Botanical Memories
a Walk through the Garden of Ernie DeMarie
article and photos by Sonia Barkat
The first thing you notice about the house is a plethora of plants. Upon turning the corner of a Briarcliff backroad, past rows of trimmed green lawns, is a sweeping meadow of purples, blues, oranges, reds—a million colors, springing from the ground and reaching towards the sky.
Walking to the front path, you might catch a glimpse through garage door windows, noticing what seem to be racks of seedlings under glowing purple lights.
This is the home and botanical garden of Ernie DeMarie.
Ernie, 66, is a high school biology teacher, a trained horticulturist, and as he calls it: a plant geek.
On a tour of his garden—which consists of front and back yards combined—the first thing he shows me are purple larkspurs; flowers his great grandmother grew when he was a child back in West Virginia. “I’ve always wanted to grow them,” he says.
Looping the front garden, it seems every plant has something interesting for Ernie to share. Its name, how it grows, where it’s from, where he got it—each flower brings something to the tip of his tongue.
When Ernie and his wife Grace moved onto the property in 2012, the front path was lined with red tulips. “I thought, oh! No deer!” he recalls. “Well, they must have been spraying them, because they all got eaten the first year.” Back then, the yard was all lawn. “I killed the grass, put sand in here, because I grow a lot of sand-loving plants.” He points out purple delosperma, South African Iceplant. By the window is a soap plant he got from California, that he says has little white flowers at night. “It’s something you never see here, but against the house it’s a little warmer, so I put a lot of zone-pushing plants there. These things,” he says, pointing out a clump of tall green leaves, “are actually gingers…which will bloom later in the summer with orange flowers.”
We pass delicate pink lilies, Amaryllis Belladonna, another South African plant. “They call them ‘Naked Lady Lilies,’ because their leaves die down and then the flowers come up around August.”
Ernie has a strong interest in South African plants. He has a lot of them, and they’re a personal highlight of his garden. “I’ve been to South Africa five times in my life,” he says. “The floral diversity there is unbelievable. The cape is justly famous for its own unique flora, then there’s the deserts, and then the eastern highlands, which are less famous but have a lot of interesting plants that will survive here—sometimes with a bit of wood chip protection in the winter.”
We see leafy South African Oxalis, Hypoxis (which has yellow flowers in the morning), and red poppies that are annuals from Europe. Among so many flowers, it’s hard to believe there’s less than usual, but Ernie says some of them are flowering less because of a harsh winter.
He has Calla lilies from California, but they’re really South African, he says. “They’re hearty and need no cover, and they even make babies and self-sew here.” On the way to a cactus bed, we pass goldenrod, and irises that have finished for the season. “There’s always something blooming here,” says Ernie.
The cacti grow in a pile of sand. There’s a Chollas cactus with purple flowers that cap the ends of prickly, branching spines. Beside it, a native northeastern cactus grows with large green pads and sunny yellow flowers—this one, Ernie grew from seed.
Turning right on a narrow dirt footpath—careful not to get snagged by prickers on the way—we leave cactus land and greet bright orange flowers, each roundish burst a clutter of smaller, star-like buds. Butterfly weed. “It’s a milkweed—I grow lots of milkweeds, not just for butterflies but because I like them—and we get lots of monarchs in the summer. They also like this,” he points beside it, “that will come up with long purple plumes. Liatris Ligulistylis. They call them Blazing Stars, but I call them ‘Monarch Crack.’ The Monarchs come right for these flowers and seem unusually attracted to this particular species.”
Nearby, fiery flowers stand on rod-like stems, their blooms a gradient of yellow, orange and red. South African Red Hot Pokers. We pass a blue-flowered “Georgia Pancake,” an Ice Plant called Fire Spinner, a pink legume he got in the south, and a plant he got off ebay. A few feet away is Asparagus Verticillatus (not asparagus like you’d see at a grocery store, but rather a massive, delicate bush) which was given to him from fellow “horticultural enthusiasts.” Its seed collection, he says, was made in inner Mongolia. Some things he gets through seed exchanges through the North American Rock Garden Society, of which he’s a member through their Hudson Valley and Berkshire chapters. “Sometimes I donate, too. And their local chapter often has free seeds to give away, from seeds that nobody ordered.”
