When the owners of a secluded country home in the Catskills desired a romantic poolside oasis, I designed the plantings to enhance dreamy summer days spent by the pool. The garden features masses of Quickfire and Pinky Winky hydrangea blooms, a row of Northwind switchgrass to catch cooling breezes and a ‘hot’ color planting of yellow, orange and cream daylilies edged by a loose dwarf juniper hedge.

One multi-stemmed white birch in the field of daylilies brings down the scale of the background forest and even when the lilies aren’t blooming, the white birch bark emerges from the green sea of Hemerocallis foliage.

Foundation beds around the house continue the soft, romantic cottage theme by combining peonies, daylilies and hydrangeas with native pagoda dogwood, red twig dogwood, pink flowering dogwood, sweet shrub, summer sweet and Virginia sweetspire. Coniferous evergreen ground the design: spreading juniper, dwarf mugo pine, dwarf Alberta spruce and box. Heartbreaker weeping redbud and Grace smokebush mark the beginning of a perennial Fairy Garden contained by a semi-circular blue stone wall and inhabited by a birdbath with a sweet songbird made of stone.