On a canoeing trip when he was just a kid, Joe Henderson
pulled up a tuber of American lotus, the huge wildflower native to sluggish
streams and ponds in this area.
But unlike most kids, Joe didn’t just toss it aside. He took it
home to his family’s rowhouse in Wilmington, Del. Like all of
his siblings – Joe’s the youngest of eight children –
he was interested in how nature works.
“We had a postage-stamp garden, and I remember playing around
in the mud as a kid,” Henderson recalls. So he dug a hole in the
yard, lined it with plastic, filled it with water, and grew the lotus
over the summer.
It was only a temporary reprieve for that particular Nelumbo lutea.
Later in the season, he says, “My dog fell in the pond and tore
a hole in the liner, and that was it.” But this childhood adventure
was surely a portent of things to come, for a quarter century or so
later, Henderson once again presides over a pond of lotus, though on
a much larger scale.
Since 1997, he has been in charge of the Pond Garden at Chanticleer,
where the enormous leaves of Nelumbo sprawl out from the edges of the
largest pond in a network of water gardens at this pleasure garden in
Wayne. So popular are the spectacular lotus that, come bloom-time in
July, Chanticleer’s web site announces “The lotus are flowering!”
to alert the numerous visitors who come to the garden especially for
their flamboyant display.
Plants by the score, and more
But there’s much more than lotus to see in this section of the
35-acre public garden. Henderson’s horticultural turf begins uphill
from the lotus pond at the Arbor and Ghost Walk – so named because
the path incorporates pieces of memorial markers for long-dead pets
of the Rosengarten family that built Chanticleer – and drops downhill
to a bridge that marks the beginning of the Asian Woods. It encompasses
four big ponds and a couple of smaller ones, the rill that connects
them all before trickling out through the Primula Meadow, plus a Bog
Garden, a Springhouse, and a multiplicity of beds that surround the
ponds.
The list of the plants that thrive in these varied environments runs
to 27 pages, single-spaced. A visitor wouldn’t have to know the
names of any of them, however, to enjoy the feeling that in all of Chanticleer,
this is where Nature is most at home. By late summer, helenium, euphorbia,
kniphofia and eupatorium mix it up with asters, ironweed, lobelias and
salvias in an explosion of color and rampant growth that seems forever
on the verge of getting out of control – though it never does.
Henderson, an eye-catching figure in the garden thanks to the bandana
that’s invariably knotted around his head, makes sure of that.
The wildlife came in two by two
And on any warm, sunny day, this corner of the garden is like a watery
Peaceable Kingdom with its scores of birds, chipmunks, frogs, fish,
dragonflies, a harmless snake or two, and a couple of large, lazy turtles
that hang out in the middle of the second pond, so still that a visitor
could be fooled into thinking they’re statues.
“Water always brings wildlife,” Henderson says, although
the turtles had a little human assistance. “They are sliders,
and they were brought in by one of the masons who worked on [building]
the ruin. He thought they were getting too big for his pond at home.
But they like to eat the water lilies.” So how does a horticulturist
deal with that? “I feed them,” he admits.
Although many of the trees and shrubs were already in the ground when
Henderson took over the Pond Garden, he is largely responsible for the
garden’s herbaceous plantings and design – something he
may have found hard to imagine when he began work at Chanticleer on
April 3, 1997. It was the day before his 32d birthday, and he recalls
thinking, “Oh, my God, I finally made it.”
Finding his way
Until then, Henderson’s career path – like those of several
of his Chanticleer colleagues – included many a detour. Right
after high school, he signed on as an apprentice with a jeweler in Wilmington.
Among other skills, the painstaking work taught him to be patient and
to do things the right way, “which helps in gardening,”
he points out. But although he enjoyed the hands-on aspects of jewelry-making,
he knew he wanted to be outdoors more, so he quit the jewelry business
and enrolled at the University of Delaware.
“I was still undecided about what to do with my life, so I took
a lot of science classes, off-loom fiber forms, philosophy – every
‘intro’ class that was out there,” he says. “The
two things that really interested me were art and science classes, so
when I had to declare a major, I settled on what was then called Plant
Science With a Concentration in Ornamental Horticulture.”
