A Garden Paradise

“What is Paradise, but a Garden.” The sentiment is carved into a small stone nestled quietly in lush ground cover on Peter and Pat Raven’s terrace; it perfectly reflects how they regard the landscape that surrounds their St. Louis home.

When it comes to gardens, there are no better experts than the Ravens. Peter, a world-famous botanist who was named a “Hero for the Planet” by Time magazine, is best known to St. Louisans as the president and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and the George Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University. During his 38-year tenure, he has led the garden to international prominence as one of the leading institutions for botanical research, education and horticultural display.  During that time, Peter, who earned his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles, has received a multitude of awards both in the United States and abroad for his work in conservation and biodiversity, including the Medal of Science from the President of the United States in 2000.

Pat is not without impressive credentials of her own. With a doctorate in horticulture from Ohio State University, her 30-year career in public gardens includes prominent positions on Long Island at three different historic arboretums and parks – all created by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture and best known as the designer of New York’s Central Park. When Pat met Peter, she was executive director of the Mercer Arboretum & Botanic Gardens in Houston.

Their marriage in 2001 created the dynamic duo of the public gardening world, with a life played out in celebrated gardens, botanical research centers and universities around the world.

When they return from their travels, the Ravens delight in their own garden, a 4.5-acre “urban oasis” surrounding their century-old home. The landscape, encompassing a large pond and a 100-foot stream, is both a horticultural showcase and a deeply personal space. “This is a garden that is lived in, not just looked at,” Pat emphasizes.

While Peter’s expertise centers on plant science, ecology and conservation, Pat’s horticultural degrees involve more hands-on, day-to-day gardening and landscape design. When they married, she quickly focused on making their large garden more user-friendly with the addition of permanent, all-weather pathways.

“We entertain thousands of people each year,” Pat explains. “I wanted people to be able to circulate through the garden, and that meant creating permanent pathways so that guests in cocktail clothes could walk down to the pond and feed the fish.”

To accommodate their many visitors, the bluestone terrace that adjoins their house was substantially enlarged. The terrace is shaded by enormous elm trees planted shortly after the home's construction. The trees amazingly escaped Dutch elm disease in the epidemic that killed millions of elms throughout the country in the latter half of the 20th century. To protect their arboreal treasure, the Ravens dry-laid the terrace (using no mortar) to allow air and water to reach the trees' roots. The elms are given regular treatments with fungicide to ward off disease, but just in case something goes wrong, two replacement elms, resistant to Dutch elm disease, are “waiting in the wings” in the couple's side garden.

“Gardens are a legacy to the next generation,” Pat emphasizes. “We always need to think of how they will look in the future and fix things the way they should be done.”

Lush oak leaf hydrangeas complement the huge elms, as do shade-loving perennials such as heucheras, hosta, epimediums and a selection of hardy orchids. A massive, 150-year-old wrought-iron urn and charming garden bench have places of honor on the terrace. Now too fragile for day-to-day public use, both were accent pieces in the Missouri Botanical Garden during founder Henry Shaw's lifetime.

The terrace offers a vista of the pond and stream that are the centerpieces of the lower garden. The Ravens' vision for this part of the landscape included enlarging an existing pond and dredging it to a depth of eight feet to allow for swimming and fish. They called on noted landscape architect Geoff Rausch, a partner in MTR, a landscape architectural firm in Pittsburgh, who regularly works with botanical gardens around the country, for the design of the rushing, gurgling stream that provides aeration for the pond. “The other main function of the stream is to separate the garden from the surrounding urban community,” Pat explains. “We have a shrub border to separate the garden visually, and the sound of moving water to block out the sound of traffic and other urban noise.”

Where the stream meets the pond, the sweeping limbs of a black gum tree provide the ceiling for an outdoor room decorated at the water's edge with large, flat-topped limestone boulders and accented with a mulch “beach” that slopes into the pond. “All the rocks were selected and placed to enable people and dogs to get in and out of the pond.

The beach is designed for people to sit and dangle their feet and feed the koi,” Pat explains. “Peter loves to go down to the beach in the evening and feed the fish.” The couple's dogs are Carly and George – bounding, affable German shepherds that lay claim to the pond and stream as their swimming pool, and the garden as their playground. In addition to displaying the best in horticulture, the Ravens' landscape has a welcoming informality – with dogs at play – that reflects Pat's current, more relaxed view of gardening. “When I gardened 20 years ago, I worried if a leaf was out of place,” she says laughing.

Despite their educations and prominence in the gardening world, the Ravens are no different from thousands of other St. Louisans whose gardens have been transformed by dramatic weather occurrences in the past few years. During the catastrophic July windstorm in 2006, the ancient pin oak that anchored their extensive shade garden crashed to the ground, taking 10 other trees with it. “We went from a woodland to an open meadow; we've tried to think of it as a planting opportunity,” Pat says philosophically.

Like other gardeners, they've also had to work within a budget. Pat loves to cook and arranges the flowers for most of the parties she and Peter host. With that in mind, the couple put high on their “to do” list the renovation and enlargement of the existing vegetable garden and the creation of a cutting garden. In keeping with their home's historic nature, the initial plan called for a series of specially drained, raised beds created from natural limestone – until the cost estimates came back at more than $100,000. “The vision of what you want to do is easy, but the vision can only be implemented if you have the money,” Pat says with a laugh.

The Ravens did complete the project – but at less than one-tenth the cost – by scaling down the size, keeping the drainage system and using decorative, split-faced concrete blocks instead of custom limestone. They purchased the canopy-like arbor that unites the two halves of the garden “off the rack” through a catalogue.

Pat is quick to give credit to Julie Hess, senior horticulturist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, who oversees the day-to-day maintenance of the garden and makes decisions when the Ravens are traveling. “We have similar tastes,” Pat says, “and Julie does things the way I would do them myself. As I've gotten older, I've learned to garden by pointing rather than killing my back.”

Despite her extensive career, Pat Raven prefers her current title to others she has had. “Being First Lady of the Missouri Botanical Garden is the best job in the world,” she says happily.