An extra treat awaits visitors to Chanticleer who tackle
the path that heads steeply uphill past the Serpentine garden. As they
near the top, they come across a perfect excuse to stop and take a breather
– a miniature cottage tucked into the hillside under the low-spreading
canopy of a Japanese maple.
This is the Apple House. And if curious visitors should step through
the door that’s propped invitingly open, they’ll surely
think they’ve wandered into a children’s picture book. 
Scenes painted on the walls of the little house depict a whimsical world
underground, where chipmunks scurry along corridors that curve among
the tree roots while the cat and dogs of Chanticleer stare longingly
down at them through the burrow entrances above. But the chipmunks,
safe in their earthy digs, carry on unperturbed, storing nuts and seeds,
decorating their home with leaves and scraps of salvaged paper, or just
taking a nap.
This little bit of fantasy was created by Laurel Voran, a horticulturist
who usually works her magic on Chanticleer’s Minder ruin and the
adjacent gravel garden. Since she joined the Chanticleer staff early
in 1999, Voran has spent most of her time in these popular gardens,
working with a palette of sunshine and shadows: The woodsy ruin, with
its focus on foliage and texture, evokes an almost mysterious moodiness,
while the gravel garden, often called “the sun steps,” is
as sun-drenched and open to the elements as a Mediterranean hillside.
Inspiring ‘something different’
But, like many of the gardeners at this pleasure garden in Wayne, Voran
is an artist whether she is in the garden or out. The Apple House mural
became an off-season project that she designed and painted over the
course of two winters when executive director R. William Thomas decided
he wanted “something completely different” to showcase the
tiny building.
“My inspiration was a scene in a garden I had visited in England,”
she says. “There was a round, turret-shaped building that you
walked into, and it had a meadow scene painted onto the back –
a cross-section of a meadow, with the roots and worms and everything.
I thought that was really wonderful. I like little critters, chipmunks
and things like that, and this is the kind of thing I would have sat
in church and drawn when I was a kid.” And if her illustration
prompts vague thoughts of Beatrix Potter, that’s okay, too –
Voran was a fan of the legendary children’s book author: “Any
book that had to do with animals, I loved as a kid.”
She still loves animals. She shares her living space with two cats,
Magellan (because of his tendency to explore) and Linty (named after
the stuff in the dryer, because that’s what she looks like), and
has responsibility for Vinnie, the large and handsome cat that stayed
on at Chanticleer when his former owner departed. Vinnie, who has his
own quarters in the wood shop, with a cat door so he can come and go
as he pleases, is the curious kitty pictured in the Apple House mural.
A gardening childhood
Growing up in Goshen, a thriving business- and manufacturing-oriented
town set in the farmland of northern Indiana, the idea of a career in
horticulture “wasn’t even on my radar,” Voran recalls.
Not that she wasn’t involved with gardening back then. She enjoyed
helping her father, Melvin, an elementary school teacher from a farming
family, with three big organic gardens in which he grew numerous kinds
of vegetables that her mother, Marilyn, canned and froze to feed the
family throughout the year.
“But to me it was part of how you live – you grow your vegetables.
It was something I assumed people did,” she says.
Marilyn Voran fostered a love of natural beauty in her three children
by taking them for walks in the woods to look at native spring wildflowers,
and Laurel also has vivid memories of family trips that took in fields
of tulips in Holland, Michigan, and the beautiful gardens of Stan Hywet
Halls & Gardens, a public garden in Ohio not far from where her
late grandmother used to live.
The desire to nurture things herself took root when she was still in
elementary school.
“When I was in fourth or fifth grade, a garden center had tossed
some annuals, some red salvias, on the edge of a trash pile, and they
said, ‘Oh, you can take those’,” she remembers. So
she took the discarded plants home, and watered and fertilized them
until they recovered.
“I was very proud of that rescue. And I grew amaryllis bulbs,
too. Someone gave me a bulb for Christmas, but I realized our house
was too cold for it. I was very concerned about this, so my Dad made
me a box that was heated with a light bulb. I think I was in about fifth
grade at the time, and I took the temperature of the soil and [my Dad]
figured out how we needed to set the timer so the light would come on
and keep it at the right temperature. I was excited about it, and wanted
it to bloom, and I was afraid that if I didn’t follow the directions
exactly, it wouldn’t bloom.”
