The couple settled in and quickly added to their 900 square-foot home. Building plans left by the owners showed the model for the two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow was featured as the “House of the Week” in the Dayton Daily News in the late 1940s.
“It was so well-built,” Iiames adds. “There were two steel I-beams in the basement to support the floor. And they used real 2x4s.”
So their addition wrapped around the original house, adding a new main bedroom, bathroom, foyer and large living room with south-facing windows. Strider-Iiames notes they expanded again in 2010, enlarging the kitchen and adding a screened-in porch and large deck overlooking the backyard evolution also in progress.
A groundskeeper with decades of career experience, Iiames used their yard as a palette for his creativity as well as a research project. He tackled one space at a time, first conceptualizing, even mowing an outline into a space just to see what it might look like. He tested ways to prepare beds, covering unwanted ground cover with newspaper, mulch, leaves or overturning new soil.
“Honestly they all work about the same,” he says.
He and his wife wanted to keep as many trees as possible, but dead trees had to be removed, and lightning strikes and a bad windstorm took more. “But we’ve added four times the trees we cut down,” Iiames notes.
Plus daylilies—over 200 different varieties, Strider-Iiames estimates. And thousands of daffodil bulbs, Iiames adds, because the deer that venture through won’t munch the flowers, preferring tulips instead.
In shady spots, Iiames focused on hostas. As dead tree removal opened more sunny spots, he discovered unique conifers could add welcome patches of green to gray, dormant beds in winter.
Today the couple has hundreds of hosta and conifer varieties in nine garden beds that curve around the house, including a rock garden, plus three ponds, the largest with lily pads and aquatic plants. Fish, turtles and frogs winter over because they leave the tall fountain flowing. The couple regularly sees wildlife, including Great Blue Herons and smaller Green Herons. “Just stopping for a snack,” Strider-Iiames says.
She selects the variety of fountains and statuary—concrete, metal, pottery and stone—nestled among the plantings to complement the flora, stonework and grass paths. “We like a more natural look,” says Iiames.
During summers, a banana tree is the star attraction—approximately 20 feet tall—and many years it yields fruit although inedible, Iiames says. A friend gifted him the start, he adds. Each year after the first major frost, he cuts it close to the ground and covers it in deep layers of fall leaves anchored with a tarp. Each spring it regrows.
“Plant people are generally generous people,” Strider-Iiames notes, always willing to share seeds and plant starts. Iiames has met many other plant aficionados through organizations such as the American Conifer Society and the American Hosta Society.
There is no irrigation system, only several fan sprinklers and soaker hoses the couple attach to the two original spigots that came on the house. Iiames says he spends “too many hours to count” every week during the growing season watering, weeding and mowing. Strider-Iiames fills in when Iiames is traveling.
“I love walking around and seeing what’s blooming, especially the daylilies. And I love sitting in the screened-in porch. It’s such a lovely vista,” she says.
Even when the yard workload picks up with spring clean-up, dividing and mulching and fall trimming and preparing beds for winter, Iiames is happy to be outside. “Oh yeah. I don’t think it’s work. I get to walk around and enjoy it.”
