On the Azalea Trail
Gardens ready to show off blossoms after overcoming a year of struggle
A CROSS the patrician expanses of River Oaks, the hope for azaleas springs eternal about this time every year.
In the weeks leading up to the annual Azalea Trail Home & Garden Tour, small armies of landscapers descend upon the private properties that will be featured along with the house museums Bayou Bend and Rienzi, with their acres of verdant paths.
Most gardeners would not even think of trying this at, um, home. Wielding pruners, shovels and flat upon flat of colorful annuals and bulbs, the crews are putting finishing touches on floral fantasylands that have been many months — or years — in the making.
Some years, the weather has been too warm, and the azaleas bloom early. Other years, freezes nip the buds on the beloved shrubs in February. The only thing that’s fairly predictable is the stress of trying to coax peak blooms to synch with the calendar.
This year’s event is a week earlier than usual. The sun has been largely absent for weeks, and gardens across Houston are still recovering from the double whammy of Hurricane Harvey’s drenching in August and a brutal freeze in January.
But not to worry. Tour visitors will have no shortage of ooh-and-ah moments inside and out.
The magnificent estate at 3030 Inwood promises to be a standout.
Owned for many years by art patron Alfred Glassell Jr., the stylized English Tudor Revival home today bears the stamp of three architects: Hiram A. Salisbury, then John Staub and, most recently, Bill Curtis of Curtis and Windham, who renovated it after the current owners purchased the property in 2010. Charlotte Moss, the New York design legend, did the interiors, including the chinoiserie-inflected dining room, a spectacular library and a new solarium.
In a sense, every room is a garden room, with windows opening on views
into the winding gardens redesigned by landscape architect Johnny Steele. Reflecting the homeowners’ favorite color, tulips in varied shades of pink will greet visitors through some of those windows and in the beds along the pool.
The indoor-outdoor blend carries into the back gardens, where a lovely loggia and a chef ’s dream of a smokehouse are just steps from the pool. Steele is creating a layered symphony of delicate pastel colors across the 3-acre property with paperwhite bulbs and annuals that include alyssum, impatiens, delphiniums, pansies, petunias, lobelia, nemesia and primula. Large, poolside urns planted with graceful, flowing color and concrete “baskets” full of perky little violas help to make it all picture perfect.
Early this week, the azaleas were just beginning to offer a blossom or two. They include legacy ‘Formosas’ in vibrant magenta and burgundy planted by Glassell, as well as coral ‘Judge Solomon,’ white ‘G.G. Gerbing’ and pale-pinkspeckled ‘George Tabor’ varieties. Several types of camellias showed off beautifully, a melange of soft pink, deep pink, red and white.
Although the tour’s theme is “Blossoms on the Bayou,” this year’s event might well have been named for Staub: All but one of the seven stops show his graceful architectural hand. Especially the home Staub designed and built for himself, with a New England motif that reminded his wife of her Massachusetts heritage. The Staubs lived there for nearly 60 years, from 1925 until their deaths in 1981. Their grandson then raised his own family in the home, which retains much of its original footprint and many of its original furnishings.
Laura and Roy Nichol, on another street, cherish the 81-year old, Staubdesigned home they bought 21 years ago. They especially love the architect’s floor-to-ceiling windows; Staub always seemed to design with the outdoors in mind.
“No matter where you are inside, you see the garden,” Laura Nichol said.
Avid gardeners who both grew up in gardening families, the Nichols have been implementing a design they commissioned from Tmothy Adcock of Thompson + Hanson since they bought the place. Rarely a weekend passes by when Roy isn’t out in the yard watering, puttering or planting, his wife said. “He goes to Buchanan’s two or three times a weekend. It’s his candy store.”
For the trail, the couple planted 1,500 paperwhites underneath their front yard’s large live oak. Several types of azaleas, including some original to the property, are starting to flower; and the sasanqua and japonica camellias are in full bloom, including two 12-foot tall white specimens along the driveway. The hollies are full of berries and Japanese maples are budding out in the backyard, where the beds surround an oval of Zoysia grass.
The deep pink, springblooming climbing rose the Nichols cherish was grown from a cutting of Roy’s great-great-grandmother’s plant in Nashville. Some of their hollies were cuttings from his father’s Nashville trees.
“Gardening is way of honoring his dad, and really joyful for us both,” she said. “It’s a superrestful, peaceful garden.”