The yard behind Susan and Patrick Tromley’s Tudor home on Bellemeade Avenue used to be mostly grass. A gift of saplings from Patrick’s brother-in-law, David Kolb, provided an opportunity to grow something unique, and those saplings, combined with more than 30 years of cultivation, transformed the backyard into an oasis.
“I planted what I thought looked pretty to my eye … I planted as native as I could, but … there are some non-native plants in here,” Susan explains. “In a shade garden, there’s not a lot of color. To add color interest with perennials, you do it with different shades of greens and also add some red or purple shades in there.”
That philosophy is evident when surveying the yard. The saplings grew into Kousa dogwood, redbud, sweet gum, tulip, oak, maple, and white pine trees. Interspersed are hostas in the aforementioned varying shades of green. Susan installed ferns to add structure and texture, but she didn’t stick with one kind: Her collection includes maidenhair, autumn, ostrich, royal, and Japanese painted ferns. She added splashes of color with palace purple coral bells, astilbe, cone flowers, Solomon’s seal, bleeding heart, brunnera, euonymus, impatiens, coleus, viburnum, lungwort, butterfly weed, spiderwort, trillium, bloodroot, and jack-in-the-pulpit.
During the design and planting process, Susan sourced ideas from books and took classes to become a master gardener. She learned fast, and her home oasis was featured on the Southwestern Indiana Master Gardener Association’s 2003 Garden Walk.
The Tromleys have added personal touches over the years. Patrick built winding stone paths and a wooden swing for Susan to sit and admire her outdoor space. A water feature adds a soothing trickling sound. Bird feeders hang from tree limbs and poles, and small statues of cats, turtles, and birds dot the landscaping. Decorative signs underscore the mood: “Nature touches every heart.” “Our main goal was to create a woods,” Susan says. “We started adding more areas where we put in stone and paths, (and) raised it up to tier it. It happened over time.”
Many of the bird statues depict owls, hinting at Susan’s hobby documenting one of the Dexter neighborhood’s nocturnal residents, which Evansville Living featured in a March/April 2021 story. In the back left corner of the Tromleys’ private “woods,” as they call it, is a small tree stump marking the former home of an owl named Eleanor, whom Susan named after former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “She was the female matriarch. She nested in a tree for eight years, and they had to cut down the tree because it was about to fall,” Susan says. “It was really nice of the homeowner to let me have that.”
The garden’s diverse plants also attract migratory birds, including warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, thrashers, and thrushes, plus cardinals, blue jays, titmice, chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, wrens, gold-finches, and sparrows. Another perk: During extreme heat and humidity, walking under the tree canopy is a fantastic way to cool off. Susan agrees: “It’s cooler back here in the summer.”
