Episode 2447

- [Voiceover] Change is the one constant in Nashville these days, but thanks to this forward-thinking gardener, this little piece of heaven will be here for future generations to enjoy. And Matt Kerske is awestruck at the recent renovation that features the rediscovered Cockrill Spring in Centennial Park. Join us. First, a forever garden.

- Just north of downtown Nashville, in historic Germantown, is a beautiful little garden. It is the Campbell Land Trust garden, and it was recently inducted into the Tennessee Land Trust, and we're gonna go take a quick tour and see all the tender loving care that's been put into it. I'm here with Berdelle Campbell in this spectacular garden. Why don't you just tell me about it?

- [Berdelle] Well, this garden started out as my husband's garden, Ernest Campbell. He was a professor at Vanderbilt, and when he was starting retirement, he said, "When I retire, I'm going to be a gardener." He went to Master Gardeners, so he was a master gardener, and the whole idea was his, that from street to alley, was space, and anywhere we traveled, anywhere in the world that he saw something growing, especially if it was an indigenous plant, he wanted some of it. Brought it back here, it wasn't indigenous, but there's specimens in here that inspired him that was from lots and lots of places.

- [Phillipe] Okay.

- [Berdelle] You couldn't bring plants, but you could buy seeds and you could find addresses that you could order them from places that had license to ship them. But our specialty is native plants.

- [Phillipe] Wonderful.

- [Berdelle] And we have a collection of wildflowers back here. These are wild woodland flocks, the purples. And in here are at least three kinds of woodland violets, which become a plague from time to time. The Virginia bluebells have finished, except one tiny speck I can see back there, and over here is Star of David, Star of Bethlehem. That's a wild one.

- [Phillipe] Yeah.

- And these are mayapples, oh, and here's one with a blossom.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, here's one that's just starting to open.

- Every plant has one white blossom, and there will be one little green apple there.

- [Phillipe] So this is a beautiful little jonquil here.

- [Berdelle] Yes, and it's a heritage bulb that goes back; it's supposed to be the kind that the early settlers, the first people that planted flowers in this country, likely had some of those. My mother had some, but we weren't settling America. And behind it is the Chinese blue forget-me-nots, which is just a favorite of mine.

- [Phillipe] Those colors together...

- [Berdelle] I love that little blue forget-me-not.

- [Phillipe] And so these are the Spanish bluebells?

- [Berdelle] Yes, and I occasionally you get a pink one like that one.

- [Phillipe] A few pink ones here.

- And these are species tulips, and species are never hybrids, they've never been hybridized: this is the way they grow in the wild.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, I love those.

- [Berdelle] We have at least five different kinds of species, and they come up every year. These have been here at least 10 years.

- [Phillipe] Wow, so perennial tulips.

- [Berdelle] Oh yes.

- [Phillipe] I just love the spurs.

- [Berdelle] Just look at the front of that little blossom. It is one of the most complex blossoms on the face of the earth. These are traditional colors; we have some other columbine that's not, and we allow them to come up, we go with flow, and we've never had this clump here just all by itself. This is a new delight.

- Now is this your house, actually, right here?

- Yes, this is my house; this is where I live.

- Wonderful.

- And we wanted to... We grow no grass; we have no lawn. We come out of the house into the garden.

- [Phillipe] So these are some really mature trees. Tell me about these.

- [Berdelle] The Kwanzan cherry, the pink one, is a Kwanzan. Every tree in this garden we planted.

- [Phillipe] Wow. Are these apple trees over here?

- [Berdelle] That's an apple tree. I have at least four apple trees.

- [Phillipe] You got a little mini orchard going on here.

- [Berdelle] Oh yeah, not a mini, a big. And I think there were about 19 peach trees.

- [Phillipe] Oh, wow.

- [Berdelle] They got very out of control. Now we have removed half the peach trees, totally, from the ground, and the ones we left we pruned severely and then we sprayed them with an acceptable, approved organic spray, and they get sprayed one more time next week. After cutting all those trees down, I count and I still have 11 peach trees! But at the end of this year, I'll take out half those peach trees.

- [Phillipe] Wow.

