An English-Inspired Garden at a 1912 Michigan Bungalow | Garden Tour & Inspiration

Now we'd love to show you our patio. Follow us. So now we'll take you on a tour of our garden. I think probably the first and one of the things we're excited to show is actually this climbing rose on the back of a house. It's called John Davis, and it's an English, sort of your typical English rose. It's absolutely covered in flowers when it blooms. It only blooms once, though, which is sort of the downside, but it's very worth it to us because the spring show is so spectacular. So then over here is our pond. So when I talk about the value that John brought to the design of the back, is we were thinking something much smaller, but he really wanted to do this 16-foot-long pond. It's 4 feet deep on one end and 3 feet on the other, so the fish do stay out all winter long, and they just sort of hang out. There's probably about 15 fish, and there's a few really large ones about 2 feet long. We've named those fish. Milo. That's the orange and white one, and then Jefferson is orange and white and black, and he's big too. And then this is one of our perennial borders that originally we had hydrangea back here, and we did that as per our plan, but then Matt and I are really more kind of plantsmen, so we love the individual plants, and we love really all plants. So we took out the hydrangea and put in a perennial bed here, which we've been weeding and tending to for a number of years now. One of the things about the pond, we actually did all the engineering and design of the water flow, which goes out that end and into the basement to a commercial filtration system, a bubble bead filter that Brad did some research on, and then the water then comes back through this end, so it keeps a continuous movement and filtration and healthy water quality. You'll notice there's 3 pink roses in here. We saw them at the nursery, and our favorite nursery is Telly's in Troy, and we didn't, there wasn't a name for them, so we went ahead and bought them anyhow because they had such a beautiful pink flower on them, and we call it the Matty Rose after Matt because he was the one who actually picked it out, and it's proven to be absolutely beautiful and blooms tremendously kind of all summer long, and I really wish I knew the name of it, so if anyone out there knows it, I'd love to. I like the name. So one of the things we did was plant a lot of boxwood. As you can see, I don't know, there's probably hundreds of them here. They were very, very tiny when we bought them, and now they've grown, and we also planted these Alaskan Weeping Cedars, which have gotten really, really big. We did clear a lot of kind of the brush that was here and put in a lot of the stuff ourselves. The view that we wanted, though, from the bedroom was really out at these Alaskan Weeping Cedars because they just have such a sort of romantic look to them. We planted a lot of peonies. This is about the only one that is still blooming, so it's kind of time for us to take all the old peonies out and put something in that'll be a little bit happier. So this is a big olive oil pot that we actually just put in here about a week ago. We were looking for sort of just the right thing that was just the right size and came across this in England, so I'm super excited to have it here. I think it adds a lot to really the end of the pond, which, you know, it's important when you're gardening and when you're designing landscape to have focal points and a place to go to, and we've tried to do that here. We've made this also into a perennial border where we sort of put in peonies, roses, there's garden phlox, there's asters, and then also some sort of natural native plants across the back, including joe pie and cup flower. But we punctuated the beds with these viridus yews, which are these upright yews that grow kind of in this very beautiful sculptural shape. One of the other things that we love is nature. We love backyard birds, and one of the best things to do to bring birds in, to put in birdbaths because water is super important to the birds. We also sort of did a little copper pipe off one of our drip hoses so when that zone runs, it also fills the birdbath up, so that helps kind of keep it filled. We also, to avoid mosquitoes, we have these little all-natural mosquito bio thingies. We put this yew hedge in to kind of stop the view, but also to have a background of green in order to show off our geraniums. So this is a little bit of a secret area where we've got ferns and trillium. We planted hemlock really early on in the work here, and so it's a very green and very cool space that we really love. We've tried to plant some Japanese ferns, and also these are trillium, which is a Michigan wildflower that grows up in the woods in Michigan. So we put a bunch of them under here to see if we can get them. To sort of continue on with the yew hedge, we are letting this section on each side grow so we can do an archway, sort of a living archway over each entryway here and on that. So this is our patio. So this is where we do a lot of our summer entertaining and have cookouts. These are Japanese maple trees that are the ones that we cut some to go into that vase in the primary bedroom. And these are really, they grow like weeds. So we're constantly having to prune them, but they have a really open, airy and beautiful feel to it to them, and they're really the right choice I think for our patio. We absolutely love them. And they turn a really great orange in the autumn time. So that's sort of an added bonus. This is my bell. So this is a restoration hardware table that I don't think is made anymore, but it has its teak and it's got a Chippendale fretwork back. John, our designer, really pushed for us to grab it when we saw it because he for some reason knew that it was going to stop being made and it's really the perfect set for out here. And one thing I started to collect are these citrus trees. These are bear's lime. A friend of mine in California had them growing crazy, so I had to go online and find them and see if I could grow them here in Michigan. They've been in our sunroom over the winter and we got some limes for gin and tonic. Thanks for watching. Go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content and shopping guides.