Partners with Mother Nature: Northwind Perennial Farm Spreads Joy of Gardening
Spirit of Geneva Lakes - September 2014 by Janet Deaver-Pack
This is the gorgeous garden from a gardener's grandest dream, full of color, texture, and ·artistic constructions that surprise, delight, and inspire, Blossoms of pink, scarlet, white, purple, yellow, orange, and blue stretch petals upward or bow, nodding, in conversations with the breeze.
The warm scents of flowers attracting bees are heady, and the sound of those insects ·seeking nectar is constant.
Strolling down the paths of gravel or brick, one almost expects to run across the mushroom where Absalom, the wise blue hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, sits enthroned, ready to announce the "frabjous day" of legend. During the early 1900s, this place was a dairy farm. Now it has been recycled: the buildings are allowed to show graceful aging, providing a vintage feel that is fundamental to its overall ambiance.
Along with rustic charm, that ambiance includes a delicate ghostly; bovine influence left from the cows the buildings office sheltered: Swallow nests are built among the rafters-the acrobatic birds swoop everywhere, ridding in the place mosquitos and other flying pests. Chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, goats, and a donkey wander freely in and out of the barns, or nap beneath cool overhangs of grasses and blooms.
There are even wild rabbits that hop down the paths and nibble among the plantings (the brown kind, not a white one in a blue waistcoat with a pocket watch). Most of the 10 acres here is planted with perennials, making it a blooming, growing expanse of tranquility stretching along Hospital Road, just north of Lake Geneva in the Town of Lyons.
Splendid Partners
Northwind Perennial Farm, as it has been dubbed, is headed by the-triumvirate of Colleen Garrigan, Roy Diblik, and Steve Coster. The silent fourth partner of this group is Mother Nature, who inspired them all with a fundamental passion for plants and growing things, especially those that come back year after year. Annuals must be planted yearly; left to their own devices, perennials return continually. This farm features more than 325 varieties including. Native plants and ornamental grasses: some are grown in plastic-sheeted greenhouses, others in beds. The farm produces more than 300,000 plants every year. There is an integrated pest management ·program used here. Customers are educated in sound ecological practices highlighting both the variety and the sustainability of the bewildering variety of available plants.
Despite all the efforts going into getting the plants to grow so they can be sold, Northwind is a place of serenity, of wonder, and of heavenly beauty. One can breathe here. One can hear the universe sing through the rustling of leaves and grasses.
"We started the business in 1991," said Garrigan, one of the farm's three owners. She has sunny hair and a smile to match. Perennials have an incredible range of colors and textures, as demonstrated by the blooms in this planting near one of the antique buildings at Northwind. Best of all, these flowers normally come back year after year.
Colleen is in charge of maintaining the antique look of the place, the animals, and the displays in the barns. "Roy and I both worked at The Natural Garden in northern Illinois, so we knew each other. We started talking about having our own place someday, and what we'd do with it. We sort of ran into Steve, who was a landscaper. He wanted the same thing Roy and I did as far as a business. Then we found this place, and the whole thing happened."
It was their mutual passion for gardening, especially earth friendly gardening, that brought the three t:ogether to buy the former dairy. They saw possibilities in a ,niche market they could create that would allow their innate talents to support each other.
Nearly every other garden center in southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois features wood mulch, decorative stone, trees, bushes, bulbs, the normal things sold at such places. Therefore, most of thein look much the same. Not at Northwind. Here, it's perennials, period, with a few gardening and home accessories to royally show them off.