- [Berdelle] I have to, because they had not grown like this when my husband was here. He had no idea how overgrown the orchard would get.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So come back, we should have some good peaches.

- Oh yeah, I would love to. So with this size of a garden, there seems to be tons of work. How do you do this?

- [Berdelle] It's tons of work, all right. And it's endless, and I'm lucky that as the garden became known as a Land Trust garden, people called and said, "Well, can I help?" And I said, "Those are dangerous words." "The answer is yes." Now, Steve is more than a volunteer. He was a volunteer, but he's also the man you have that pruned the peach trees and sprayed the peach trees, and he also is a gardener over at Monell's.

- [Phillipe] How wonderful, yeah.

- [Berdelle] So between Monell's and Campbell Garden, we keep him very full-term occupied. So it demands a lot of help, and then if something is needed to be done and we can't do it, then it waits until we can.

- [Phillipe] Sure.

- It's an easy, casual... We let the plants have a mind of their own, and then we have to be casual about... We're serious, but we the jobs done, but nothing is rigid.

- Well, I can tell it's a working garden, and I love the flows of it, and you just let things seed out and let 'em be where they want to be.

- And if you visit next week and come down this path, you'll stop and say, "But this is not like it was," and it's true.

- Constantly evolving.

- Later in the year, keep in touch, because the lilies are a show.

- Oh, I bet.

- [Berdelle] They really are.

- So we've got this wonderful sign that you've got here that's talking about the induction of it in The Land Trust. So when did that happen? And tell me about that.

- [Berdelle] Well, this was last summer. We had a garden tour, and that's the picture the first spring we lived in this house, and that's the row houses that are restored beautifully. And that's Ernest tilling the first time, and I'm digging with a hoe back there. That's his first and this was his last spring in the garden. Those are tulips that he planted, the last tulips that he planted.

- [Phillipe] That's wonderful, and I'm sure they're still blooming today.

- [Berdelle] Oh, they are. Of course, I was gardening with him, but there were days I said it's his inspiration, and some days it's my persecution, but we were both in here working on it. One of the things that bothered him greatly, he'd be sitting out here on a stool, pulling weeds, planting bulbs, and saying, "I wish there was something that I could do "that would assure me that when I can't garden this place, "nobody can put any buildings on it." And we didn't know anything could, so when The Land Trust started focusing on preserving urban green space, I jumped at the opportunity.

- Of course.

- And called Jeanie Nelson, and she knew the garden, and she was as excited as I was. So to have it under protective easement is just a dream that he was having that he didn't think would ever come true. I want you to see the Carolina silverbell you leave.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, well, let's go look at it, yeah.

- [Berdelle] Okay, all right, you have to come around and then look up, because we've been looking down so much.

- [Phillipe] Wow, yeah, when we first walked in, I totally missed this. It was just over my head the whole time.

- [Berdelle] Our master bedroom was up there, the window, it was so wonderful every morning to be greeted with it.

- [Phillipe] Sure, and so this garden is open to the public. You like to have people walk through?

- [Berdelle] Well, it's not open to the public. People can check with me, and I've told neighbors, if you're wandering through, I'd like to see you. If I miss you and there's something you want to see, there's a gate at the front and a gate at the back, so they may walk through, but it's not an official public garden.

- Sure, okay.

- It's a private garden that I like to share with people.

- Wonderful, yeah, well it really is a gem here in historic Germantown.

- [Berdelle] Well, you're very nice.

- [Phillipe] I appreciate you sharing your stories and the history of the garden; it's really been fun.

- [Berdelle] I've enjoyed doing it.

- [Phillipe] Thank you so much.

- [Berdelle] And come back, especially when the lilies bloom.

