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. This is the starting venue for our Spring Photo Walk at Stan Hywet on Sunday, May 31, 2026 from 2-4 pm.
We will visit the English Garden, completed in 1929 and designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, who has been described as the Dean of American landscape designers. 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 will 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.
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.
All of the photographs included in this article were taken with my handheld iPhone 16 Pro – you do not need heavy, complicated, expensive 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, May 31 from 2-4pm for a pleasant stroll around the spectacular gardens at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens. Bring your iPhone or Android smartphone – 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