Colorful Gardens Keep Grand Hotel Blooming Throughout The Seasons
By Bernie Nguyen

Garden foreman Jennie St. Onge with the red geraniums on the front porch of Grand Hotel. The Tea Garden is in the background.

Visitors to Grand Hotel may easily take notice what may be Grand Hotel's most spectacular feature, its gardens. Designed by groundskeeper Steve Bernard and maintained by a seven-man crew, the grounds of Grand Hotel are a bower of annuals, shrubs, and native Mackinac trees that shade the hotel lawns.

"We are one of the biggest display gardens in the Midwest," says Mr. Bernard, proudly.

The grounds crew begins work in mid-April to clean up and prepare the many flower beds for the annuals that will later be planted.

More than 100,000 flowers are planted at Grand Hotel every year, says garden foreman Jennie St. Onge. The beds of color, variety, and pattern are designed in the fall for the following season.

"All our designs are done before Thanksgiving," said Mr. Bernard, "so we can get them to the different growers."

Each fall, between 15,000 and 20,000 bulbs are planted in anticipation of their spring blooming. Among the most noticeable of these bulbs are the tulips that grace the triangle Beds, which lay on the roadside between the hotel entrance and Cadotte Avenue.

Because the design of the beds changes every year, after the tulips are past their bloom they are dug up and composted and about 20 new varieties of annual flowers are planted before the bulbs for next year are put in place in the fall. The crew stays from April until mid-November, just after the season ends, to clear the grounds and ready them for the next springs planting.

"It's very labor intensive," said Ms. St. Onge, adding that the vast bulk of the planting will take place later in the season. "We don't like to plant anything until the middle to end of May," she said. "Its too risky." Some plants are coldhardy, however, and can be planted early.

The one plant fixture at Grand Hotel is the Rocky Mountain Red geranium that graces the length of the hotel's front porch. More than 1,000 geraniums are planted on the porch each year, said Ms. St. Onge, and their beauty has made them the hotel's signature flower. The climate on the porch, which includes plenty of sunshine and cool nights, produce the unique size and vivid red color of the geraniums makes them among the bestgrowing plants on the grounds.

An exception to the carefully groomed flower beds is Wildflower Hill, which is seeded with a mixture of flowers and left to grow on its own. Black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, asters and other native plants can be seen on the hill throughout the season.

Grand Hotel's gardens follow the carpet bedding style, a technique that dates to the Victorian era in which different geometric shapes, patterns, and bold colors repeat themselves in the lushly planted beds. In keeping with the hotel's Victorian ambiance, said Ms. St. Onge, the gardens use many flowers from that period, and the bright colors of the gardens also help call to mind a bygone age.

"Although they're all different colors and changing year after year," she explained, "they all have that same Victorian, formal look to them and that's what people expect. It goes along with the whole theme of the hotel, a look back in time, very bold and very extravagant."

Designs appeal to visitors' sense of color, texture, and composition.

"For the last couple years, we've really been working on how colors and textures mix," said Mr. Beranrd. "We like to experiment in pots and see some really nice color combinations. You definitely need a mix of foliage and flowers."

"There is a variety of different inspirations," Mr. Beranrd added. "Sometimes we'll theme it out, like in an election year, we'll have a lot of reds, blues, and whites and some flag designs."

The gardens and the shapes of the vast lawn must be designed toward their appearance from all angles. Since it is one of the first things visitors see when they walk up Grand Hill, said Ms. St. Onge, "the Tea Garden needs to be appealing to the eye from a distance."

In addition to attention to form, the gardeners must plan around Mackinac Island's climate.

"We know what grows well," said Ms. St. Onge, explaining that the best plants here thrive in cooler temperatures.

Ms. St. Onge added that the Vita Course, a wooded area below the hotel that includes a half-mile-long wood chip path with exercise stations, is a good

example of using local plants to create a soothing, well-established environment.

"We've been doing a lot of work the past couple years adding cedar and birch trees, which are both native to the Island," she said, in addition to the smaller spring flowering bulbs and woodland plants that also grow there. One of the few places on the Island that includes non-native plants, said Ms. St. Onge, is by the Esther Williams swimming pool, where the gardens try to achieve a more lush, tropical look.

Just as the pool is a calculated exercise in using plants to create a specific atmosphere, the rest of the gardens are also planned to achieve special effects down to the smallest bud.

"We pretty much have everything where we want it," Ms. St. Onge said, indicating that even the ground-covering shrubs by the hotel's Labyrinth were planted and strategically placed, and that nothing grows by accident.

In the summer, Grand Hotel gives garden tours three times a week, and the gardens showcase many Island favorites.

"Everybody loves the horse and carriage topiary" in the Tea Garden, said Ms. St. Onge, adding that people enjoy different things at different times, but that the hotel's 50 varieties of lilac are "always a favorite."

"Even if you're not into plants," Mr. Bernard said, "I think all our plants are appreciated greatly. We grow some unusual and beautiful things."

Grand Hotel's intensive gardening area is about 30 acres and includes the Tea and Wedding Gardens, the Rose Walk, which displays Carefree Beauty Shrub Roses, and the Tennis House Gardens, among several others.