Barbara designed the garden’s water feature with a reflection pond that contains a rare pink Japanese iris that blooms for only a day.

A statue of Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardening, watches over the Hedbergs’ expansive garden full of climbing roses and other beauties.

Although English gardening was Barbara Hedberg’s forte, her Boulder garden incorporates native plants, including Rocky Mountain columbine and penstemons, as well as foxglove, larkspur, foxtail lilies and delphiniums that she grew from seed.

Barbara Hedberg studied English gardening techniques while living part-time in Britain with her husband, Ray. Her natural garden in southeast Boulder covers nearly an acre.

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Delphiniums and Other Delights

An Illinois farm girl leaves behind the legacy of an amazing English-style garden she created and tended in Boulder.

Photos by Erik Paulsrud photography
By Kimberly Ezzell

Dazzling delphiniums, the spicy scent of an antique rosebush, sweet lavender hugging the paths and an endless display of eye-popping colors and textures—that’s what you’ll find in Barbara Killey Hedberg’s garden. For two decades, Barbara put her experience and education to work, crea­ting an English-inspired landscape worthy of a Stately Homes tour.

Her lavish garden spills over nearly an acre in southeast Boulder, making it difficult to imagine a time when Barbara didn’t garden. “I suppose there was,” she admits, “the few years before I was big enough to hold a hoe.” A farm girl from Illinois, Barbara was raised with her hands in the soil. She sowed seeds, harvested vegetables and spent long days in the kitchen helping put up food for the winter. She remembers when her parents bought their first deep freeze because cold-packing vegetables was so much easier than canning them.

When Barbara left the farm to settle into her and her husband Ray’s new suburban Boulder home in 1968, she brought along a prized keepsake—a placard from the governor of Illinois declaring her childhood home, a farm that the Killey family had run for more than 100 years, a Centennial farm. She placed the sign on a wall overlooking her new home’s yard, where it remains today.

Looking at Barbara’s expansive garden with its thick lawn, mature trees, flower beds, mixed borders, water feature and prized delphiniums, it’s hard to believe it started as only “a plot of sod and just the plants I could see out the kitchen window,” she says. An accomplished and educated gardener, Barbara also grew vegetables until she discovered, to her chagrin, that her three children preferred canned vegetables to fresh.

That’s when Barbara’s garden began to take a different tack. Because Ray used to work in England a fair amount before retiring from IBM, Barbara trekked the United Kingdom studying English gardening techniques at flower shows, public gardens and Stately Homes. “I’m sure those houses are beautiful, but I never went inside,” Barbara confesses. “I was there for the gardens, like Powis Castle Garden in Wales, with its terraced beds built along the steep slopes surrounding the castle.” After dozens of visits to England, Barbara was inspired and knowledgeable enough to develop her Boulder garden along the same principles.

“It’s not about bringing home a bunch of plants from England,” Barbara explains. “It’s about understanding why these plants work—why they are used in these gardens.” English gardens tend to favor natural plantings, she observes, with climbing roses that grow wild and untended atop stone walls, and clematises that playfully wrap around tree trunks. In London, where Barbara and Ray owned a flat with friends, space is at such a premium that gardens often grow upward on obelisks that can support a bounty of juicy tomatoes or pots of flowers.

Barbara liked the vertical gardens she saw in London, but prefers plants that don’t need staking for her garden. Her foxtail ­lilies soar 7 feet high and her columnar apple tree boasts 12-foot-tall vertical branches on a scanty 12-inch-wide base. And then there are her exquisite delphin­iums, aptly dubbed “The Queen of Flowers” because of their clusters of opulent, jewel-toned blossoms. Barbara grows hers from high-quality, hand-pollinated seeds she acquires from The Delphinium Society in England. Many of Barbara’s flowers are the same varieties that have won accolades at the Royal Horticultural Society flower shows in Chelsea and Wisley. These plants, judged for details such as the number of petals, the width of each blossom, trueness of color and overall strength, are dramatically more sophisticated than their field-grown cousins, she says.

Membership in the society earns Barbara a fresh packet of seeds annually, as well as a report on the year’s choicest selections. “With these seeds, you know exactly what you are getting. With the field-grown plants found in American nurseries, where the seeds of many varieties have been mixed together, it’s an unknown,” says Barbara, who developed a knack for growing from seeds on her family’s farm. As her flowers continue to thrive over the years, Barbara divides her favorites to keep her garden well stocked in delphiniums that run the colors of the rainbow.

English & Eclectic
An intuitive and insatiable gardener, Barbara completed the master gardener program at the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension and served on the Boulder County Extension Advisory Board. She later became a member of the CSU State Extension Advisory Board and traveled throughout Colorado to observe, among other things, innovative potato farming experiments.

Barbara’s years of study have certainly influenced her garden. For instance, she loves to research a particularly unique plant and then consider its habits and where it might fare best in her garden. She’ll then search for the exact cultivar she wants, and often finds it in a favorite catalog or specialty nursery, and occasionally at local home-improvement stores. “The same wholesalers tend to sell to both the specialty nurseries and chains,” Barbara says, “so it pays to know what to look for.”

One of her prized plants, a Chinese fern, was a gift from a fellow extension agent who received it from his grand­father. Another recent addition is a new ‘Turtle Dove’ hosta, which boasts unusual balloon-shaped blossoms. The 5-inch-tall plant was a splurge at roughly $9 an inch. Other teeny plants, like ‘Cat’s Eyes’ hosta, a dwarf Japanese maple and a dwarf spruce, are tucked into crevices between the moss boulders in the garden’s newly installed water garden, which Barbara designed. This latest addition to the Hedberg landscape features a waterfall that melodically feeds into a raised reflection pond filled with statues of frogs and ducks, as well as live frogs raised from tadpoles rescued from a backfill project. The pond also contains lotus and iris plants, including a rare pink Japanese iris that blooms for only one day. It used to house koi, too, until a blue heron swooped in and consumed them all in a day. “That was expensive birdseed,” Ray says with a laugh.

For her part, Barbara couldn’t be more pleased with how eclectic her English garden has become. “That’s OK,” she quips. “So am I.”

Kimberly Ezzell first met gardening mentor Barbara Killey Hedberg while anguishing over delphiniums bent by a windstorm. A car pulled up and Barbara called out, “Just cut them off, they’ll grow back!” and then the car peeled off.

Editor’s Note: Barbara Killey Hedberg passed away on Dec. 3, 2007, leaving the care of her garden in the capable hands of her husband, Ray. She will be missed.

© 2008 Brock Publishing Company
homes@brockpub.com