Gardening on the Forest Floor
Plantings showcase a home nestled in the forest.

By Anne Raver

Cole Burrell

WHEN C. Colston Burrell and his partner of 20 years, Bruce Ellsworth, first saw the house—all cypress and glass—tucked into a wooded slope in the Blue Ridge Mountains, they made an offer without even walking in the door.

That’s how seductive the landscape is: Virginia pine and hickory, tulip poplar, black birch, and hop hornbeam rolling down to a stream at the bottom of a grassy ravine.

“To drive over a creek to get home is pretty good,” says Burrell, 49, an ecologist and a garden designer who is known as Cole, recalling his first impression of the place. After eight years, he says, that feeling has only deepened.

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