- [Voiceover] Grapes are easy and fun to grow here in Tennessee; well, that is, the American varieties. The European wine grape has problems here. It was one of the world's first domesticated crops, but it likes a drier, Mediterranean climate. If you can't pronounce the name, keep looking 'til you find a Concord, a Niagara, or a Delaware, who are all at home on this side of the Atlantic. Grapes are traditionally grown on a hillside with a beautiful view. That's because they love air flow, plenty of sunshine, and they're less likely to be injured by late spring frosts. The first vineyard I set out 30 years ago failed miserably because I put it in ground that was wet-natured, and grapes don't like to have wet feet. It's a good idea to sub-soil the soil and to lime it really well before you set your vineyard out to get your grapes off to a good start. There are three things to remember when pruning your vines: first, unlike most fruit, grapes are produced on the vines from the new growth each spring. Secondly, a vine can only support a limited number of clusters. And thirdly, you want the fruit close to the trunk. This all translates into severe annual pruning. I try to leave 40 or 50 buds on the grapevine, and prune everything else off. This is where I pruned it last year, right here, and then it makes this new growth, and it makes the grapes on this year's growth. If don't prune them and leave them, they'll grow way, way, way out there and the fruit will be real far from the trunk, and the vine will be supporting a lot of leaves and not as much fruit. So I'll probably leave, like, this branch maybe next year. And then, one going out this way. And then I may just cut it right here and take everything else out of there. Black rot is the worst problem, and some of the grapes shrivel and fall off. But unless we have a real rainy August, grapes do well here. When you don't use chemicals, nature restores a balance and allows for abundance. Muscadines are native to the Southeast. They bear bigger grapes with a thicker skin, which makes them more disease resistant. This one has been here two years now, and it's just starting to make a few grapes. We use pruning shears to clip off the clusters of grapes. What we don't devour directly can be preserved in pretty jars of purple jelly or bottles of Tennessee's finest homemade wines.

- [Voiceover] Well, if you haven't been to Centennial Park lately, it's probably about time you visited. I'm out here at the newly installed Cockrill Spring landscape installation in downtown Nashville with landscape architect Tara Armistead. Now Tara, it's not every day that such a historical find gets discovered on a landscape job. Tell me a little bit about the history of Cockrill Spring and how you all came upon it.

- Well, actually, I find this almost like a mystery novel, how we discovered what's gone on here. I'm gonna take you back 400 million years, and there was a broad, inland sea, and Nashville was buried under that. There was a huge upwarp; all of the limestone was exposed, and therefore you have all these springs in our Nashville Basin, and this was one of those springs. Cockrill Spring we discovered, and it actually was the terminal spring of the Natchez Trace. So we've looked in archives, we've read scripts that talk about coming in and getting a cool drink of water off of Natchez Trace coming to Cockrill Spring, watering horses and things here.

- [Matt] Right, right.

- So we knew about it; we knew that it was in this general vicinity, and we ended up digging, really with a backhoe and a rebar, just pushing into the ground where we thought it would be. We hit this rock, which is, once we scraped away about three feet of soil, we found this rock, it's a five-by-five piece of limestone. We lifted it, and underneath it, was the spring. So we were stunned. You can still see some of the drill holes in it. We know that this is at least 150, 200 years old, probably from the Natchez Trace. What is interesting too, is that cholera outbreaks started to happen in the 1800s, and the city thought the right thing to do for the health of the citizens, more people were moving to Nashville, is to pipe all the water rather than have it open and exposed, 'cause open and exposed, it gets contaminated. People were cropping up with cholera around the different springs. So we know that in the mid- to late-1800s, they piped it.

- Piped it to the storm drains?

- Yes, and so it's been piped for over 150 years to our storm drains.

- Wow.

- So finding it and daylighting it was really something, and we did that about three years ago, put a meter on it to kind of see if it was a spring that would dry up in the summertime, but it doesn't; it runs consistently year-round. And we've had a meter on it for a couple years, and it produces, and this is crazy to put your head around, but about 50 million gallons of spring water a year.

- You're kidding me, 50 million?

- So about 200 gallons of spring water a minute.

- Wow.

- And whereas that before was going into our storm sewer and being treated, now one of the most important parts of the design is to daylight it and reuse it in the park.

- [Matt] Fantastic, so tell me some of the ideals and elements that you're incoporate with this water and how you wanted it to be viewed by the public.

