Montford garden reflects years of care
This rose-festooned structure anchors a 1915 Arts and Crafts home that was featured in June’s Historic Montford Garden Tour.
Photo by Rachel Pressley
When Mandy Kjellstrom moved from Lake Toxaway to Asheville’s Montford Historic District in 2006, she brought a car full of plants and two very green thumbs.
“Gardening is in my blood,” says Kjellstrom, whose maternal relatives farmed the wind-blown flats of the Texas Panhandle. “If you can grow crops there,” she laughs, “you can grow crops just about anywhere.”
That hard-earned resilience came in handy as she began restoring the grounds around her 1915 Arts and Crafts-style home — a Montford treasure that once operated as the Flint Street Inn. The bed-and-breakfast, open from the 1980s through the early 2000s, had strong bones but a neglected landscape.
“The garden was bright and beautiful but very overgrown,” she recalls. With renewed vision and a solid landscaping plan, Kjellstrom salvaged two snowball viburnums and a hedge of lilacs, though some had to be relocated after years of unchecked growth. Most everything else was added slowly over time: irises passed down from her grandmother’s Texas garden; rhododendrons, hostas, and mountain laurels gathered from her former property; and knockout roses, azaleas, and hydrangeas from local nurseries.
“My particular love is hydrangeas,” Kjellstrom says. The garden’s fig tree — so productive it yielded enough fruit to produce 60 pints of preserves per year — is also a favorite.
To tie everything together, she incorporated meandering rock walkways leading to a pergola, a “beautiful rock wall out front,” and a revitalized koi pond studded with water lilies.
The pergola, originally meant as a “vinery” to support vigorous kiwi-plant climbers, was built to be sturdy. Now, draped in less-devouring climbing roses and clematis, “it’s just a pretty entrance to the upper part of the backyard,” notes Kjellstrom.
A small, sloping vegetable patch was also transformed into a tidy rock garden and an accessory dwelling unit was constructed to serve as a light-filled art studio.
“This home will always be my favorite,” says Kjellstrom who, sadly, parted ways with the residence this past year.
Though Kjellstrom now calls Athens, Georgia, home, she was pleased to know her greenspace took center stage when the current owners opened it to the public for the Historic Montford Garden Tour. Hosted in June, the beloved event welcomed visitors into eight of the neighborhood’s most inspired outdoor spaces.
“We look for a diverse range of gardens that will be of interest to a wide diversity of people,” says Lynn Raker, a landscape architect and an organizer for the annual garden tour. “Some gardens are more flower-oriented, some are mostly trees, and some are more focused on capturing the heritage of local ecology.”
According to Raker, the garden on Flint Street impresses guests with its stunning rockwork, abundance of perennials, and thoughtful layout.
“The garden is very tasteful,” she notes. “It was well designed with a very naturalistic look.”
Photo by Rachel Pressley
Down in Athens, Kjellstrom has already begun work on her new garden, even incorporating a few cuttings from the prolific fig tree as a nod to her nearly 20-year tenure in Asheville.
“I put so much heart and soul into that garden,” she says. “But when you sell a house, you just have to overcome your sadness.”
The Historic Montford Garden Tour, montfordgardentour.org.