TD spotlights Seminary Avenue home for Garden Week

Their attention to detail is evident from the moment you step through the front door. A spacious foyer leads to their world of art and collectibles. The focal point is a broad stairway that begins with a curling mahogany banister and then pauses at a landing with a built-in window seat before rising to the third level.

Original oak and mahogany floors gleam. Sturdy fluted, ionic columns and woodwork throughout the house are painted glossy white.

“We had to do a lot of work to the ceilings and, in an older house like this, everything sags,” Fox says. “It took us weeks to paint [the entryway] . . . we used a laser line to make sure we had a straight line and marked it with pencil, then taped it to create the pattern.”

Outside, the owners brought in two dump truck loads of fill dirt to even out the backyard. An alee of lavender crape myrtle and boxwood were planted along the sidewalk that leads to the garage.

A winding oyster shell pathway leads to the newly replanted perennial bed. Established boxwood, azaleas and mature hardwood trees accent garden areas.

A large male Ginkgo tree shades much of the front yard with its fan-shaped foliage that turns a luminescent gold in the fall. It’s believed that Ginkgos grew over most of the earth some 200 million years ago, during the era of dinosaurs.

Several of these resilient trees were near the blast center when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. They survived the blast without major deformations and may still be seen today, earning the Ginkgo’s the nickname, “bearer of hope.”