I stumbled upon Chanticleer Garden by happy accident while on a driving trip down the East Coast during the summer of 2008. It was, and still is, the most engaging, playful, and beautiful garden I’ve seen. (Click here for the first of my six posts about Chanticleer.)

Photo courtesy of Rob Cardillo
Author Adrian Higgins and photographer Rob Cardillo were also visiting Chanticleer that year in the course of researching and taking images for their new book, Chanticleer, A Pleasure Garden (2011). They’ve captured many of the features and details that enthralled me, so reading their book has been like revisiting the garden with a great tour guide. However, Chanticleer is not merely a coffee-table memento for those who’ve visited. It will interest anyone curious to know what this self-described “pleasure garden” is all about—its history as well as its seasonal changes—and it offers a glimpse of how the theatrical art of the place is achieved.

Photo courtesy of Rob Cardillo
Cardillo’s photographs provide plenty of eye candy and will make you long to see the garden for yourself. But it’s Higgins’s intimate knowledge of the place and evocative descriptions that bring Chanticleer to life. He walks you through the various gardens, painting pictures with words of the changes wrought by the seasons and the gardeners:

In four slender, tapering, chalky terra-cotta pots on the overlook one spring, Benarcik combined effusive plantings of a magenta pink cultivar of English daisy (Bellis perennis) called ‘Galaxy Rose’ as a filler, with a deep-purple-leafed beet green named ‘Bull’s Blood’, above which floated the classic tulip ‘Prinses Irene’, which is orange-flamed magenta. Above that rose a deep purple tulip, ‘Paul Scherer’. These are all strong and brooding hues, especially for the arboreal chill of April, but it is the very out-of-season passion of their color saturation and pairing that leaped at you and grabbed you by the shoulders, and demanded to know, “Have you ever seen anything like this in a pot in April?”

Photo courtesy of Rob Cardillo
If, like me, you’ve fallen in love with this magical garden, and have visited or plan to visit, you’ll love getting the story behind each of the gardens and will pore over Cardillo’s photos with delight and anticipation.

Photo courtesy of Rob Cardillo
As Higgins writes, “Chanticleer isn’t about flowers….it’s about plants, plants on their stage. It’s music, it’s ballet, it’s cinema. It’s the garden as an art form, and in the twenty years of active garden making here, Chanticleer has developed an international reputation…as one of the most theatrical gardens in the United States.”
Chanticleer Garden is drama and comedy performed on a 35-acre stage. Chanticleer the book is an adoring fan letter. Read it—or better yet, visit—and you’ll be a fan too.
Disclosure: This book was sent to me for review by the University of Pennsylvania Press. My review, like everything in Digging, is my own honest opinion.
All material © 2006-2011 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.