned that square of ground into our garden of every shade-loving plant we could find.

These are photos of our plantings from that wonderful period of our life. We begin with the path to our potting shed, and then you will see other views of the garden over the next several days. It was our paradise.