A few feet from it, pink-and-white Crinum lilies arc gracefully like delicate horns—their large, garlic-shaped seed heads laying flat across the ground. “It’s because in nature, they grow near rivers,” Ernie explains. “The seed heads lay down, break open, and then the seeds—which are like round grapes—float away in the water to grow somewhere new.”
Nearby are dusty pink Christmas Roses (Helleborus) that he grew from seed. “It’s the cheap way to do it,” he explains “Most plants here are from seed, some I get in trades, and I do just buy some now and again. This thing came from a piece of root I got at a daylily nursery in New Hampshire,” he says, excitedly pointing out a Silphium plant that’s starting to poke up its head. “It’s not a daylily, but it was growing there. The stalk of the flower was maybe 12-15 feet high! I asked about it and they let me dig up a piece of the root.”
Many plants Ernie gets from people he knows—like a flat, flaming-red South African flower he says is called Lucifer. “I got it from a friend who was getting tired of them. I said, ‘I’ll take them!’”
On the way to the driveway, we see coneflowers. “This is the only native yellow coneflower,” Ernie says. “appropriately named Echinacea Paradoxa. It’s the paradox, because it’s not purple or white like all the others. This yellow is used to cross with purple ones to create all those colored hybrids you see that come in oranges, red, and all kinds of neat colors.”
Along the driveway, across from a field of ginger—which Grace doesn’t like, because it looks like corn—is a Japanese orange tree Ernie got from a friend. It’s for curiosity value rather than eating, he says, but the Russian olive tree beside it is supposed to have edible fruits.
Outside the back garden are impatiens bicolor. He got them from Panayoti Kelaidis, a good friend and the Director of Denver Botanic Gardens Outreach. “He got it in Pakistan, during 9/11,” Ernie explains. “I think it was him collecting. They didn’t even know what was going on, and suddenly the army shows up to take them out. Like, ‘Hey guys, stop picking flowers, we gotta get out of here!’”
Behind a tall deer fence, the back garden is even bigger than the front. On the way in, we pass a potted Deppea splendens, which became extinct in nature (and dependent on humans for survival) when its forest was cut down to make charcoal. It’s not the Deppea splendens that Ernie is walking toward, though, but his favorite section—a dedicated South African garden.
Ernie talks his way through the thistle daisies, hybrid gladiolus he bred himself, black callas from Trader Joes, and Gerberas grown from seed. “Over here is the original Gerbera from which they’re bred. In the spring it’s gorgeous. Panayoti came here for the first time last spring, and he wrote on his blog [Prairiebreak] something like, “don’t even ask me about this,” Ernie laughs. “‘Cause it was one of those kinds of things.”
As we leave the South African garden, Ernie explains that sometimes plants will cross when growing next to each other. “You get interesting hybrids in between.”
We pass South African wormwood, which is used for respiratory issues, and a Toona Sinensis that Ernie planted for Grace, who is Chinese. “Some Chinese people eat the young leaves. If you smell it, it smells kind of like basil. They cook it up with eggs and eat it,” he explains. “You can see it grows like a weed. Every year I come and chop them down half way so we can always reach the new leaves.” A second tree has popped up next to it, and Ernie says they’ll probably pot it and give it to some Chinese friends. “We have a Chinese friend who actually ordered a plant from California. They wanted a big plant, they had money and they paid $500 for it,” he laughs. “I was like, if you want a piece just come over here!”
Returning to the flowers, Ernie points to a garden of daylilies. “I collect daylilies, which is somewhat unusual for a plant geek like me,” he says. According to Ernie, lots of ‘plant geeks’ look down on them, because they’re common and don’t have good looking leaves. “But I like ‘em,” says Ernie. “I call them ‘happy flowers.’ They always have a new face to show you every morning. Because they open for a day and then they fade.” One of the daylilies he bought because it shares a name with one of his sisters.
Passing potted South African plants, which need to be brought inside during the winter, we approach a garden of Asian flowers. Lilies from China and a pink Lijiang Road Climber rose that came from a grower in Florida. “Some plants I got from my wanderings, some from other people. I collect plant seeds when I travel,” says Ernie. “I import a lot, too. I have a special permit. That white one is a Regal Lily my friend got me from China, from the one valley it grows in. The purple Carnation is from Taiwan, from seeds I collected around Christmas Time.”
Ernie stops to photograph a large blooming rose. “He’s really strutting his stuff today!”
