Jeff Poole digs deep in new book about Charles Stick's gardens
Orange County journalist discusses his new book and why he left the Orange County Review
If you’ve wondered what former Orange County Review editor Jeff Poole has been up to since he left the newspaper two and a half years ago, you’re not alone. For 26 years, Poole, 54, was so reliably present at county meetings and local events—and his award-winning journalism and photos such a mainstay of community life—that his departure came as a shock to many.
Poole’s absence was all the more noticeable when the paper’s corporate owner, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, began filling the paper with news mostly from Charlottesville and simultaneously published in the Daily Progress. To date, Poole has not been replaced, and in another blow to local journalism, Lee Enterprises recently laid off Gracie Hart Brooks, the longtime editor of the Madison Eagle, and eliminated her position.
I sat down with Poole (my editor at the Orange County Review from 2017-2020) in late December at his home in Gordonsville to talk about the newspaper business and find out about “Charles J. Stick and His Gardens,” his new book about the life and work of the prominent landscape architect who lives at Waverley Farm in Somerset.
The coffee table-style book contains Poole’s comprehensive narratives about four gardens Stick designed (including Waverley Farm and Mount Sharon, both in Orange County) and shorter discussions of 10 more. It’s generously illustrated with photos of the gardens by numerous photographers, including Poole, and includes a selection of Stick’s design sketches and landscape master plans. “Charles J. Stick and His Gardens” showcases not only Stick’s tremendous expertise and artistic flair but also Poole’s talent for immersing himself in a complicated subject and bringing it alive in his warmhearted prose.
HH: Why did you decide to leave the Orange County Review?
Jeff Poole: Local news is hard. And it’s a tough business, especially when it’s a local newspaper owned by a corporation that’s far away—and when the goals and objectives of the people who work [for the paper] aren’t in alignment with those of the people who own the company and make the decisions that affect the employees, the customers, the readers. It’s very hard to reconcile a “community-first” mentality with the remote, profit-centric mentality of the owners who don’t know the readers, who don’t know the community, who don’t know the people producing the newspaper and facilitating its presence in the community.
It got to be an untenable balance. I felt like I could see, very clearly, the direction the company was going, and I think that is very clear now. It was important to me to be able to leave on my own terms rather than have them eliminate my position.
How many reporters did you have working for you before you left?
I had one—Ike Parrish. And he left shortly after I did.
Were you typically working seven days a week?
Yeah. I would say for more than 12 years, every day.
Why were you working around the clock?
Part of that was just me. I had an idea what the newspaper should look like and what it should contain and how it should be structured, and I was committed to that, regardless of whether the company was or not. And if they cut a job, I tried really hard to absorb that cut internally, inside the office, so that the people who were reading the newspaper and paying for it and supporting it through the advertising did not see that.
I’m not trying to pat myself on the back. I’m just saying that I was trying to keep the newspaper and the community from suffering just because the company saw [the paper] as a place they could cut and save money. We didn’t cut the price of the subscription—why should we cut the quality of the product? It’s a little idealistic, I know, but I figured out ways to do workarounds.
Did you already have plans for writing “Charles J. Stick and His Gardens” before you left the paper?
I did not. I didn’t have another formal job. I was open to whatever might present itself, and I took the summer [of 2022] to just catch my breath because the last year or more at the newspaper was like a perpetual sprint, given the circumstances.
How did the book project with Charles Stick come about?
Charles Stick and Charlotte Tieken invited me to dinner. My wife, Sarah, works at Waverley Farm where they live. She takes care of the horses and the chickens at the farm and has worked for Mrs. Tieken for a long time. So they knew me, and they knew my work through the newspaper. But I only knew Charles Stick casually. I didn’t really know him or his work, to be honest.
He had a contract with a publisher, Monacelli, and they had apparently interviewed or attempted to get the book going with other authors, and it wasn’t a good fit or it didn’t materialize, or they couldn’t get any traction with it. So he asked me if I was interested, and I confessed I didn’t know very much about horticulture, much less landscape architecture. I knew how to write and I knew how to take pictures, and I’d written thousands of stories, some of which were about gardens and some of which were garden-adjacent. But beyond covering Historic Garden Week or writing a few garden-related stories, I had no conception of the kinds of gardens that we’re talking about here.
I’d been through the Waverly garden, but mostly just while Sarah was working. I kind of knew what I didn’t know, and I told him I was very interested because I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, but also a good application of the skills that I had developed at the newspaper over the course of 20 some years. It sounded like a unique and exciting opportunity.
