Sometimes I hesitate even to call it a garden. It’s a series of beds and borders strung loosely around our house, sometimes growing, sometimes dying, changing more or less randomly, depending on how much time and money I’m willing to spend on them. For various reasons, this past summer I had to leave them pretty much to their own devices. There’s no such thing as benign neglect in the garden.
Chaos in the garden seems to happen very slowly, and then very quickly. By this fall, parts of the garden had devolved into pandemonium. It was time to get some professional help. Fortunately, a wonderful garden designer named Maggie Leonard was willing to carve out a few days from her busy schedule to deal with the disarray.
Calling on Maggie made me realize once again the importance of having fresh eyes on the garden. I see it so often I don’t notice what’s there. And when I take a good look at it, I despair. But where I see defeat, Maggie sees an exciting challenge. What I view as a problem, she considers an asset. Bony dry soil can be amended to accommodate tough perennials like epimedium and lamium. To her, a granite outcropping that was interfering with my planting schemes becomes a valuable natural feature to be prized. She sees the rag-tag collection of plants I’ve grown tired of as abundant new material to work with. She says she paints with plants.
When my husband and I bought the house 14 years ago, there were no traces of the garden that the original owner had installed in the 1950s. The canopy of mature maples and hickories surrounding the house created lots of part shade. It was late fall, and I had brought along 20 or so plants from my previous garden but there was no obvious place for them. There were sun-loving lilies, shade-loving hostas, and everything in between. I had no time to think how they might best be deployed, so I made a quick and dirty job of it, marking out an oval-shaped bed and clearing it of grass and weeds as best I could. This was only temporary, I told myself as I jammed the transplants into the ground wherever they would fit between the rocky ridges I discovered several inches below the surface. I worked in a lot of compost and hoped for the best. I planned to reposition the plants in the spring when I could prepare more appropriate places for them.
My vision was not so easily realized. After the snow had melted in the spring I began to take stock of the property. There were patches of grass — hardly what you’d call a lawn — and a wide, sloping expanse overrun by the toughest, most ineradicable invasives — a tangle of winter creeper eponymous, bittersweet, garlic mustard and poison ivy. I hired a landscaper to brush-hog this area and put in new topsoil. This created a large, welcoming bed for new plantings, but also for opportunistic weeds. Over the years I have wrestled with this space, with varying success. But left untended for one summer it ran amok. Maggie to the rescue!
We surveyed the garden bed by bed. Luckily, she has no sentimental attachment to plants I have kept just because they have managed to survive, if only barely. She knew immediately which ones needed to go. “How do you feel about those Shasta daisies?” she asked. When I hesitated to answer, she said, “Good, let’s get rid of them! And what about that scraggly Brandywine viburnum?” Again I had no answer. “Let’s move it to a sunnier spot with better soil,” she said. She pointed to a messy strip of geraniums, pulmonaria and Canada anemone that had been infiltrated by crabgrass and creeping Charlie. “Do you want to save that?” She asked. By then I knew the answer.
She didn’t need to consult me about an aronia and a fothergilla that were scrunched into a bed where they crouched beneath perennial spreaders like black-eyed Susans, coneflowers and asters. She relocated them to a spot behind the house where they’d have more elbow room. I wondered why I hadn’t thought to do that before. As I said, the status quo is hard to buck.
In the meantime, I’m poring through catalogs of spring-blooming bulbs. It’s moving-in time again. Snowdrops, daffodils and tulips will enjoy emerging from their winter sleep into happy new spaces.
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer. Her latest book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” was published in 2024 by White River Press.