Near the back fence, are flowers from closer to home. For Ernie, they are from home. Beside Phlox from West Virginia, which he says Swallowtail butterflies love, is a dark red, leafy plant, currently not in bloom. Coral Bells. “When I see the Coral Bells, I think of my family,” says Ernie. “It’s a plant that’s traveled with me for many years. It has a story.”
Ernie says his great grandmother used to grow that very plant in West Virginia. “Then my grandmother, in her garden. I brought back a piece from there, and this is that plant. It goes back four generations, I’ve had it for at least 20 years.”
Before moving with Ernie to his current garden, the Coral Bells had a home with him in Tuckahoe. His garden back then was smaller, as he lived on the second floor of his parents home. Ernie says he and Grace were there for 10 years after they married, before deciding to get their own house. “My father was from Tuckahoe originally, but he and his brother and father went to work in the coal industry. My father met my mother in the house he was rooming in. I remember growing up in that house,” Ernie recalls. “We had four generations in that house. It was cool, for a kid.” However, in the 60s, when the coal industry was collapsing, his father left West Virginia to become a truck driver. “We moved to Maine for a year when I was five years old, then to New York—to Yonkers [where he went to school], and I hated it at first.”
Ernie says they lived right near the parkway. “There wasn’t as much nature around there. But I would spend my summers in West Virginia. My father would pile us in a Station Wagon, take us back to West Virginia, drop my mom and us off from the summer, while he did his truck driving up here.”
Back on our loop, we step over a carpet of Corsican mint, which Ernie says is the smallest mint you’ll ever see. When we stop to touch it, it smells like peppermint.
On we go past a Tibetan peach tree (that has never had peaches) and a tomato plant (that has had only one tomato.) Growing food, Ernie says, is not his thing.
Ernie points out a Cistus plant, which he says they call Burning Bushes in the Mediterranean. “It’s because they have resins in the leaves and they can catch fire when it’s really dry,” he explains. “They never do that here though. They’re considered zone-pushing plants, nobody tries to grow them here because they’re not hardy.”
We stop at the brick patio, which Ernie says has become gardens, too. Small plants peek out from between the cracks. “People build these elaborate rock structures with cracks to put the little plants in,” he says, explaining the current rock gardening trends. “You can hire people—I know two people that travel around the country to build these crevice gardens for folks that got money or botanical gardens. But this is a natural crevice garden. It’s bricks, there’s crevices right there!” One of the plants sprouting up by his feet is an Erigeron divergens. “I collected it many years ago, in Phoenix, Arizona,” he says. “I was working for the Botanical Gardens at the time.”
Ernie’s road to the Botanical Gardens, and to where he is now, wasn’t direct. After getting his Bachelor’s degree, he got a Ph.D in horticulture from Cornell. “I had to figure out, what am I gonna do with a degree in horticulture?” says Ernie. “And the answer was: not much.” So, he went back for a Masters in teaching, in agricultural and occupational education, and he also got a certification to teach biology and general science. From there, in the 80s, after working one summer at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Ernie taught for four years at Brooklyn’s now-defunct Prospect Heights High. “It was considered a very rough high school, like one of the roughest possible,” says Ernie, “but I had a good time. I had a horticulture program, I was young, I liked my kids, they liked me. Some of the kids are retired now!”
His first trip to South Africa was right after that. “I was like man, somebody should be studying these plants, it should be me.” So, he returned to Cornell for a P.h.D., studying tissue culture of rare South African Geraniums. “I did all these weird crosses and stuff. It was fun.”
Five years later, after finishing his P.h.D, Ernie says most schools were hiring adjuncts. “I grew up poor,” he says, “I wasn’t going to work for nothing.” So he left teaching, ending up at the New York Botanical Gardens (NYBG) as their Desert Plants Coordinator. “I was in charge of the desert plants, cacti, succulents and all that. I took care of the plants that were in the non-public area, primarily,” Ernie recalls. “I grew stuff and sent it up to the conservatory if they needed it. Helped plan the new plantings when they redid the conservatory. And I got a couple trips to Africa out of it, which was fun.” But Ernie says the money, although better than some other botanical gardens, wasn’t what he was looking for, and he wanted a pension, which only NYBG gardeners—not curators—got. In addition, he notes the politics of working there were messy. “It stresses people out.” So after six years, he applied to go back into teaching. Ernie spent the next seven years at Columbus High School until it was broken into “mini schools.” Finally, he ended up teaching bio at Horace Greeley in Chappaqua, where he has been ever since.
