Garden of Earthly Delights
Dr. Steve Ford tames a wooded beast
By Cynthia Adams
Photographs by Lynn Donovan
What would neurologist Steve Ford choose to do after years of healing others?
Dr. Steve Ford’s former work life meant consulting with stroke patients, treating headaches, seizures, neurological issues or chronic pain. Most days were spent scrutinizing patients’ symptoms in a quest to solve what has been described as a “puzzle” inside a patient’s brain. After more than 43 years of stress-filled work attending those living with chronic pain, would the physician heed the admonition to “heal thyself?”
Ford discovered the answer to that particular puzzle lay in the great outdoors.
In the six years since his retirement, Ford seems to have found an avocation, carving a private woodland garden from the densely forested acreage at Willow Creek, a High Point suburb.
Today, transformed, it is a dreamscape that covers some 2.5 acres. In bringing order to a thick, untamed landscape, he created four pockets of serenity, each designed for cocktail-sipping at dusk in an Adirondack chair or simply enjoying the water sounds, bird calls and, best of all — the soothing sounds of silence.
Water factors heavily into the design of Ford’s gardens. There’s a swimming pool he and his wife, Gillian Overing — also recently retired from a career as an English professor at Wake Forest University — installed when they moved there in 2001, and places aplenty to relax into the charms of a green space tucked inside an urban neighborhood.
Now his daily routine — “whenever the weather’s okay” — is to pull on work clothes and spend hours enhancing his personal vision of peaceful tranquility — toiling in a private retreat. After retiring from a high-stress area of specialization in 2017, Ford could have easily chosen a hobby with less headaches. But he found himself taming not one but three adjoining lots, uncovering all sorts of unexpected possibilities — and a new set of challenges. For instance, a charming footbridge he built to span the brook kept being washed away by storms.
Palms held up in surrender, he explains he’s bowed to the inevitable.
Other projects simply required dogged determination.
Ford had to haul untold barrows of gravel, which he edged with wood, to create walking paths that wouldn’t also wash away during heavy rains and flooding. “All of the paths in the garden were created by me,” he says with modest pride.
The couple has owned the property for 23 years. It offered wooded privacy on both sides of the early-1990 contemporary house, but the rear of the home opened to the Willow Creek golf course, allowing light to flow inside.
Overing, who is British, was born in London. The pair met at Wake Forest “on a blind date set up by friends,” Ford explains. He did his residency at Baptist Hospital after graduating from The Medical University of South Carolina in 1979. “I was in my internship and she was in the first year of her professorship.”
His wife’s true passion, enjoyed since childhood, is horse riding, explains Ford. But his is gardening.
Yet, as an Englishwoman, she, too, appreciates the outdoors.
“Yes, Gillian enjoys the garden,” he says, smiling, pausing outside their contemporary home, proceeding through the garden gate towards the long, rectangular pool. The pool is flanked by Asian touches with an exotic deciduous tree in the corner. John Newman, a professional landscape designer and friend, helped design the Japanese-themed pool area. Brian Hanson, a fellow retiree and friend, created the Japanese lanterns, which sit near the pool, from concrete.
The graveled pathways leading away from the secluded pool feature more and more native plantings. “I guess the underlying theme is that these are mostly plants that grow naturally in a shaded wetland,” Ford says.
The couple’s border collie, Blanche, was obtained from a Charlottesville, Va., friend and breeder. Blanche (named for Blanche DuBois) is uncharacteristically disinterested in herding, Ford explains, but she excels at loyalty.
Never far from Ford’s side, Blanche follows as he walks a path that leads to a shaded brook. The brook is fed by Abbotts Creek, one of their property’s natural side boundaries.
As peaceful as the effect of trickling water is now, it seems idyllic.
Less so, before.
At first, the property was quite overgrown, so much so that even three years after they had purchased it, “we didn’t even know there was a creek,” given the thickness of the woods engulfing the house.
“I’m a hands-in-the dirt person,” Ford explains. As he learned more about gardening, he considered being part of a gardening club for years — hard to do with his medical career, he inserts. With a nudge from fellow gardener Martha Yarborough, the couple opened the garden five years ago for a public tour to benefit the Davidson County Master Gardener program.
At the urging of Yarborough, who devotes her own retirement to developing ornamental and vegetable gardens (see September, 2022 O. Henry, “Simple Abundance”) Ford took the Davidson County Master Gardener classes.
Transformed by 2018, his garden was more than ready for public scrutiny. It was opened for public tour and featured in a North Carolina State Extension Master Garden video as an example of what other native gardeners aspire to: “From the dazzling bluebells that cover ancient woodland in the spring to the bright meadows bursting with buttercups in the summer, wild flowers are what make our woods so beautiful, while providing precious nectar for invertebrates.”
Citing a lettuce-lined path and poolside beds, as well as colonies of ferns along the stream, the introduction promised “. . . the diversity and expanse will amaze and inspire you!”
Now Ford’s focus has turned exclusively to native plants. Walk down one of his pathways and you’ll encounter trillium grandiflorum, trillium x. flexatum, Carolina allspice, and more, each carefully labeled.
There are masses of woodland wildflowers, narcotic in their beauty. There are grasses and sedges. Native ferns that volunteer (sometimes with a helpful assist from Ford).
“The ferns include Christmas ferns, lady ferns, cinnamon ferns, shaggy shield ferns, Japanese painted ferns, ebony spleenwort, ostrich ferns and multiple varieties of maidenhair ferns.”
Mosses, too. All plants that thrive in variable levels of light and high humidity.
“Other flowering plants in the garden include Arum italicum (Italian arum), bear’s breeches, May apple, Solomon’s seal, bloodroot, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Japanese and native pachysandra, Arisaema dracontium, wild ginger and primroses,” Ford says, sometimes citing their botanical names.
“More numerous are the native sessile and trillium cuneatum [or sweet Betsy] that were present before I got involved in the property and have continued to thrive without my cultivation. The same is true about trout lilies that have proliferated in the garden without my cultivation.”
Then there is the tree canopy itself. “The trees that predominate are tulip poplars, sycamores, red cedars and sweet gums, providing the overstory. The understory is populated with American and kousa dogwoods and various Japanese maples, Stewartias, American and Japanese Styrax, deciduous magnolias, azaleas, camelias, rhododendrons, hydrangeas,” says Ford. “I could go on and on, but I think that sounds like enough.”
Now Ford’s routine (when the couple isn’t traveling) is to sink his hands into the soil of the woodland oasis of his own design. Ford once planted Lenten roses, but he points out he is concerned they are too invasive and jokes about taking them out with weed killer.
Those pushy Lenten roses, he says ruefully, have got to go. But as the skies grow grayer and a storm threatens, he heads inside with Blanche padding behind him. She plops on the floor at Ford’s feet where he has settled onto a sofa.
The doctor smiles, reaching to stroke Blanche’s head. When asked the hour he looks mildly surprised, giving a telling answer. Since retirement he finds he has stopped wearing a watch.
And his smile deepens with the soft sounds of a rhythmic rain as Blanche sighs contentedly. OH
