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Garden of Earthly Delights

By Kate Reynolds
Photographs by Rimas Zailskas

Peter Gentling likes to tell the story of how, one soft afternoon in late summer, he went out to tend his gardens and found a couple enjoying a picnic on his property. His unexpected guests were most apologetic, saying that they’d been told they were welcome to come and take pleasure in this little Eden. “No problem,” he responded amiably, “I just work here.”

It’s a lovely anecdote, and a perfect illustration of Peter’s delight in sharing his bounty, as well as his sense of stewardship of the land.

On their rolling acreage off Town Mountain road, Peter, a retired surgeon, and his wife Jasmin have created a lush haven for all manner of plant life, exalted and lowly. A place where nature and spirit are nurtured. A place of poetry.
The property came to the Gentlings with an impressive provenance. The century old residence had once served as the summer White House for Herbert Hoover, but perhaps more significantly, it was purchased from Dr. and Mrs. E. L. Demmon.

“There’s a lot of continuity in this garden,” Peter observes. “Dr. Demmon was a forester who ran the experimental station here for a number of years, and Mrs. Demmon was the mother of the Botanical Garden at UNCA — she and Mrs. McCracken. Mrs. Demmon made me promise that I would keep up her wildflower garden.”
“Dr. Demmon brought these Dawn Redwoods, the Metasequoia, back from China, where his previous assignment had been as forestry advisor to the Chiang Kai-shek government,” Peter gestures towards several massive specimens along the hillside. “This plant was native here 30 million years ago and, for some reason, became extinct, so it’s simply been returned, essentially.”

Peter himself is an enthusiastic collector, traveling to some of the world’s most renowned gardens, gathering specimens from seed exchanges and garden societies, propagating plants from far-flung locales — South Africa, Russia, the Canary Islands, Madeira and New Zealand.

His greenhouse, painting studio and container gardens abound with unique and unusual cultivars, some of which are integrated into the landscape. Among the chosen, a rose grown from a hip gathered at the site of the Battle of Agincourt in France, where Henry V of England defeated Charles II.

“These things have a historical meaning for me,” he explains, “and being historically minded is important if you are a gardener. You need to know history and you need to know geography. If you know those things, and you know the climate of the plants you’re growing, you’ll be much more successful.”

Along with specimen plants, Peter has imported an all-embracing sensibility about the spiritual and emotional attributes of the landscape. The allegory and metaphor.

“Take the white pines, one of my favorite plants. See how sculptural they look? A white pine, more than any other tree, is built in the shape of a human. It has a distinct head, it has a chest and a torso and shoulder, then it has an abdomen, hips and so on. White pine is almost an anthropomorphic form.

“The Japanese know this; they talk about it all the time. The first trip I took to Japan I had the great fortune of being with a man who was the chief garden designer for the emperor.

“I asked him to tell me about the Japanese White Pine. He started talking about the Black and Red Pines. The Red Pine is like a little, stunted dwarf, with a wonderfully contorted, thick trunk. The Red Pine, he said, is like an old man. The White Pine is elegant, more like a woman. The Black Pine is more like a man.

“When you are doing garden design, you need to think about using plants appropriately. For example, in a walking park, you would plant Red Pines, because they are more entertaining, more interesting. It’s a different level of garden design than what we’re accustomed to in the states. This kind of thinking should influence your ideas — your imagination. This is the tip of the iceberg — the rest of it comes from that,” Peter says.

“Fortunately, I knew enough about gardening, and enough about anatomy and plants to put all that together. This garden is a compilation of those things. I use these Japanese ideas quite a bit. For instance, an upright dark structure with a recumbent light structure represent male and female figures. The configuration is said to bring ten thousand years of good luck.”

One can well believe that fortune smiles on this place. One of the legacies that the Gentlings inherited was an infrastructure created for the Demmons by Doan Ogden, the renowned landscape architect, whose signature stone walls and meandering paths lure the visitor through both formal and feral spaces.

Closest to the house are the more practical and mannered plantings — a vegetable garden, defined by a wall of Weeping Cedar, a whimsical herb garden, planted in the shape of a leaf and bordered with Dwarf Boxwood, espaliered apple trees and three exuberant cutting gardens to provide materials for Jasmin, a talented flower arranger.

But in the grand scheme, Peter relies on texture to create interest and depth, using blooms somewhat sparingly. “Flowers come and go,” he says. “They’re nice to have, but they’re fleeting.”

His palette runs to shades of green and gold, to shapes and their interactions.
“I’ll use the native ginger — Asarum Canadensis — with Pachysandra because I want the matte leaf with a round edge and the shiny leaf with a toothed edge.”

It is an eclectic mix — a blue hibiscus under planted with confederate rose, the beloved hellebores that he propagates and tends with such care coexisting happily with proletarian varieties such as carex, trillium, jack in the pulpit, foamflowers, native lily of the valley, the ubiquitous poke and even ironweed salvaged from a ditch. “ I love weeds,” he says with a grin.

And then, of course, there are the trees. “The shafts of light that come through these great trees here,” Peter gestures. “What I’ve done in this garden is nothing compared to what these trees do for it. If I didn’t have any special plants here, it would be just fine, because the trees have such gorgeous, wonderful spirits.”

“To take the trees down — what a terrible mistake that would be. When people develop a piece of property and they clear-cut all the trees to put the footprint of the house in, they’re really loosing the most soulful essence of the property. I don’t understand why people don’t realize that to build a house in a wooded area is a great privilege.”
Peter’s belief in the importance of green spaces has led him to extend his efforts beyond the theoretical walls of his own garden through involvement in conservation organizations and civic planning.

“Right now, we’re struggling with the concept of urban wilderness, where children can come and play, where people can wander and see forest — in the city. I know in my heart that when people have places in the community that are wild and open that they’re going to feel more a part of that community.”

He speaks of Edward O. Wilson’s concept of Biophilia. Of the human need to interact with other life forms, be they fauna or flora. “We humans, we’re arrogant. We think that we are different and separate from the environment.”
“But the truth of the matter is that if you lose your connection with the environment, with the earth, and the things that nurture us all, you will be the worse off for it. You will be poorer — you will not learn the aesthetic you need to know to make you happy.”

He smiles, thinking perhaps of the couple that found a brief respite amid his much-loved trees and plants. “Yes,” he nods, “to make you happy.”