He shows his students pictures of his own garden, and started a garden at the school. “I built it bit by bit with my AP bio classes,” he says. “After the AP exam we would go out there and work on it and expand it, and I would buy plants with my own money..” While working remotely during covid, Ernie says he was alerted by another teacher that the custodians covered the garden in with landscape fabric and mulch, and planted junipers. “I talked to the principal who didn’t even know and then we talked to the superintendent and they were supportive of me and asked what we should do.” Ernie suggested leaving half of the garden how they did it, while getting the other half back. “I use it as a biodiversity lab.”
Although he’s used to it now, Ernie says his first year at Horace Greeley was a big cultural adjustment. “It’s different kinds of students than I've dealt with before,” he explains. “I’m a very direct person and extroverted. If there was a beef with a kid in the Bronx, we’d talk about it, we’d work it out.” In the suburbs, he says it’s different. “The kids tell the parents who tell the guidance counselor who comes and tells you and I'm like, why didn’t the kid tell me? I’m not gonna bite!”
While he certainly won’t bite, he does grow carnivorous plants! On the patio stairs, which are covered with trays of potted seedlings, he introduces me to a one-year-old Venus flytrap, grown from seed. Nearby is a much less violent plant, a hibiscus he’s had for a long time. “That plant came back to me,” says Ernie. “I gave a cutting to someone who worked at the botanical garden. Later, when I lost my plant, she gave me a cutting back.”
Ernie is out in his garden every day. With so many plants, there’s always something to do, whether it’s collecting seeds, pulling weeds, or putting down wood chips (which he says tree companies are happy to give you since it costs them money to dump them). Sometimes, he relocates chipmunks and squirrels. By the water lily pool, which sits at the center of the backyard’s terraces, a camera and water squirter are rigged up. “We used to have to capture the racoons. They’re disgusting to have to carry anywhere in the car. Besides, they hiss at you,” says Ernie. “My wife has all kinds of videos of them hissing at us, which she likes to scare her friends in China with. But my son in law is smart and he rigged up this system. So now,” he laughs, “Grace shows me the pictures of racoons running from the squirting that occurred during the night!” When it comes to wildlife, the unpleasantry of racoons—and voles, his nemesis—are balanced by the frequent visitation of hummingbirds.
When it comes to suggestions for those trying to make more of their land, Ernie right away says:“get rid of your lawn.” There’s a big movement against them, he explains. “They're basically big monocultures of nothing. They don’t support wildlife at all. The more sprayed they are the worse it is.” He also suggests weeding early and often. “And you have to edit as you go along,” he says. “If something’s out of hand, pull it out. Put something else there or let something else fill in, let it grow bigger.”
But when it comes to the details, he says a garden is a very personal creation. “Some people like to grow vegetables and food plants. Some people like ornamental flowers. In this area you’re better with deer resistant plants,” he says. “My garden is kinda on the crazy level here, I don’t expect people to do what I'm doing.”
What he’s doing is personal for him, too. “I’ve been gardening since– well, I was told I put sticks in the garden when I was 4 years old,” he recounts. “I followed my great grandmother around and put sticks in the ground. She had a rose garden. I remember I always liked flowers, I was kind of obsessed with them,” he says. “I like the colors and the life and the happiness they bring. And now I finally got to do my own thing here, which I like. No rules.”
Back in Tuckahoe, he says his parents wanted to maintain some little patches of lawn, although he could do whatever he wanted in between it. At the botanical garden, he said he often got complaints when trying to do things. “Here, I do whatever I want and everybody loves it,” he says. “All the time, people come by. They stop the cars, they come out, they talk. Or they just yell, ‘I love your garden, I love coming by here every week,’—I call them my regulars,” he smiles. “They walk by just to see what’s happening here, because it changes constantly.”
Ernie says he often gives seeds or plants away to people who come by, when they like something. “I mean, that’s what gardeners do,” he says. “I’ve gotten things that are hand-me-downs, too. And, you know, you remember the person that way. You remember who you got it from.” We walk past plants from his travels, more gifts from Panayoti, and return to a front lawn full of purple larkspurs. “A garden is also a place of memories.”
Connect with Ernie
• At his blog A Not So Simple Garden (updated a few years ago)
