Half an acre near the Rockefeller Park Greenhouse around Martin Luther King Drive was badly overgrown last spring when Mike Hetman and MaryAnn Thesing collaborated in renovating the area.
Half an acre near the Rockefeller Park Greenhouse around Martin Luther King Drive was badly overgrown last spring when Mike Hetman and MaryAnn Thesing collaborated in renovating the area.
Four months later, the Japanese Garden, a haven for reflection, complete with Japanese maple trees, the traditional bridge, tea garden, a wisteria-covered trellis and a bamboo shed, draw crowds along its white lucky-stone paths.
Hetman, owner of Estates Landscaping at 8015 Mayfield Road in Chester Township, said he and Thesing, a landscape designer with GardenPHD in Cleveland, met at the city-owned park several times to strategize.
“I call MaryAnn the Japanese maple queen,” he joked, adding Thesing knows everything about the many varieties of Japanese maples.
That was handy because some of the trees in the garden were 70 to 80 years old and in desperate need her expertise.
“The garden hadn’t been taken care of for many, many years,” Hetman said.
Besides the many trees that needed attention, the ground floor had been ignored.
“The beds were so infested it looked like old bushes and shrubs, and grass,” he said, estimating the garden had been ignored for more than a decade. “It was pretty bad.”
Rockefeller Greenhouse gradually has been rehabilitating the gardens that highlight plants from many countries around the world. Clearly it was time for the Japanese garden to be tended.
Once Thesing and Hetman agreed on a plan — and the rain stopped falling — he and his crew put in several days of “ripping and tearing” through the overgrowth in July’s heat to get to the bones of the garden.
“We started the middle of July and were done by Aug. 1,” he said. “It was a lot of work and a lot of long days.”
They enhanced the gardens with boulders and added concrete ramps to improve accessibility for handicapped visitors, Hetman said.
While reconstructing the paths they were pleased to discover thick slabs of sandstone.
After consulting with Thesing, Hetman’s team used the slabs to build a wall that hadn’t been part of the plan.
“It was just an add-on. It came out real nice,” he said.
They dug out about a quarter-mile of paths around the garden and used some of the sandstone as pavers.
Once the overgrowth was removed they pressure-washed the bridge and the bamboo shed, and cleaned up the statue with a Japanese theme.
The first challenge the Estate Landscaping workers faced was getting the visitors out of the Japanese Garden so it could become a construction zone, Hetman said. They strung the orange fencing around the entrances after herding everyone out.
A few weeks later he was gratified by the community interest.
“When I took down the orange fence — I was still rolling it up — and there were 20 or 30 people waiting there to see what we had done,” Hetman said. “It was a really fun project. I’ve been in the business 21 years and I like this kind of creativity.”
Next year he hopes to be revamping the Rose Garden at Rockefeller Greenhouse and to be involved in renovating a texture garden for the visually impaired.
