Friends And Family

Add Special Touches

To A Vintage Home’s Garden

 “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?

By Nancy K. Crevier

Betsy Kenyon can zero in on three things that make the gardens surrounding her antique home on Main Street particularly special to her.

One is the formal English-style garden beside her home that neighbor Brid Craddock helped her lay out. Loosely based on the formal gardens at the Mayflower Inn in Washington Depot, the foursquare side garden replaced two perennial strip gardens seven years ago.

“I have always loved the gardens at the Mayflower, so one year I took pictures of them and brought them to Brid, across the street, who is a master gardener and designer. She helped me bring it to scale for this space,” said Ms Kenyon.

Each of the four plots is planted to yield color in every season. As summer wanes, the predominant flowers are the ethereal blue blossoms of the bluebeard plants, surrounded by sunny yellow black-eyed Susans, and silver-leafed Russian sage. Pink roses cover tall bushes at the corners of two sections, the second blossoming of the year. Wispy stems of rue hover above the low growing greenery.

The perimeter of the entire garden is planted with Japanese holly, a boxwood-like shrub that Ms Kenyon values for its hardiness and because it is not favored by deer. The interior edges of each plot host velvety lambs ear — the tall summer blossoms cut back — and lavender pink Germander. Spring and early summering plants, such as the coral bells, baptista, lupine, gayfeather and lavender bee balm take a back seat at summer’s end, showing only green leaves from beneath the shade of late summer flowering plants.

The four plots meet in the center at a fountain, water burbling merrily up from the pineapple shaped spout. “The pineapple is traditionally the sign of hospitality,” explained Ms Kenyon, “so it seemed just the right focal point to go with our vintage home.”

Sprouting amongst the lamb’s ear and shrubs is the second item of which Ms Kenyon is particularly fond in her garden.

“Our friends John and Jane Vouros went on a tour of Ireland and brought back seeds from this wonderful melon-colored poppy, which is really quite different from the poppies we have here in America. They gave me seeds and I’ve been nurturing them and hoping the root system gets stronger and that I will eventually get flowers,” said Ms Kenyon. “It was just so sweet of them to share the seeds with me,” she said.

Walking from the front to the back yard, one passes a Japanese honeysuckle vigorously climbing the pole to a rustic birdhouse — home to both wrens and robins in season. Then it is through the carriage house, where one bay has been transformed into a garden workspace and a cozy place of respite. The doublewide back door opens onto a less structured garden.

“This garden is sort of wispy, and a little crazy. I guess it is what you would call a cutting garden,” Ms Kenyon said of the space that runs from one edge of the property to the other.

In it, buddleia, nepeta, and Veronica cast a purple hue, highlighted by spots of bright yellow day lilies, coreopsis, and black-eyed Susans. Towering masses of ornamental grasses add visual excitement to the garden, and in spring, said Ms Kenyon, the garden is full of blossoming iris.

It is in this garden that her most treasured plant grows: a feverfew plant brought over from Scotland by her great-grandfather.

“He was a farmer and a big gardener, and he wanted to bring a ‘piece of the earth’ of Scotland with him when he moved to Fairfield, Connecticut,” she explained. “He brought a whole rooted plant, and put it into his Fairfield garden. I got it from my grandmother when I moved to Newtown, and brought it to this house when we moved here in 1984.

“I’ve passed pieces on to my daughter in Greenwich, so now it is being passed down another generation.”

It was from her great-grandfather that she came to love gardening. “He would meet me at the end of his driveway, when I was little, with a wheelbarrow and wheel me all around, telling me all about the things in his garden,” she said.

Circling back toward the house, perimeter gardens boast red bee balm and blue and black salvia, both thick with honey bees, and masses of nico blue hydrangea over a thick carpet of wild geranium leading up to an arbor, that in summer, is covered in white heritage roses. Still more of the blue hydrangea and a pink hydrangea shrub that morphs to a deep maroon in autumn lean out from the house foundation, above a display of ferns and lily of the valley.

The gardens have been evolving for the 26 years she has lived on Main Street, said Ms Kenyon, with additions and subtractions updating the landscaping.

“I think that’s part of the love of gardening — the movement and the change,” she said, “and the little things that make it special.”