A Glimpse Of The Garden

By Nancy K. Crevier

“A Glimpse Of The Garden” is a miniseries focusing on the heart of a gardener’s work — a special spot, an extraordinary plant, a place of respite, or a place that evokes a heartfelt memory. What is down the garden path of your friends and neighbors? What is down your garden path?

“I’m a painter,” explained Susan McLaughlin Rosen, standing in the yard of her summer home on Taunton Lake Road, “so my philosophy holds for paintings as for all of the gardens. I noticed that it is the same for creating gardens as for painting: you make a composition, of texture, the layers of plants, the color. Even the breeze off of the lake creates movement in the garden, and you always go for movement in painting.”

Ms Rosen’s cottage is surrounded by greenery and blossoms, and includes two children’s gardens, complete with pint-sized chairs and a tiny stone bench beneath shady shrubs, a rock garden, and winding stone paths that weave about the home. But the garden that pleases her mightily is the perennial garden at the edge of the property overlooking Taunton Lake.

The garden was in place when she and her husband bought the summer home ten years ago, but was overgrown and neglected. Although she is a master gardener, her training is mostly in diagnostic tools, she said, and she soon realized she needed a garden designer to sort things out. “I tried to fine-tune it, because I knew what I wanted, but then I called in a friend with a real eye for garden design, and she helped immensely,” said Ms Rosen.

The garden is a balance of seasonal colors now and plants that include lady’s mantle, phlox, day lilies, peonies, astilbe, fairy candles, daisies, fox glove, faux sunflowers, hydrangea, spirea, and two rose topiaries. It is anchored at either end by purple clematis clambering up tall wooden lattices. A few annual impatiens add color and mark the walkway that weaves throughout the lake-edge garden.

“We can sit in our lawn chairs and look out over the garden and lake, or go out onto the lake and look at it from a different angle. And like painting a portrait,” Ms Rosen said, “when I sometimes turn the whole painting and work from all directions, you can look at the garden from all directions, too, and see it differently.”

“You have to wear so many hats when you have a garden,” said Ms Rosen, who views the flowers and shrubs in her yard as fondly as if they were her own children. “There is the artistic hat, to make sure the colors and flow work; the medical hat, if one of the plants get sick; the inventor hat to find creative ways to make tall plants stand up straight, on so on; and the magician’s hat.” The magician’s hat has worked particularly well with the roses in this garden. “They get only a half a day of sunlight , so they should not do well here, but they get the reflection off of the lake and have thrived,” she said.

Finding the little “garden escapees, from who knows where” that unexpectedly pop up in the garden is another aspect of the garden that she loves, as are the birds that are attracted to the garden. “They love the garden and reward us with their song,” she said.

“I actually think of my garden as one of my paintings. You get this by hours and hours of labor. There’s no way around it, exactly the same procedure as with a painting. The difference is that with a painting there comes a time when it is finished. The garden is always changing, though, and always a work in progress.”

It is hard to leave her “children” when summer ends, she said. But Ms Rosen finds solace when returning to her New York City home in a poem she once discovered, credited to naturalist Charles S. Newhall: “Farewell, ye kindly companye/Each vine and shrub and tree/Dear friends to me;/Farewell again, ye God-sent companye.”

That is what is down the garden path at Susan McLaughlin Rosen’s.