Glimpse Of The Garden

A Delight For Owner And Guests

By Nancy K. Crevier

“A Glimpse Of The Garden” is a seasonal 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?

Joyce Webster plants her garden for a succession of color. Starting in the spring, a shady wildflower garden bordered by a low stone wall bursts into bloom. Liverwort, bleeding heart, wild geranium, and sweet woodruff turn winter’s barren places into a jungle of greenery. Meadow rue towers at the back of the garden bed, the wide leaves of lady’s mantle dance on thin stems, and the Lenten rose drops the last of its blossoms to the ground.

The stone wall is bisected by a slate walkway that leads from the driveway to her doorway, with summer gardens filling the areas above and below the wall on the side opposite the wildflower garden. Halfway to the house, the path is intersected by a granite block circle that invites the visitor to walk around a centrally placed urn, overflowing with flowers that change with the season. Knee-high boxwoods encircle the urn.

“I had the walkway and this circle put in,” said Ms Webster. “I felt that something was needed to greet people coming to the house,” she said, adding that the design was based on gardens she had seen in Williamsburg. “I think it gives a Colonial feel to the property that goes with the house,” she said.

“I have been gardening most of my eighty-some years,” said Ms Webster, a member of The Town & Country Garden Club since moving to Sandy Hook from Fairfield eight years ago. “I’ve always enjoyed working outside.” When she purchased her 1800s home, she saw the potential for mixing the old with the new.

Where ancient rhododendrons do not border the property, ten-foot tall lilac bushes reach out into the road.

“The lilacs and many of the shrubs were here,” she said, including the gigantic holly trees that flank one doorway. Bright orange daylilies, long a part of the yard, lean over a picket fence, along with coneflowers and deep purple lupine. A four-foot diameter stone cover on the home’s original well could be a blight on the tidy yard, but Ms Webster has framed it with lily of the valley that add a nod of white and fragrant flowers every spring, and lush greens the remainder of the year.

 “I have added several smaller gardens, as well,” Ms Webster said. One that she is particularly fond of is near the stone wall, with a focus on flowers that bloom in shades of pink and blue.

Dark and light blue delphinium, clusters of lavender coneflowers, and feathery fronds of pink and purple astilbe are set off by bright white daisies and golden black-eyed Susans. Double and single blossom hollyhocks of pale pink stand tall against a backdrop of butterfly bushes with deep blue flowers. 

A nearby garden is nearly ready in July to pop with color. Although she favors perennials, this garden is host to a number of zinnias adding summer color to the backdrop of yellow flowered potentilla bushes, enormous joe pye weed, low growing forsythia, and mounds of nepeta (cat mint).

Near her kitchen door is an herb garden, where the delightful scent of spring-flowering Daphne greets her, and oregano, rosemary, mint, culinary sage, dill, and chives compete for space with scented geranium and the broad-leafed ornamental sage. “They are very handy, close by the house,” said Ms Webster.

Her newest garden was just put in this spring, and features ornamental grasses, sedum, and daisies. Nearby, a honeysuckle bush and butterfly bush, as well as a bluebird house, add diversity to the landscape.

Where Ms Webster cannot add color directly into the ground, she has added it with another gardening favorite of hers: the use of hanging baskets and strategically placed pots. She also attracts color from the skies — the red cardinals, bluebirds, jays, grackles, sparrows, and redwing blackbirds that visit the many feeders on her property. Viburnum bushes provide flowers in the spring and berries for the birds in the autumn.

Off to one side of her home, a covered stone patio provides a place for Ms Webster to enjoy the songs of the birds and the potted plants that surround it. Low growing junipers and Mugo pine, and a variety of hosta plants look down on the patio from the top of a half wall at the far end of the outdoor room.

“I love the colors in the planters I design. It gives me something to do,” she said, “and it’s restful to sit and see all the color around me. It’s a wonder: from nothing comes these beautiful plants.”

The gardens border the upper and lower yards, and draw visitors down to the pond, where Ms Webster has installed a shade garden. There, green and burgundy lace ferns, cinnamon ferns, hosta, and an unusual Japanese variety of Jack in the Pulpit, with oversized leaves, create a peaceful scene. A small bridge leads over a brook and into the woods. Flag iris and other natural plants frame the pond.

“I could never paint a picture, but I can put together the colors and create a picture in the garden. Every spring when I start tending to it all, I think I should stop,” laughed Ms Webster, “but then, I don’t.”

That is what is down the garden path at Joyce Webster’s home.

To see this collection of photos in color, and more images from Joyce Webster’s garden, find this story under the Features tab at www.NewtownBee.com.