As a fledgling interior designer, I arrogantly thought that designing a garden for myself would be easy. I had to take a step back and become a student again, and although I made – and corrected – many mistakes over the years, the process was never dull. One thing I learned is that it’s just as well that I didn’t have a clear plan at the outset, because nature had a plan of its own.
Since I was in a hurry at first, I began with a flat, sunny spot on the south side of the house. This area, formerly a lawn tennis court (I learned this from older villagers who had been guests in the house formerly owned by Mr and Mrs Knowlton), provided a lovely view from the screened porch.
This wall of photographs provides endless inspiration
Annie Schlechter
A gate, path and steps lure the visitor from one garden to another
Annie Schlechter
As there were two large crabapples along the south border with a scrubby hedge on each side, I immediately envisioned my first garden ‘room’, but it would need some structure. The land also sloped into the space, so I felt it should be terraced with gracious steps. Our dear friend the artist Christopher Hewat, who grew up nearby and had a passion for the stone walls you see all over the countryside in northwestern Connecticut, built a wall along the north edge for us. On each end I had tall lattice fences built to form the back wall of the perennial border and to create a doorway to the area beyond. I designed a rounded arch to be placed between the two crabapples, and in front of the lattices I dug two 40-foot-long, five-foot-deep beds so I could begin planting. I filled the beds with some of my favourite flowers: peonies, roses, foxgloves, lilies, and lavender. Each weekend I rushed to our house in the country to weed, water, deadhead, and see what was in bloom. As I had no planting plan per se, I often bought whatever looked good in the nursery. The joy was in the process, but as the summer went on, I found that my beds were not fabulous – height and colour were wrong, and textures were not complementary. That is when I realised I needed to educate myself. With the help of my wonderful bookdealer friends Timothy Mawson and Mike McCabe, I started a gardening library and spent my evenings devouring the writing of Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll, Christopher Lloyd, and Russell Page, to name a few. I also knew that even though I had visited many American gardens with my mother when I was young, I needed to travel and see other gardens. My first trip to England was like searching for the holy grail. Walking through the gardens at Sissinghurst and Hidcote for the first time was exhilarating.
Comments are closed.