Wornall/Majors Museum Garden Tour features six lush spaces, from Old World to modern

A shady garden with an Old World yet informal feel. An urban sculptural garden with formal modular spaces.

These two lush spaces will bookend the June 4 Wornall/Majors House Museums Garden Tour.

The Old World garden belongs to Judy and David Aull in Sunset Hill, and the urban plot is the sanctuary for sculptor Tom Corbin in Kansas City, Kan.

When Corbin moved his studio into the 104-year old firehouse nine years ago, the yard was a “nothing lawn” with shrubs, a hot tub and pigeon coop.

Now it has a crisp design thanks to a series of squares. Most squares are made with long cement planks laid in a pattern similar to hardwood flooring. Squares in between are filled with pebbles and greenery. A weathered cedar dining table sits atop a matching platform at one end of the space and is surrounded by eight ultra-modern Slither dining chairs in eye-popping red to match pots of nearby begonias. A concrete fire pit sits near the other end.

“We wanted something not super formal, but something with a certain architecture to it,” Corbin says. “Straight lines, not curvy. We wanted certain areas and alcoves where we could show off sculptures and paths that would lead to them.”

A 9-foot-tall fence made of horizontal wood slats surrounds the entire space. which included eight of Corbin’s sculptures on the day we visited, though that number and the sculptures themselves change frequently.

All are for sale, he says, except the whimsical centerpiece, which is of a portly, old man in swim trunks — with a rubber ducky life preserver around his waist — perched on the end of a diving board. A square, in-ground fountain bubbles beneath him.

Hostas, holly bushes, blue spruces, fluffy grass, sculpted Hornbeam trees and rhododendrons are structurally sleek while adding lushness.

Kissinger & Associates Landscape Design + Installation created the space, which serves as an event space for nonprofits. Corbin uses it almost daily during warm months. His work, which now includes figurative paintings, is highly collectible and can be found on movie sets and in the homes of such celebrities as Tom Hanks, Sofia Vergara and George Brett.

“A lot of times I’ll go out there with a sketch pad to come up with new ideas,” he says. “And sometimes it’s nice to take staff out there at the end of the day and have a cocktail.”

Imperfectly perfect

When Judy Aull moved into her south-of-the-Plaza Sunset Hill home 18 years ago, she wasn’t much of a gardener. Then she began volunteering at the Wornall herb garden, and her passion for planting blossomed.

Fortunately, she had just the yard for it: the one-third acre of ground surrounding her 1932 Tudor had already been neatly groomed by the home’s previous owners, the late Mary Ann and Frank Sebree. MaryAnn, a well-known local antiques dealer and owner of Sebree Galleries, left behind several old European structures in the garden, including a couple of fountains and a well top that remain today. The top serves as a planter for petunias.

The Sebrees had also laid out a series of patios, gardens and paths around the perimeter of the huge backyard, and the Aulls kept them pretty much intact, with additions.

Judy gave a tour of the yard one sunny morning. Workmen were constructing a large glass conservatory attached to the rear of the home, looking out onto the garden.

The tour committee describes the Aulls’ yard as a historic Normandy farmhouse garden.

Toward the front and center of the yard, a large wooden pergola covers a round brick patio and European fountain with a cherub centerpiece. Another fountain in the shape of a lion head hangs several feet away on a brick wall, spewing water into a basin.

Because the yard is shady around the perimeter, there are ferns, hostas, boxwoods and hydrangeas — lots of hydrangeas: Annabelle, Oak Leaf, Limelight, PeeGee, Lady-in-Red , Tardiva, Nantucket Blue hydrangeas and more.

Five seating areas have been positioned for taking in views of the lush yard as well as the in-ground swimming pool the Aulls had installed several years ago. You have to move around the yard to see the seating areas, as some are surrounded by layers of foliage. One at the back of the yard has a large overturned clay pot with a square slab of concrete on top, serving as a table. It’s surrounded by weathered wooden benches.

“This is where we like to sit and have a glass of wine and watch the dogs,” Aull says.

Aull works hard at gardening — she’s out there nearly every day, year-round, she says — but isn’t overly fussy. She sprinkles birdseed atop a 4-foot high brick wall. Friends and family members, she says, keep insisting she tear out a dead tree nearby, but she refuses.

“I don’t care,” she says. “The birds like it! They sit in it all the time.”

She points to a flowering shrub with pink and pale green leaves. It’s Leucothoe, she says, and it’s one of her favorite plants.

“Winter or summer, it always looks like that,” she says, then points to a nearby plant with speckled leaves and purple blooms, explaining that it’s lungwort, often used for medicinal purposes.

Aull recently dug up and moved a tricolor hydrangea from a sunny spot to a shady one in the back corner near a sun-dappled path covered in pea gravel.

“I have friends who say, ‘I don’t know why you don’t put your plants on wheels; you move them all the time,’ ” she says.

A concrete pagoda is perched among several plants along the path. A recent hail storm tore through the leaves of her Solomon’s Seal plant, but the tiny, bell-shaped blossoms beneath the greenery are still intact. Wild ginger sits near big hostas. Farther along the path are small crape myrtles and a large black and brown magnolia. Pink dianthus, Euonymus, hostas and a Sun Gold cypress surround a tall evergreen at the back of the garden.

Nearby are irises transplanted from woodlands near the Aulls’ farm in Lexington, Mo. They came with a surprise: a low-growing plant with yellow and green heart-shaped leaves outlined in red. The seeds were hiding in the soil surrounding the iris bulbs. Aull has no idea what it is. Someone told her to get rid of it, because it’s invasive, but Aull refuses again.

“I’m not a perfectionist,” she says.

Aull fertilizes her flower beds with fish emulsion and uses compost, cotton burr and other organic fertilizers.

Aull also has an area she calls her holly hospital.

“If a plant looks kind of bad, I don’t throw it out. We bring it in here and nurse it,” she says. “Then when it gets looking good, we put it back in the yard.”

This story was originally published May 27, 2016 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Wornall/Majors Museum Garden Tour features six lush spaces, from Old World to modern."