Stacey Freed | Special to the Democrat and Chronicle
One of the biggest home trends in recent years has been the desire for easy indoor-outdoor connections and in the use of biophilic design (connecting people and nature within our built spaces).
Numerous studies have shown how being outdoors is good for your health and wellbeing. Even just viewing plants or gardens from a window is beneficial for health. None of this science was on Zuzanna Kwon's mind as she went about creating a veritable Eden in the backyard of her Bushnell's Basin home. She just loves to garden.
Zuzanna, who has a doctorate in piano from the Eastman School of Music and sits on the board of the RPO, and her husband, an eye surgeon, purchased the home on 11 wooded acres with a pond back in 2011. The property had been vacant for a decade.
The then-4,500 square foot concrete and plaster home was previously owned by Michael Lasell Watson and his wife, Nicoleta Zervas. Watson, who died in 2012, was the great grandson of Don Alonzo Watson, one of the founders of Western Union. Like his ancestors, Watson was a great patron of the arts. He had hired Wharton Esherick, often referred to as "the dean of American Craftsmen," to design the house in the early 1960s. Esherick was known for his organic designs and sculptural wood furniture.
Since the Kwons moved in, they renovated the kitchen in 2014, and in 2019 they added a master wing and family room, and this garden masterpiece.
Gardening Genes
Not a trained gardener, Zuzanna just has always loved being outdoors and gardening and has a discerning eye for detail. She knew what she wanted in the landscape and began planning it in her mind as soon as she and her family moved in. She worked with Benson Enterprises in Victor to develop the landscape design plans, and architect Richard Mauser of RAM Architects in Rochester did the home addition.
Since the house stands atop a hill, in order to put on the addition, they had to dig into the hill. There was a need for a lot of retaining walls. "I asked Benson to create the terraces. It was a dramatic renovation, but I wanted terraces so I could garden between the walls," Zuzanna says. McKinnon Construction did the demolition.
Zuzanna says her love of gardening comes from her family, particularly her grandfather. In fact, she inherited Dahlia tubers from him, bulbs that he had been digging up and replanting for more than 50 years. "Flowers are like my family heirlooms," she says.
She started many of her plants from seeds and bulbs in her garden room but also purchased many of the plants from Home Depot and Bristol's Garden Center.
She did all the planting herself, spending much of the COVID lockdown digging, hauling soil and mulch, and planting. She guesses she put over 500 plants into the ground. "I was homeschooling the children, so gardening was my escape," she says.
The garden is a showstopper, but Zuzanna is humble about her accomplishments. She laughs as she says, "I just know what belongs in sunny or shady areas. Mostly everything survived."
Colorful Contrast
The home's interior is all white, with clean, modern lines. But outside, it's a riot of color, texture, and movement.
On one side of the house is a path lined with Limelight hydrangea trees, rose of Sharon trees, black eyed Susans, geraniums, boxwoods, rose bushes, petunias, catmint, marigolds.
That's just on the sunny side; on the shaded side there are hydrangeas and several varieties of impatiens.
Below that area there are three stepped rock walls that form terrace gardens, almost like giant flower boxes. In the sun, catmint, rose trees, rose bushes, geraniums, spirea, sedum, hydrangea trees, zinnias, daisies, petunias, sweet potato vine, and dahlias are all thriving.
On the shady side there is a hydrangea garden bursting with light and deep pink, blue, and purple flowers. Leafy ferns line the path. Then, at pool level there's more boxwood and catmint, juniper and rose bushes.
Still more plants grow beyond the pool and down the hill below it, where Zuzanna has raised bed vegetable gardens with tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, herbs, calendula, and garlic. There are kiwi vines and raspberries, blackberries and grapevines. Rows of apple, pear, plum, peach, cherry, and persimmon trees grow on the hill down to the pond.
There are more garden areas on the opposite side of the house from the pool. There, behind the kitchen, is a patio with a grill and another fire pit (there are four in total) and seating area. There's a perennial garden surrounding a magnolia tree that was planted in the 1960s: hostas, impatiens, marigolds, hydrangeas, six colors of phlox (pinks, purples), black eyed Susans, five colors of coneflower, gladiolus, and heliopsis. An herb garden runs along the border outside kitchen with cilantro, parsley, basil, sage, dill, chives.
Zuzanna approaches the garden almost as a painter — or more aptly, as a musical conductor — might, with a natural sense of how to balance color, shape, size, texture, and materials.And she has an incredible eye for detail. For example, the chairs around the outdoor table and the umbrellas are the same shade of green as the nearby sweet potato vines.
The gardens are inviting all year long, the colorful flowers giving way to fall foliage; then the bare trees along the pond and the snowy terraces beckon in winter. The Kwons love to entertain, and the gardens fill with guests during the family's annual Halloween haunted hayrides and Christmas sleigh rides. The children, who all play the piano as well as other instruments, choose a charity each year and give a musical concert to raise money.
Zuzanna is always tinkering, though, always looking for another spot to tuck something colorful. "Gardening is like an art or music performance," she says. "It's a living and breathing art form."
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