- So what's important is to remember that this is a historic spring, and so to be able to just hear the water running over the rocks, much like it did for hundreds and hundreds of years, we wanted it to be subtle and not to upstage the Parthenon at all, so just the idea of feeling that you're in a very peaceful, natural-feeling area. This was the threshold to the park, so that idea of it being clean, simple design.

- [Matt] Right, and to kind of set as a backdrop to this beautiful threshold, we have some native landscaping that is just coming into bloom in this time of year. Tell me a little bit about some of the plant choices around the threshold here.

- I'll do so; so this is a great way to view this: you're looking at the plaza, and it was important to us to use local materials. The crab orchard is the stone; it's called crab orchard stone, it's a variegated variety. And we love the waves in it; we like the way that the color of the crab orchard stone picked up the columns in the Parthenon. But as importantly, Crab Orchard, Tennessee, was a part of this Natchez Trace, that timeframe, so they're the crab apple trees, which are of Crab Orchard, Tennessee. We have native plants: fothergilla, you have the Virgina sweetspire in front of that and some more here that's just getting ready to bloom. We have callicarpa, so it has just a magenta berry.

- [Matt] Great for wildlife.

- [Tara] Yes, great for wildlife. To this side, this is this low-grow sumac.

- Yep, I love that.

- Hypericum, more callicarpa, so really trying to use what I'm thinking of as workhorses in the landscape.

- That's right, these are all tough plants.

- Nothing ornamental, all natives.

- And it's just really great to see how so many elements are all intertwined, from the crab orchard stone to the crab apples trees, and successional forest, I love how y'all are playing off all the different themes.

- Yeah, well something too is you start with the history, and that informs our design, but as important is kind of this environmental... The sustainability, what do we do with 50 million gallons of water?

- Right, absolutely.

- Why do we choose the plants we choose, why native plants? And all of it plays into that.

- [Matt] I see the Cockrill continues down in a meandering path here into what you all call the wetland area. Tell me a little bit about the key feature of this area and what you all are trying to accomplish.

- So it's important that the water carries through in kind of a sinuous way through the landscape. We are falling about a half a percent a foot to keep the water moving through here, and remember I'd said it's about 200 gallons a minute. It can be as low as 150 gallons, but...

- [Matt] Still a lot of water.

- [Tara] Yeah, a lot of water moving through here. You can see where we've opened the channel. When the water comes up just a little higher, the water moves into the wetland. It's washed by these plants. It has a little bit of phosphorous in it, and that takes the phosphorous out of it. It's then collected in two huge underground cisterns. They're eight feet by 20 feet each; they're huge. And that water then is pumped up to Lake Watauga.

- [Matt] That's a good distance away from where we're standing.

- [Tara] Right, but if you go up there now... We call 2012 the "last summer of slime" up on that lake, because we were able to dredge it, and then because it's getting this clear, cool water, it's now just, the water quality is hugely improved. And so the intent is to continue using this water, clean it in the wetland; we can control how much water is in this wetland and any time and then reuse it throughout the park. So eventually Centennial Park will be a water-neutral park.

- [Matt] Talk to me a little bit about some of these plantings; I can tell it's starting to all wake up around here, and it's all starting to lush out a little bit. Tell me about the plantings. So the thinking here was to have our... The color palette we thought about would be more purples and greens, so we have juncus, we have iris coming up, and then we have the swamp milkweed; those are really our three perennial-type plants that are planted in here.

- They love wet feet.

- Yeah, enjoy wet feet, don't mind it. And then on the banks, we have some some of the ilex decidua, the holly, just to hold the berries for the birds, and again, a native plant.

- Absolutely, another wildlife feature.

- And something else, that if we're in this area too, and we're staring right at it is these walls: they trace the old Natchez Trace trail, the large stone walls, and it would be unusual to get stone this size, but we found these. These were the old bridge abutment for the Demonbreun Bridge, so they're also historic, but to bring them back, and just... On one end of the stones, it says Natchez, on the other it says Nashville.

- Tell me a little about your knowledge of Centennial Park and what it means to you.