So he proposed at our dinner meeting that we do a test chapter, and the test chapter was Mount Sharon, because that was a garden with which I was familiar from the newspaper. And I knew [the owners of Mount Sharon], Charlie and Mary Lou Seilheimer, through my work at the newspaper. It was also close by, so it was easy to get to. If that [chapter] worked for me and it worked for [Stick], then we would progress from there. And so the first part of the book that I wrote was about Mount Sharon.
How did that trial chapter about Mount Sharon go, and how did you prepare for it?
It was wonderful to write for the sake of writing and to not have a hard deadline where I had to turn something around [quickly]. And the Seilheimers were so gracious with their time and their garden and walked me through it. It was very much a good place to [start] because they knew me from the newspaper and were extremely patient with me not knowing very much about gardens and landscape architecture.
I had read quite a number of landscape architecture books before I spent any time with them, because I wanted to be as prepared as I could be. And [Mount Sharon] has been written about in magazines and other publications, so I had some reference material that I could read specifically about that.
What were some of the highlights when you were researching Mount Sharon?
The Seilheimers—I talked to them together, and it was fun to interview them, and they sort of played off each other. It sounds like that’s also how they designed the garden in collaboration with Charles—some things that Mrs. Seilheimer wanted and some things that Mr. Seilheimer wanted. And then you’ve got Charles in the middle who’s the expert, so he’s trying to balance those.
It was sort of like going to a play and you know you liked it, but you can’t really articulate why you liked it. You just know you liked the show. It’s like that when you go to Mount Sharon and you know it’s beautiful and you like it, but you don’t understand necessarily the pieces in place that not only make you like it, but make it what it is, and then that creates the feeling of joy or discovery or satisfaction. So I got a real sense of why the garden creates this response through my conversations with them and then, also, later with Charles as he walked me through the garden and told me how he created it.
Mrs. Seilheimer was great. She took me on a tour of the garden and explained a lot of it. Mr. Seilheimer was very much the infrastructure man, and he talked a lot about that part of it. She talked more about the plants and just understanding all the pieces—just the complexity of all that—that make it what it is, and then, you know, which explain how it makes you feel when you see it. So that was part of it.
The other part of it was when Charles and I were talking about [how a landscape invites you to respond it], and a phrase that he uses with most of his designs is “the genius of the place.” He said the genius of the place [at Mount Sharon] is that view. When you get to the top of the hill there at Mount Sharon, he’s like, “The genius of the place is this unfolding Virginia countryside all the way in every direction.”
That notion of “the genius of the place” was a lightbulb moment. It’s not just saying, “All right, we’re gonna put a garden up on top of this hill. It’s like, “All right, how do we put a garden up here that connects with the genius of the place, which complements it and highlights it, and connects with that view at almost every point?”
Did you ask him that for the other gardens—what’s the genius of this place?
Generally? Yeah. In some places it wasn’t as much about the genius of the place as it was just kind of what the big idea was. The Sleepy Cat Farm garden in Greenwich, Conn., is on a much smaller physical footprint, but it’s a lot packed into that footprint, and it’s sort of three or four gardens that have evolved and been added to over time. So it wasn’t so much the genius of the place as it was the big idea, which was to create this winding pathway through this terrain.
At Crab Tree Farm, the genius of the place was this beautiful woodland on the shores of Lake Michigan. You’ve got this rich forest that runs almost up to the house, which is right there on the bluff, and an unimpeded view of Lake Michigan, just as far as you can see. But you don't really see the lake until you get all the way to the end of this property.
What were some of the pleasures and challenges of this project?
You know, the further we got along, the more I had a feel for what [Stick] was doing at each garden. And so we didn’t have to spend as much time on the ABCs of landscape architecture as we went along. That was nice, because a lot of times at the newspaper, we’d have to get up to speed quickly on a topic that we didn’t know much about.
Some of the challenges were just my own limitations in still not knowing very much about horticulture. I don’t know how many times I asked him, “What is this?” “What is this?” “What is this?” And he’s like, “Viburnum. Viburnum. Still viburnum.” I’m not a very good plant identifier. He was very patient with me.
Another challenge was, it’s not as if he was sitting around without gardens to work on and other projects that he was busy with. We met pretty regularly, but there were times when he’d have to travel for work, so there were periods where we’d have a little bit of a lull.
He wasn’t micromanaging you?
No, he gave me a lot of editorial or creative license to write. I think as somebody who creates things, he recognizes the process and how the person who is coming up with it needs some room to operate. He was extremely generous with that, particularly since I’m telling his story.
I also felt like I got to know him pretty well while we were sitting there in the garden house at Waverley, and I feel like I got a good sense of his voice. I hope that it conveys that way.
