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Where the Wild Things
Are Now
By ANNE RAVER
Published: December 18, 2013
MIDDLEBURG, VA. — This 100-acre rolling landscape in the middle of horse country was an old cornfield when Wayne and Beth Gibbens bought it in 1990.
“Not one tree on it,” said Mr. Gibbens, 77, a retired Washington lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. “The cornfield was so overgrown with poison ivy, we had to cut it with chain saws.”
And the thicket of multiflora rose and invasive vines was so dense, they had no idea there was a dry stone wall, built before the Civil War, running along their property line.
“We used to come up here and envision what we wanted,” said Mrs. Gibbens, 74, standing at the edge of a wide, lichen-covered outcropping they call Picnic Rock that overlooks the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But when you’re restoring 100 acres, where do you begin?
For starters, she said, “We knew we wanted trees.”
Without the cover of evergreens and deciduous trees, there were few birds, except for starlings and crows. And as a founding member of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Tex., Mrs. Gibbens was determined to encourage wildlife.
“We wanted to bring it back from the cornfield to a natural habitat for creatures, something looked like Virginia,” she said. So the first thing the couple did was plant oaks from acorns and a grove of pines.
Twenty-three years later, the cornfield has been transformed by a combination of their labor and the vision of W. Gary Smith, a designer renowned for his artful naturalistic landscapes. As Elizabeth Epley, the couple’s daughter, said, “Gary created a language, destinations, a story. It calls you to that place.”
In the beginning, there was a lot of hard work, but their story evolved with each discovery: finding Picnic Rock beneath the brush; catching a glimpse of the first song birds to inhabit the nesting boxes they built; watching a female fox carrying a fish from the creek to her pups.
To see these two in their old clothes, hacking away at weeds or picking up rocks in the field — they still do this — you would never know that Mrs. Gibbens came from a cattle ranching family in Texas with ties to the Johnsons, or that Mr. Gibbens had served in the Texas Legislature and recently was a co-chairman of a benefit that raised $5 million for cancer research. They got a good laugh one day when a woman stopped her car to tell them she had been observing what good workers they were and asked if they might have time to help out at her place.
Those first years, they came up every weekend from their home in Arlington, Va., to plant trees: native oaks and hollies, little-known species like sourwood, yellowwood and black gum. Mrs. Gibbens put in a hedgerow of chokeberry, hackberry and dogwood.
They also dug a pond for wildlife and put up their first purple martin house on a tall pole. Within minutes, a purple martin had moved in. “Some people wait years,” Mr. Gibbens said.
They put up 10 more houses, each with a dozen compartments for nesting birds, and a purple martin hotel for many more. One summer, they counted 400 purple martins.
While they were at it, they set up bluebird boxes as well, two dozen of them, and counted 54 baby bluebirds one weekend.
But they still didn’t have a house for themselves on the property, so they found a used camper and parked it by a clear-running spring.
“A little tacky thing,” Mr. Gibbens said, “completely against regulations.”
In lieu of running water, he added, “We put a little pipe in the spring, so we could sort of clean up.”
A few months later, after the novelty wore off, they built a one-room structure that they referred to as their “temporary cottage,” although they used it for 10 years. But after their daughter married and had two children, she started bringing her family down from Bronxville, N.Y., on the weekends, and it got “a little tight and cozy,” Mr. Gibbens said. Especially when everyone’s dogs (various corgis and terriers) piled in, too.
“Beth and I would spend the night in the tack room of the stable,” he said, with the horses and donkeys.
By the time they got around to building a proper house, a decade or so ago, they knew enough to keep it low, nestled into the land. As Mrs. Gibbens said: “You know how it’s kind of rude to put your house right in the middle of the landscape? Well, we made this so you can’t even see it from the road.”
That’s the kind of wisdom that comes over time, after living on the land. But learning how to reshape a landscape proved to be more difficult.
They had tried planting wildflowers and warm-season grasses, scattering the seeds over a few acres of the mowed field, only to have them overtaken by weeds. And the trees they kept planting “were here, there and everywhere,” Mrs. Gibbens said. “We weren’t getting it quite right.”
