It’s hard to tell where Gale Unterberg’s home ends and her garden begins.
There are walls, of course, to keep the outdoors out. But with natural light flooding in through the windows – offering a panoramic view from most of the house of a neatly manicured lawn, rose bushes, wooden trellises, sculptures, fountains and flower beds – the garden at first seems to be an extension of her home.
Starting Over
Gale and her husband, Ed, moved to Chapel Hill 10 years ago from the Chicago suburbs. They were ready to retire and wanted to live somewhere with a pleasant climate year-round. Plus, they’d always wanted to build a house, and a nearly three-acre lot in Governors Club was a perfect starting point.
Ed worked with architect Bill Hirsch of Cary to design a home that had a view of the outdoors around every corner (even the downstairs bathroom). Gale worked with Tony Tyznik, the former head landscape architect of the Morton Arboretum near Chicago, to come up with a blueprint for the landscaping.
Dozens of photos taken by Ed illustrate the garden they left behind in Illinois, which was more reminiscent of an arboretum than a typical suburban lawn. Gale’s North Carolina garden had a lot to live up to.
Quirky Touches
As you step through the Unterbergs’ back door onto a patio with a grill, dinner table and chairs, the immaculate, dark green lawn stretches to either side and slopes down in front of you into a thicket of trees.
If you head to the left past flower beds full of roses, tulips, candytuft and peonies, you’ll spot a climbing hydrangea encroaching on a stone bench. There is a greenhouse, too, stuffed full of plants, like an orange tree and geraniums, which require warm weather that has yet to arrive. Across from the greenhouse, a wooden trellis covered with climbing new dawn roses is surrounded by bushes of knockout roses. And you can’t miss the swan-shaped topiary that Gale formed herself.
Or, you can turn to the right off the patio, passing a screened-in porch with a fireplace and white wicker furniture, as well as a New Orleans-inspired walled courtyard that leads up to a second-floor deck, before descending a stone path to a wooden gazebo among the trees.
While the garden is immaculate, it’s certainly not stuffy. If you look closely, it’s full of quirky little touches – a chain-saw sculpted wood carving of a bear attached high in a tree and lattice covered in vines that have been shaped into a much-larger-than-life owl on one side and cat on the other. Real wildlife certainly feels at home here; the garden is full of feral cats, birds, squirrels, a resident fox, a few too many deer and even an occasional coyote.
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