What’s your message to readers of Byrd Street about “Charles J. Stick and His Gardens”?
Most of us interact with the natural world in our daily lives. [The book] is a way for us to think about how we move through nature. Why is the landscape around us structured the way it is? What clues and what observations can we glean from our natural surroundings? And how might we better connect with nature? How might we better connect with the world around us? I think those are universal principles that are always valuable.
These gardens are an expression of our connection with nature. And each of us does that in our own way. Whether it’s just a plant on our windowsill, or if it’s a big formal garden, or if it’s a vegetable garden—there’s joy to be found. And I think this book illustrates that joy on a very large scale, but it’s applicable on a small scale. Most of us are not going to have gardens like these, but we can find inspiration in them. I think, too, from a historical standpoint, it’s nice to record these gardens because they are treasures, much like beautiful buildings.
Jeff Poole’s “Charles J. Stick and His Gardens” (Monacelli, 2024) is available at The Arts Center in Orange and The Laurie Holladay Shop in Gordonsville, and from online retailers.
Chelsea Quintern denies saying, “I’ll leave the LGBTQ kids alone!”
If you read the previous issue of Byrd Street, you may recall the hypothetical New Year’s resolutions attributed to various public figures, including Orange County School Board member Chelsea Quintern (District 4). Adorned with winking emojis, this fictitious list was intended as a bit of end-of-year fun.
Quintern, known for her far-right politics, was not amused. In response to the joke resolution attributed to her (“I’ll leave the LGBTQ kids alone!”), she wrote to Byrd Street that the “misattribution is not only inaccurate but damaging to my reputation and public image.” She stated, “I categorically deny having made such a statement.”
Take a moment, everybody, to let that sink in.
Dear Dr. Jennings
Dear Dr. Jennings, I am an active woman in my late 60s diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis a few years ago. I tried to see a specialist, but due to demand, have not been able to find one who will see me. I have tried all areas surrounding Orange County (but Fredericksburg). Should I be concerned? It hasn’t seemed to slow me down or affected me too much. —Crooked Ring Finger
Dear Crooked Ring Finger, Unlike wear-and-tear osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune connective tissue disorder. That means your body makes antibodies that attack some of the cells that make up tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bones. Some people have milder cases of RA than others. Fortunately, with early diagnosis and innovated treatments, RA may not cause the problems that it has for people in the past.
Yes, it is important to find a specialist who can review the latest medical therapies available to you. However, there is no great cause for concern. It may take a while to get an appointment with a specialist once you find one. Look for medical groups with internal medicine specialists and/or rheumatologists associated with larger hospitals or their satellite offices. Remember that you may be asked to see the specialist only once or twice a year as long as your condition is stable. So, you might consider looking for a specialist at a distance.
If you have a medical or health-related question of general interest, submit it to Dr. Dena Jennings at drdenajennings@gmail.com and please use a pen name. Your real name will not appear in the column.
Coming up soon
Parks and Rec Introduction to Rugby for young athletes, age 10 and up, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 11
Intro to Woodwork with Jim Fuller, The Arts Center in Orange (sign up in advance), 1:30-4:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 18
Drop-in classes in clay, The Arts Center in Orange (sign up in advance), 6-8 p.m., Wednesdays
Drop-in sessions in ceramics studio, The Arts Center in Orange (sign up in advance), 12-2 p.m. Fridays
Register for Spring 2025 classes at Germanna Community College
Obituaries
Jeffrey N. Dodson, 57, Orange; Barbara Evelyn Wheeler, 84, Rhoadesville; Lewis Milton Kennon, 85, Mine Run; Joan Phyllis Crane Parnell, 89, formerly of Lake of the Woods.
Recent back issues
Byrd Street’s 2024 Citizens of the Year: Ellen Wessel and Dan Hornick (Dec. 31, 2024)
Motion emotion: School board chooses OCHS site for proposed CTE building (Dec. 22, 2024)
Orange County School Board holds retreat at former “lunatic asylum” (Dec. 15, 2024)
“The angels were with me”: Hit by a falling tree, Orange artist Megan Marlatt escaped with her life and grew closer to her family (Dec. 6, 2024)
Will never understand the Lee Enterprises business model. Orange Review was easily hitting 24 pages a week with plenty of region-unique content and lots of ads. Jeff leaves and Lee throws in the towel. Go figure.
I thought the end of year resolutions you made up were hilarious and would have been great if real. Of course she was offended… it is the last thing she will do and truly the first thing she should do . She has no sense of humor! Honors to Ellen and Dr. Hornick are truly deserved!