Then one day in the mid-1990s, she heard Mr. Smith speak at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference in North Carolina. “I called Wayne and said, ‘This is the guy,’ ” she said.
Mr. Smith, 57, is best known for public landscapes like Enchanted Woods at Winterthur in Winterthur, Del., and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. But when he saw how much the Gibbenses had accomplished on their own — the curving paths and paddock fences that hewed to the topography, the trees and pond and birdhouses that brought in wildlife — he agreed to help them turn their property into a cohesive landscape.
He began by asking them to show him where they liked to go. They took him along the paths they loved to walk and showed him Picnic Rock, where they like to sit and dream, the hill where the groundhogs lived, the slope where they freed the young sycamores from choking vines, and the stream in the dappled glade with its mossy rocks.
“Every place has a narrative,” said Mr. Smith, who believes that naming places invests them with meaning that deepens with each experience.
He sketched out a master plan — a starting point, really, that would evolve over time — jotting down names like the Daily Jaunt, Picnic Rock, Groundhog Hill, Sycamore Slope and the Most Magical Place (which later became known as Where the Fairies Live, after the couple’s grandsons started to build bridges and catch crayfish in the stream there).
Now, as Mrs. Epley, a 46-year-old art historian, said, “Instead of just going for a walk, we have to check out what’s going on in Where the Fairies Live.”
And no one, it appears, feels silly using a name like that, not even her teenage sons.
One 20-degree day last month, six people, two corgis and a terrier piled into the family’s Kawasaki mule to chug over the hills and share stories about the land. We walked down to the stream, through a grove of old trees and past Woodpecker Hotel, a soaring tulip poplar full of holes. Sam, 17, and John, 14, led the way across the mossy rocks to Where the Fairies Live, talking about the crayfish they had caught and cooked over a fire there the day before.
That weekend, the whole family had been helping Mr. Smith with one of the art installations he likes to create here. They gathered bundles of Indian grass in the meadow, tying them together to make a 45-foot rope. Then they laid it in a serpentine curve that began at the fire circle by the pond and ran up the slope to the house.
John said, “What’s really cool is, I’ve been coming here for all my life, and I never noticed how everything winds around here and the hills go up and down.”
Mr. Smith grinned. “That’s one of the things that art does,” he said.
Over the years, with Mr. Smith’s help, the family has created a naturalistic landscape of many destinations that somehow doesn’t feel contrived.
When the family wanted a gathering place, he suggested building a fire circle, using millstones to mark the four cardinal points. They planted 16 swamp white oaks around it, adding a few random oaks outside the circle. When you are sitting by the fire, you feel the circular pattern of the trees surrounding you, almost like the pillars of a classical temple, but from the outside it looks like a natural copse.
And when Mr. Gibbens would mention that he loved a certain kind of tree, Mr. Smith would say fine, but don’t plant just one. So instead of singular trees dotting the winding drive, there are groupings of species that look as if they seeded in together, blooming in masses in the spring and changing color together in the fall.
Designs evolved as they went along. Instead of a straight allee of deciduous trees leading to the house, as Mr. Smith first envisioned, they preserved the serpentine shape of the drive, cutting through a low hill. Now the arrival at the house, with its simple gravel entry court, is a pleasant surprise. The design has an understated formality, with a clipped hornbeam hedge on the south side, a mass of bright red winterberry on the north and a sweet bay magnolia gracing the front of the house.
“That tree was a potted magnolia, sent home with us after a party,” Mr. Gibbens said.
And the house serves as a viewing station for whatever is going on outdoors, with great, airy rooms that look westward over the meadows to the mountains.
The Epley boys fell in love with nature here. Sam learned to listen for the eerie call of the foxes in the night. John was enraptured by the sunsets and gathered the family together to watch the sky change colors.
Years ago, Sam asked his grandfather what heaven was like, and Mr. Gibbens said, “I made a stab at it, saying it’s a place of beauty, tranquillity and peace.”
Sam considered that for moment, then asked, “Well, isn’t this heaven?”
“Yeah,” Mr. Gibbens told him. “I think you hit it.
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