After graduating in 1990, he worked for several years in community greening
and public horticulture for the Delaware Center for Horticulture, then
spent some time exploring a variety of byways – he traveled to
California, worked at a retirement community called Stone Gates in Wilmington,
and managed a new coffee bar at Swarthmore College in the Philadelphia
suburbs.
The path to Chanticleer
It was a chance encounter with Irish gardening celebrity Helen Dillon,
in this area to speak at a Perennials Conference at Scott Arboretum
of Swarthmore College, that set him on the path to Chanticleer.
“I was living with Jeff Jabco [coordinator of horticulture for
Scott], who was giving a garden tour to Helen Dillon,” along with
other conference lecturers Rob Proctor and David Macke, says Henderson.
“They were going to Ashland Hollow, [renowned landscape designer]
Bill Frederick’s place, and I’d never been, so I tagged
along.”
During the course of the tour, Dillon asked Henderson if he liked what
he was doing, then suggested, “Why don’t you get a job at
Chanticleer?” The idea came up again later that day, when the
group visited the home of Chris Woods, then director of Chanticleer.
“So we had an interview right there,” Henderson says.
That might easily have been that. But during the Perennials Conference,
Henderson and Dillon got to be smoking buddies, trekking outside together
for cigarettes and conversation. Although he’s never been sure,
Henderson believes that Dillon suggested to Woods that he hire the young
horticulturist. Whatever transpired behind the scenes, when the two
men ran into each other at the Philadelphia Flower Show a few months
later, it led to another, more formal interview – and a job offer.
“I don’t think she remembers me now, but she certainly made
a difference in my life,” Henderson says of Dillon. “I don’t
think I’d be here otherwise.”
Learning by trial and error
One
of his early projects at Chanticleer was building a bog garden just
to the east of the big pond. It’s an impressive-looking garden
now, with numerous varieties of pitcher plants and other carnivorous
oddities such as Venus flytraps, plus moisture-loving lobelias, bog
buttons, the delightful star grass, and even American cranberry. But
Henderson laughs as he talks about his initial efforts to create a bog.
“It was trial and error,” he says, adding that he had to
redo the top of the bog a couple of years later to correct his many
mistakes. “I learned what not to do, by doing the wrong thing.”
Experimentation is part of the culture at Chanticleer, where executive
director R. William (Bill) Thomas encourages the horticulturists to
try out new ideas both in the garden and in the off season, when the
gardeners turn their hands to other kinds of artistry. 
Visitors strolling along beside the creek might be surprised to come
upon a large and dramatic starburst of stone in their path. This off-season
creation is Henderson’s transition from one style of walkway to
another, “part impact crater, part mouth, something to swallow
[or] envelop you,” he says.
Off-season artistry
The winter months have also given Henderson time to design some of the
boxes that adorn every section of the garden, as repositories for the
Plant List booklets that visitors can consult to find the names of featured
plants.
“I try to design them with the [particular garden] in mind, so
they are integral to the location,” he says. And some are also
samplers of his skills, such as the Plant List box in the Pond Garden
that showcases his woodworking, glass fusing, and metalwork talents.
Henderson learned how to do wrought-iron work from fellow horticulturist
Przemyslaw Walczak, and last winter the two collaborated on a much larger
project, artistic wrought-iron railings to flank iron gates –
which they also designed, but didn’t build – at one of Chanticleer’s
private entrances.
“It’s called the Meadow Fence,” says Henderson, and
incorporates stylized flowers and vines in its design. It came about
because the two gardeners worked on a wrought-iron balcony for Henderson’s
house. “After Bill saw what we were doing on the balcony, he and
Przemyslaw decided on the front fence, which was one of the few places
on the property where deer were still getting in.”
The project will continue this winter: “We want to put some vines
across the main gates to help integrate them, give them more of that
organic quality.”
A garden captured in words and photos
Because Henderson really enjoys what he does, it’s hard to tell
where work ends and leisure begins. The home he shares with Jabco, his
longtime partner, is surrounded by a splendid garden with echoes of
Henderson’s Chanticleer ties. Its myriad attractions include a
flourishing bog, and a pond that’s being redesigned as a rain
garden – because it insists on drying out between rainstorms.
Their Swarthmore garden is frequently a stop on garden and pond tours.
You may even have seen bits of it in magazines. In 2000, hundreds of
garden writers and photographers from all over North America visited
it when the annual Garden Writers Association conference came to Philadelphia.
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