As Serendipity Dictates
The strength of Helen Stone’s Hailey garden is its forgiving caretaker.
Photography: Ilona
Meadow rue watches over a fish fountain and koi in a pond.
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Tucked away behind thick green foliage near the center of Hailey is a garden sanctuary of remarkable beauty and charm.
At once a cool, shady oasis and a riot of color and texture, this living art gallery is where gardener Helen Stone plants and pulls, nurtures and creates. She and husband Ben Schepps have spent more than 30 years shaping and transforming this beautiful work in progress they call home. With her welcoming smile and warm laugh, it is more than clear; this is a woman who literally loves what she does.
Stone has an expansive, almost encyclopedic, knowledge of gardens and plant life, much of which cannot be found on those small plastic nursery tags, she says. With her garden as her guide, Stone has cultivated her vast knowledge through trial and error in some cases, and serendipity in others. Much of her success can be attributed to her genuine enthusiasm and abundant appreciation for the natural world. There is basic common sense and practicality, too. In her own words, “You had better do it now because you never know about tomorrow.” And for Stone this applies to everything from deadheading your allium to transplanting an unhappy primrose.
Gardening can be tedious, demanding, difficult work. It can be confounding and surprising. It is composed of all sorts of living, breathing, ever-changing elements, and the gardener needs to be flexible and accepting, even forgiving. Stone embraces the necessary symbiotic relationship. Even though her birches are dying because of their need for more water, they remain in place. Stone is “leaving them for the birds for now,” she comments quite matter-of-factly.
Luxurious and bountiful, Stone’s garden consumes all but a medium-sized central lawn at the corner of First Street and Silver. In the middle sits the old white house originally belonging to the Mallory family.
LEFT to RIGHT No denying the beauty of lilium lillies. Curly fern provides a green backdrop. Helen Stone standing with a kolkwitzia beauty bush.
“Those wonderful old black and white photos you see around town, you know, the ones with the fish and Main Street and everything,” explains Stone, “well, those were all taken by Martyn Mallory Sr. and developed right here in the darkroom he dug under the house.”
Stone beams a little and continues, “As a present a number of years ago, Bill (his son) gave us one of his father’s photographs of the house. We have it hanging inside.”
Photographs from the Mallory collection grace the walls of the Hailey Public Library and various Valley restaurants and retail shops. Originally built in 1895 as a one-room cottage, the Mallory house (see sidebar page 51) soon became the only darkroom in the entire area. Hand-dug and river-rocked by Mallory himself, the home is a source of pride for Stone and Schepps for the important part their home plays in Hailey history.
The garden was already graced with a wonderful collection of 70-year-old Douglas fir trees. Stone began planting silver spruce, lilac, and many other still-living plants and trees back in the late 1960s. Today, they more than adequately block out the surrounding neighborhood, offer marvelous shade and privacy, and contribute to the variety of microclimates present in this large corner lot. Accordingly, Stone created mini-gardens around the house by working with the incredibly site-specific details of sun, shade and soil. >>>
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