Gardens
Bundles of Berms
A homegrown gardener delights in transforming mounds of dirt into works of art.
BY
Gloria Gale
PHOTOGRAPHY
James Maidhof

If there was an award for an indefatigable and talented gardener, there’s little doubt Susie Novo-Gradac would be stepping right up to the podium. 

Susie not only has a green thumb but just the right attitude for tending to her nearly 40 acres of once-upon-a-time pasture land.

While her property looks expertly sown to most, Susie is her own worst critic. “It might look beautifully landscaped now, but it wasn’t always this pretty,” she states flatly.

It’s a tribute to her resolute character to maintain this plot of manicured perfection throughout Kansas City’s extreme seasons.

“I wish I had more time to devote to gardening,” she says while scrutinizing her lush landscape with a critical eye. “Heck, it takes me eight hours just to mow.” But as owner of Metro Pawn, work takes up most of her time.

“When my husband and I bought this land some 14 years ago, it was more than double in size,” Susie remarks. “We divided it into a reasonable parcel and started planting — trees mostly, but then the sheer size called for more.”

When Susie’s husband passed away, she pondered how to continue what the two of them had planned. She decided to start creating berms, mounds of earth engineered by humans to serve a specific purpose. Berms have been used for centuries to contain areas, bolster defenses, aid in home construction, provide privacy and add variation to a landscape.

Susie used hers to imitate a bit of Colorado’s mountain scape, where she has a vacation home. “Certainly, I wanted to give a bit of a lift to my flat, Kansas prairie, but it was also kind of test to see just how creative I could make this property,” she says.

In every direction, Susie has applied her skill and patience to the dozen or so berms dotting the land. She also relied on friend Danny Jones who owns Jerry’s Nursery. “Basically, I tell him what I want to do and he helps me,” she says.

More often than not, she has a design in mind that includes lush plantings culminating in a scenic fusion of grasses, perennials, annuals and big boulders.

For any tender green thumb, the berms hold lessons in the art of garden balance, color, scale and design. “I plant what I love, try to make it striking and generally include some type of tree,” Susie explains.

Looking around the acreage, numerous varieties of spruce, from Blue and Norway to Hoosier and Weeping, are obvious favorites. “They’re hardy and colorful, interesting and seem to thrive here,” she says.

Among the spruce, maples and pines meander rock and mulch berms, and Susie’s taken liberties with these eye-catching hubs, where a statue, intriguing outcrop of rock, bubbler or building settles into the grassy knolls.

The sturdy mounds of earth clearly give Susie a place to juxtapose a burst of color like sage, blue hydrangea or coneflower with the unexpected cypress or Serbian pine. Near her 2,500-square-foot home, a large metal feather stands nestled into one berm filled with waving grasses, looking like it was dropped from a giant phoenix. In another, a metal flower pops up between boulders, weeping pines and fern leaf buckthorn, leading directly to a fairy-tale-like potting shed. Then there’s the carousel horse, pert and forever prancing under a little wooden stall across from the deck. “I’m crazy about carousel horses and got this one from my husband as a gift. It looks like wood but actually it’s made out of metal,” she says. 

Beyond a stucco wall built to break up some of the vast expanse between the gardens near the house lies a gentle sweep of rolling grassland and a pond. Without the wall visually focusing attention on the perennial and grassy plantings that dot the berm in front of it, the rolling span of acres would overwhelm the eye.

But that’s part of the beauty Susie doesn’t object to. She’ll let the back acreage go fallow so she can concentrate on the extensive grounds surrounding her house.

With Susie’s two Jack Russell terriers, Milton and Maggie, always trailing behind, her to-do list is lengthy: tending to the flower beds, where roses mingle with cacti and other succulents; planting more feather reed grasses; and trimming the bushes. “I wish I could devote all of my time to this property, and someday that might happen,” she says. In the meantime, Susie looks forward to the gardening tasks at hand.