A host of purple allium globes rising above a sea of ferns and hosta foliage greet you as you walk from the parking lot to check in as a visitor at the Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens Carriage House in Akron, Ohio. I made a scouting trip on June 5 to check out the Stan Hywet gardens in preparation for our photo walk on Sunday, June 29, from 2-4 pm.
My first stop was the English Garden, completed in 1929, and designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, who has been described as the Dean of American landscape designers. Shipman viewed many of her contemporary, mostly male, landscapers as “cemetery landscape” designers, and was heavily influenced by the English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, who favored formal garden designs with lush flower borders. Although Shipman designed over 400 gardens in North America, only a few have survived, including Stan Hywet’s English Garden, which has been fully restored and maintained by the Akron Garden Club.
Adjoining the English Garden to the north, the extensive flower borders below the West Terrace of the Manor House are filled with dozens of colorful peonies, irises, and baptisia that bloom in late spring and early summer, providing spectacular foreground elements for wide-angle vistas of the monumental, 65,000 square-foot Tudor Revival Manor House.
As we continue our walk along the West Terrace we reach one of the entrances to the the Japanese Garden, which was originally designed by Warren Manning in 1916, in collaboration with Japanese landscape architect T. R. Otsuka. Below the stone pagoda sculpture in the lower left of the photograph above is a small waterfall, and two underground 100,000 gallon cisterns, which originally provided water for the entire estate, now provide the water used to irrigate the Stan Hywet gardens.
When I took this photograph on June 5, many of the azalea and rhododendron shrubs in the gardens had past their peak of bloom, which now occurs in early and mid-May as a result of climate change. However, a few rhododendron shrubs, including the one shown above, were delayed by the cool, rainy weather we have experienced in northeast Ohio during the past couple of weeks.
The Great Garden, northeast of the Manor House, explodes into a profusion of blooms in late May and June, including the multicolored hybrid lupines shown in the photo above. Together with irises and peonies, the Great Garden provides a feast of eye candy for flower and garden photographers throughout the growing season.
The Rose Garden at Stan Hywet has experienced a variety of soil problems during recent decades, but it was in great shape when I visited on June 5, with an excellent display of healthy rose blossoms throughout the garden.
All of the photographs included in this article were taken with my handheld iPhone 16 Pro – you do not need heavy, complicated, expensive Canon, Nikon, or Sony SLR/Mirrorless cameras, multiple lenses and tripods to create beautiful images of flowers and gardens! Your recent iPhone or Android smartphone, used with optimal camera settings, great lighting, and an eye for a strong composition, will reward you with superb images of nature and garden subjects.
Join me on Sunday, June 29 from 2-4pm for a pleasant stroll around the spectacular gardens at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens. Bring your iPhone or Android smartphone and a list of flower/garden photography topics you would like to discuss – I will be in the Carriage House courtyard at 1:30 pm prior to our walk to help you with smartphone camera settings and any other photography questions you may have. Here’s a link to the Stan Hywet website to register for the photo walk:
https://stanhywet.org/events/photography-walk-ian-adams