click to enlarge - James Buck
- Ken Mills in his home garden
Follow the winding stone footpath into Ken Mills' home garden — through the large wooden church doors, past the metallic steampunk crab perched on a boulder, and pausing at the Japanese teahouse before entering the Celtic labyrinth — and a visitor might think, I have no idea what's coming next.
That's exactly how Mills intended it. Around each bend is another unexpected discovery. During my recent visit, the landscape architect offered to either show me around or let me explore the grounds on my own. When I chose the former, he seemed crestfallen.
"Really? I kind of like people exploring," he said. "Discovering on your own gives you a slightly different perspective — and that's actually the perspective I'm interested in."
Still, Mills was an amiable tour guide. For 25 years, the longtime gardener and owner of Burlington-area landscape architecture firm Terra Logic has been working on this plot in northern Chittenden County, which includes a 1770s house he shares with his life partner, artist Jenn Karson. Having come to landscape design after leaving corporate America and following other creative paths, Mills has packed a lot of sensory inputs into the dense, two-acre property.
"Literally everything you see I planted, built or brought in," he said. What was once an open meadow is now a sun-dappled woodland resplendent with European beech, weeping larch and Japanese maples, the ground a carpet of pachysandra, vinca, mayapples and sweet woodruff.
click to enlarge - James Buck
- An enclosed koi pond in Ken Mills' garden
Yet Mills' garden, a passion project and perpetual work in progress, never feels crowded or overly manicured. It's open and airy, even in enclosed areas. One can sit beside the koi pond and listen to a gurgling waterfall and never slap a mosquito; last year, Mills screened in the entire pond, both to keep out pests and to protect the fish from hawks and herons.
The pond is one of several enclosures, along with the 12-by-20-foot screened-in teahouse and a smaller meditation chamber, that allow visitors to be simultaneously indoors and bathed in nature.
But it's not all meant for quiet meditation beside a pool of frogs on lily pads. You can shoot hoops on Mills' blue-painted basketball court or ascend the bridge above the labyrinth and take in a bird's-eye view of the entire garden.
Mills built the labyrinth in the 1990s, before he had his landscaping firm or any heavy machinery. He hauled all the rocks from the road himself in a wheelbarrow, which took months. Unlike a maze, which is a puzzle to solve, the labyrinth is designed for ruminating on an idea or question, he explained. After following the path to its center, one hopefully arrives at some deeper insight.
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Erin Hanley
- The labyrinth garden designed by Ken Mills at his home
"Once you have that clarity, then you should ascend to the heavens," he said, raising his arms in a gesture of the structure's metaphorical significance. In earlier years, Mills had a ladder that rose straight into the air, but it was unclimbable. So he replaced it with a fabricated steel bridge with wavelike railings, a spiral staircase at the entrance and a straight ladder at the exit. Mills initially envisioned having visitors leave the bridge via a playground slide, but there wasn't enough room to make it work.
Instead, he attached a slide to the second floor of the house. "Why walk down stairs when you can slide?" he asked rhetorically.
That sense of whimsy and playfulness is evident throughout the garden. Tucked in a shady nook is a tombstone with two bowling shoes, a bowling ball and a pin protruding from the soil. A sign on the iron fence behind them reads, "Out of service."
click to enlarge - James Buck
- A boulder sculpture in a fountain at the garden
In other spots, Mills uses his knowledge of physics and engineering to create impressive illusions. One, a large metal sculpture titled "Unchained Desire," is composed of two steel rings that appear to be drifting into space, tethered to the Earth by chains. Mills based the sculpture on a much larger, award-winning design he created for Burlington's South End Arts + Business Association, which was supposed to cover the Pine Street silos outside Dealer.com. However, after the company was sold twice in two years, the new corporate owners nixed the project.
Another sculpture, which Mills designed and built in his "meditation corner," received an award last year from the Vermont Nursery and Landscape Association/Green Works. Visitors approach the meditation corner via rectangular stone steps that seem to float on a sea of pachysandra. In the middle of this is a pool with a large white boulder at its center. Until a few months ago, a pump shot a fountain of water from beneath the stone, creating the illusion that the rock was held aloft on the spring.
Unfortunately, some workers in the garden accidentally toppled the 1,500-pound boulder. Mills has since righted it, but the fountain no longer works.
"It was very cool," he lamented. "Now I'm starting from scratch."
Mills, who's old enough to collect Social Security but doesn't look his age, discovered his passion for landscape architecture relatively late in life. When he was a child, his parents had a one-acre property in Virginia Beach, Va., that was extensively landscaped.
"The truth is, I had to do all the work, and I absolutely hated it," Mills said. "I swore that if I ever had a house, it would have a big asphalt lawn. I wanted nothing to do with landscaping."
Instead, he spent years chasing other careers. After earning an undergraduate degree in chemistry, he built custom furniture, then owned several restaurants in Virginia. On the recommendation of a friend, Mills moved to Vermont in 1985 and bought the house the following year. Through much of the 1980s and '90s, he worked in biotechnology and information technology, designing instrumentation that screened for infectious diseases.
"That was pretty cool," he said. "All of these things were intellectually interesting but not a passion."
click to enlarge - James Buck
- Mills said of his outdoor screened spaces, "Another place to feel like you're in the gardens, not next to the house in a screened-in porch. You're actually out in the wild."
To satisfy his creative urges, Mills volunteered for projects involving film, theater and music, organizing events such as concerts and movie screenings at the Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington. In March 2003, he produced a concert with Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed in Ira Allen Chapel at the University of Vermont.
By then, Mills was doing landscape work professionally in Vermont. He had his own company, with a truck, equipment, and crew of three or four.
"Out of all the things I was doing, it was really all about ... spatial arrangement," he said. Whether he was designing the ambience of a restaurant or the appearance of a theatrical set, Mills explained, the unifying theme was creating impressions.
"How do you move through space?" he asked. "How does that space affect you, consciously and unconsciously? And how do you design space with all of that in mind?"
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Erin Hanley
- A rock sculpture in Mills' garden
In 2008, eager to earn a name for himself, Mills decided to pursue a master's degree in landscape architecture at the University of Arizona — "which is about as opposite from Vermont as you can get," he acknowledged. Though other landscape architects told him that academic study would be a waste of his time — unlike most of his fellow students, he'd spent years working in the field — Mills wanted to gain a deeper understanding of environments, plants and ecologies, especially where water was involved.
"The future is all about water," he said, "pollutions, droughts, floods [and] the whole changing climate."
Ultimately, Mills sees his creative pursuits in his own garden as being less about the plants and biology than about design and synthesis. "How do you make something really different here and really different there, but make it feel like they belong together?" he mused. "How do you integrate things?"
Now, Mills would like to find ways for others to enjoy his creation and utilize the space, such as with small meditation retreats, painting classes or intimate musical events. As he put it, "This place is not for me. It isn't. I just work here."