- Well, we've got the Parthenon right behind us, and it is the remnant of the Centennial Exposition in 1897. And so this park wouldn't be the park if it weren't for this huge exposition. It's fascinating to me because it was built in less than a year. It really represented community. It represented diversity, celebration, innovation. If you can imagine, it had not only Centennial Park; it had a pyramid, it had tightrope walkers, it had different houses that represented all the different interests. It had a women's building; it had an agricultural building. It also had an area called... Oh, it had rides, one called Snakes and Ladders.

- A water ride here, I believe?

- Yes, it was really celebrated in 1897. If you can imagine, there were about 10,000 visitors a day. There were 1.8 million people that visited it in a six-month time. That would be like 19 million people visiting Nashville now today.

- [Matt] Incredible.

- [Tara] You think of 10,000 visitors a day, the city was 95,000 population. It was this huge success. President McKinley opened the exposition by pulling a lever in Washington, D.C., lighting up the exposition, because electricity was such a big deal. Booker T. Washington visited. Susan B. Anthony visited. I mean, you can go on and on. So it's really a time that celebrates all the good parts of human beings, you know? It really does; you think about the innovation, you think about all of the things going on. It closed with $37 in the bank, and then it was all made of plaster of Paris, so everything just was temporary, take it all down, except not the Parthenon.

- That wasn't the case with the Parthenon.

- People loved the Parthenon. Centennial Park became a park in 1903. It was our first real, big city park in Nashville. And then the Parthenon was built as a permanent structure in the 1920s. Well, next steps: so this first step is not only Cockrill Spring, but phase one was all of the work on Cockrill Spring, musician's corner, which you can see there, which is providing a permanent place for the best lawn party in Nashville, is what it's dubbed. It's changed from 500 people to over 3,000 now, so we had to make sure that we designed an amphitheater that never feels empty. We'll be renovating the great lawn; it gets a lot of traffic, so engineering the great lawn, continuing strengthening the outlay of trees to either side of the great lawn. We're really interested in revitalizing the core of the park. The design team, the lead designer, was Thomas Woltz of Nelson Byrd Woltz out of Charlottesville.

- Okay.

- Hodgson Douglas was the local landscape architectural team that worked with us, and then I represented the private concern, so my firm. So those three firms worked with Metro Parks and the conservancy, and finished on time and on budget.

- [Matt] How about that. We like that when happens in this industry.

- [Tara] I know!

- [Matt] Fantastic, more to come, can't wait.

- Light, citrus dressings are a great thing to utilize in the wintertime when citrus fruit is so inexpensive. So go ahead and stock up on oranges and grapefruit, and of course, lemons and limes, and keep those in your refrigerator. Just remember to pull them out of the refrigerator about 30 minutes before you get ready to juice them, so you'll get more fruit. Then roll it on the countertop, and you're ready to juice. Okay, so we're gonna make these dressings with two different juices and two different herbs, but the basic recipe is the same. So I'm gonna start with a little bit of orange juice for this particular one, and I'm gonna use some fresh oregano that I'm just going to bruise just a little bit with the scissors, so I don't want it completely chopped; I want it just kind of coarsely chopped, so to speak. So I'm gonna add that to my jar, and then your recipe of salt and pepper stays the same, so I'm just gonna add the salt and pepper to that. I'm going to add a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, 'cause that just kind of freshens the whole thing up a little bit. I'm gonna add some minced shallots to it. Again, you can add as many or as few as you want to that. And then I'm going to add some olive oil. And then the reason I like to do this in canning jars is because it makes it so easy when you get ready to emulsify it. So just gonna shake it really easily, like that, and your dressing is ready to use. I'm gonna do the exact same thing with lemon, except for this time, I'm gonna use thyme that's dried. So if you don't have fresh herbs in your garden, you can still utilize the same recipe. Just utilize the dried thyme to that, and you're gonna cut it down by one-third. Again, I'm gonna add the salt and pepper and the shallots, and again, the same basic recipe with one tablespoon of white wine vinegar and the same amount of olive oil to that. So the same thing with a completely different flavor. You can go ahead and make these up. Keep them in your refrigerator and use them in about a week. You can find even more variations of this recipe at wnpt.org.

- [Voiceover] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our website at VolunteerGardener.org or on YouTube at the Volunteer Gardener channel. And like us on Facebook.