So each day, she took the bulb’s measurements and charted its
growth until, of course, it did bloom, a beautiful red. She kept the
amaryllis for several years, transplanting it into the garden each summer,
and it kept right on producing its red flowers.
Seeking an outdoors career
Still, when she went off to Goshen College after high school, she had
no clear idea of what she wanted to study, and waited until her junior
year to declare a double major in art and natural science.
“All I ever wanted was to be active and outdoors. I never wanted
a career that would put me behind a desk,” she said one late-summer
afternoon as she worked in the gravel garden on a bed of dianthus that
had been overtaken by thyme. In her outdoor gear, with a belt around
her waist to tote her two-way radio and her well-used Felco pruners,
Voran looks as though she was born to garden, yet it was a fairly circuitous
course that eventually led her to professional gardening, and Chanticleer.
“I think if the college had had a course in horticulture, I would
have figured it out earlier.”
A summer job as a groundskeeper at Greencroft retirement community in
Goshen nudged her in the right direction. After graduation and a lengthy
trip to India and Nepal, Voran returned to Greencroft as a groundskeeper
in 1991, and stayed for five years, plowing snow and painting apartments
in the winter.
“For a retirement community, it had quite nice grounds and gardens,
and some fairly unusual trees, as well as a pond with natural areas
and trails around it. It was a good place to learn a lot of things,
and to find out that I really liked that kind of work. And I also found
out that I wanted to work somewhere that horticulture was the main thing,
at a higher level.”
Finding the right path
But she needed more credentials. After rejecting landscape architecture
when she realized it would put her in an office more often than a garden,
she stumbled across the answer one day when she was flipping through
the pages of Horticulture magazine: the Longwood Professional Gardener
Training Program, a two-year course for live-in students at Longwood
Gardens in Chester County.
“The first time I visited Chanticleer was on an afternoon plant
walk with Bill Thomas,” who was then a teacher and researcher
at Longwood Gardens, “and I thought, ‘I would love to work
here, or at a place like this’ – but I soon learned that
there aren’t a lot of places like this.”
Voran put out feelers to Chanticleer when she graduated from Longwood’s
highly-regarded program in early 1998, then headed off to England to
spend the summer as a student – “A weeder!” she says
– at two National Trust gardens, Knightshayes Court in Devon and
Biddulph Grange near Manchester. While she was still there, visiting
as many gardens as she could on her days off, she heard from Chanticleer.
A job had opened up. Was she interested?
She started work on Jan. 2, 1999, the same day that demolition began
on Minder House, one-time home of Adolph Rosengarten Jr. and now the
site of the ruin garden. This garden is a big part of Voran’s
responsibilities, and she loves it, but she is more at home in the gravel
garden that slopes away down a hill beyond the ruin.
“The sun steps I helped to create, and it is more my style,”
she explains. “I love wild, unkempt places, and there’s
something about the meadowy, open feel that I like. Maybe this has to
do with growing up in the Midwest – I love grasses and a prairie
sort of feel, a more naturalistic style of gardening.”
Living on the job, and loving it
Chanticleer
has twice sent Voran on plant trips to South Africa, along with fellow
horticulturist Jonathan Wright, to be inspired by the colors and patterns
of that sunny country as well as to seek out plants that will thrive
here. Some of them she has grown from seed she brought back.
About four years ago, Voran moved into a little house at Chanticleer
that was previously used as offices, joining a small community of staffers
who live on the grounds. With this privilege come some extra responsibilities,
such as watering plants in the greenhouses on weekends, getting the
parking lot open for employees after a snowfall, hooking up generators
if the power goes out, and looking after the garden’s small propagation
house.
“And of course the pool needs to be used,” Voran adds, laughing.
“That’s very important.”
She swims at least three days a week, though usually in a bigger pool
at Bryn Mawr, where she is enrolled in a U.S. Masters Swimming program.
She bikes a lot, too, and on her 39th birthday in August, she competed
in the Brigantine Triathlon, which she describes as “a short triathlon,
as triathlons go” – a quarter-mile swim, an 11-mile bike
ride, and a four-mile run.
But it is her job that brings her the greatest pleasure, no matter what
the season.
“Last winter I started carving a plant list box, a mushroom for
the Minder Woods,” she says. “The mushroom cap will lift
up so you can reach inside and get the plant lists.” Whenever
she hits an obstacle, she can turn to another artist on staff for help.
“That’s the great thing about working here: I don’t
have to know everything – I can pull from the brains of my co-workers.”
–oo0oo–
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