Gardening: Peek Into a Short Hills Garden

Each year the Garden Conservancy searches for noteworthy private gardens across the U.S. to include in its Open Day's Program. These gardens are then opened to the public for self-guided tours on a specific day. The $5 admission fee goes toward support of the Garden Conservancy's national preservation work. Our own Greenwood Gardens is one of the recipients.

This year Greenwood is not open to the public due to extensive renovation work that is now underway. But on May 15 two private gardens will be open in Short Hills. This week I got a sneak preview tour of George Sternlieb's garden.

Sternlieb early gardening inspiration came from his days playing hooky at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. When it came time to have a full-fledged garden of his own when he moved to Short Hills in 1963, his first thoughts were of his days in the Japanese gardens in Brooklyn. He even invited the then curator of the Botanical Gardens Japanese gardens to help him execute a design.

While the design served as an inspiration, he never really implemented it as executed. Instead he began to add bed by bed starting with one he calls the Fishbone Garden. It is planted with perennials and 30 dahlias. Now nearly 50 years later his one acre has very little grass and instead it is set up into different themed and free form garden areas.

He has a healthy collection of various Japanese maples and a huge assortment of evergreens but also gives nod to tropicals with a large number of potted agapanthus and mandevillas as well as his orchids strung between trees like a collection of lights.

According to Sternlieb, there are two kinds of gardeners: Those who look at plants seeking a particular missing color within an existing bed and those that see an individual plant for sale, buy it, and look for a space to put it in. He considers himself the second type of gardener. His garden definitely has the unusual, including a dwarf elm, two 35-year-old Sargent Hemlocks and a Scottish Thistle that gets six-eight feet tall each year.

The volunteer grasses in his circular rose garden pond get nearly as tall. "I like plants that bulk up," said Steinlieb. His massive collection of potted hostas is also a testament to that interest. Each year he sets up his 50 foot wall of vines from about 15 containers overwintered in one of his three greenhouses.

Full of charming anecdotes and not just gardening but propagation tips, Sternlieb is hands on in his gardening. He does rely on two outside helpers to move the massive containers in his collection into and out of his greenhouses. 

For him gardening has been a great discovery. Looking back there might have been things he would have done differently but still he wisely says "You don't know who you are until you realize what you have done with your garden," he said. It is clear that there is alot of personality tied up in 66 Old Short Hills Road. Don't miss your chance to see it.