South Orange in Bloom

While the rain-soaked spring may have been a drag for residents, the flower gardens of South Orange couldn’t be happier. A spectacular display of vibrant colors can be found throughout the village—and even on fences. Here are a few areas in town with gardens worth checking out:

“Everything’s gone crazy,” said Lyn Kelly, a resident of the Village Colonial section on Garfield Place. A magnificent Russian Sage stands front and center in Kelly’s corner garden. “I’m getting things I didn’t even know I had,” she remarked. A Scotch Broom the size of a giant shrub seems to have grown overnight. Bee balm, coreopsis and echinacea in enormous clusters fill out this wonderful garden.

Nearby, Lynn Lopes’ sun-and-shade garden, 30 years in the making, is filled with life and motion: her evening primrose unfurls at 8:40 p.m. “It’s like watching time-lapsed photography,” said Lopes. A beehive and a wren house are active in the yard. Baptisia or False Indigo with purple-spiked flowers and pods that will turn into shakers for the neighborhood kids, Chinese Lanterns, red-leafed castor bean, and a window box of nicotiana and petunias, all vie for the eye’s attention. “A lot of trial and error,” is Lopes’ gardening philosophy, which seems modest in the face of such bounty.

Nearby, at the end of Tichenor Avenue, is a community garden, referred to as "the triangle garden" because of its shape, or "Shepard’s Green," after the soldier’s monument, dated 1918, that sits alongside it. Neighbors contribute and maintain the plants and have done so for years. How do you get a neighborhood of gardeners? “It’s contagious,” Lopes said. “If you do it, someone else will do it, too.”

That feeling of contagion is evident on Centre Street just off South Orange Avenue, in the Montrose section, which has to win the award as the prettiest string of cottage-style gardens in town. Rose- and clematis-covered trellises, daylilies, echinacea and clumps of black-eyed Susans alongside porches and driveways make is seem like one continual bed of color.

On Ridgewood Road just a few blocks from Floyd’s Field, brilliant swaths of zinnias travel along an old chain fence, capturing the allure of an Early Victorian garden and representing a current trend as well—repetition of the same planting in a long row.

Shrub gardens along Wyoming Avenue contain bushes that flowered in the spring, like azaleas and rhododendrons, which the local deer population seem to ignore. These are interspersed with evergreens, creating an undulating landscape of shades of green.

And an award for the most beautiful local specimen has to go to the delphinium with spikes of lovely violet-blue flowers. It bloomed for the first time ever, according to Village Colonial "flower people," probably in no small part because of the June showers. This is the summer to savor and enjoy our local bouquet.

Editor's note: Photos are down on account of a technical error. Our apologies. We'll restore them asap.