My partner Joe and I are not at our best in the garden. I am a relatively new and nervous gardener, so when it comes time to do anything, I stand in the yard with my phone, anxiously Googling: How many inches deep? How close together? Should I add bone meal?
As I scroll, the minutes pass and ordinarily mild-mannered Joe begins to chafe. If he were a cartoon figure, his head would explode. As he put it, when I asked him just now why we fight in the garden, “I get a little impatient about it sometimes. Why on earth are you standing in the garden with a phone? You’re supposed to have a spade in your hand!”
It’s not just us. Marital strife in the garden, I’ve read, is a thing, with couples arguing over division of labor, budget, likes and dislikes, and in our case, time management.
Riley Brannigan, who works in the gift shop at Allen, Sterling & Lothrup nursery in Falmouth, has seen it firsthand: One half of a couple piles up an ambitious heap of seed packets and pricy garden tools. The other applies the brakes. Friction, if not outright disagreement.
That said, the four couples I interviewed ahead of Valentine’s Day to ask how they get along in the garden, are models of harmony.
Skillins Greenhouses made the wedding bouquet for Ben and Abby Schaeffer’s wedding. Abby kept requesting more and more of the flowers she loves. Ultimately, the bouquet “weighed, like, 50 pounds,” she said. (Catherine J Gross Photography, courtesy of Abby Schaeffer)
BUDDING ROMANCE
Abby and Ben Schaeffer met on the job at Skillins Greenhouses in Cumberland 14 years ago. She was a high school junior at Greeley. He was a senior at Gray–New Gloucester. They began to date the following year.
Today, they’re married with a 15-month-old son, and they live — and garden — in Windham. She’s a pharmacist, he’s a detective, but they still pick up the occasional seasonal shift at Skillins. The garden, Abby wrote in an email, is “truly our happy place together!”
When Ben and Abby Schaeffer bought their house, the garden was non existent. Today it’s a lush oasis. (Courtesy of Abby Schaeffer)
Ben and Abby Schaeffer have planted nearly 50 varieties of dahlias at their home. (Courtesy of Abby Schaeffer)
Before they bought their home, it was a rental property and the landscaping was neglected — or more like nonexistent. Together, they’ve transformed it.
Ben has built seven raised beds and counting. They grow tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, peppers, herbs and many other vegetables, as well as lots of cut flowers, including 50 varieties of dahlias; Abby has been “dabbling” in floral design, helping friends with their weddings and baby showers. Come spring, the garden is awash in lilac blossoms.
Ben credits Abby as the “brains behind the operation.” He describes himself as the maintenance crew.
When he suggests what turns out to be an impractical idea, such as sunflowers in a certain spot, Abby lets him down gently. That’s a great idea, she’ll tell him, but isn’t that spot a little shady?
Ben Schaeffer in the garden. (Courtesy of Abby Schaeffer)
And though their gardening styles differ — Abby is more structured and analytical — she gives him room for experiments and whimsy.
The Schaeffers know many couples where just one person gardens. Abby is grateful that, for them, it’s a shared passion. In summertime, Ben sometimes pulls into their driveway at the end of a workday and takes a moment to bask in the lush garden. “Wow!” he’ll think as he takes it all in. “There’s a lot of satisfaction knowing that it’s been a shared project.”
As homeowners, the Schaeffers have house projects, too, but those can be sources of stress or irritation, Ben said. “Not so with the garden stuff.”
The garden is a “sacred space,” Abby agreed, bringing to mind their early romance, especially one rainy afternoon in a greenhouse at Skillins when the downpour scared off customers, and Ben and Abby had a few minutes of “flirty fun” imagining their future home. “And now that’s our reality!” Abby said.
Skillins did the flowers for the Schaeffers’ wedding eight years ago. The wedding favors? Packets of seeds that the couple labelled, “Let love grow.”
PUT DOWN ROOTS
It was Dorothy Cady’s garden first. She has lived — and gardened — on Peaks Island for three decades. She’s been a Master Gardener, a rigorous national certification, for most of that time.
But when Cady made space for Claire Devries in her heart seven years ago, she also made space in her one-acre garden.
Dorothy Cady, left, and her partner Claire Devries, in their Peaks Island home. (Anna Chadwick/Staff Photographer)
Dorothy deeply appreciates Claire’s enthusiasm and willingness to help. When Claire starts to say she plays “a small role with Dorothy in caring…” Dorothy interrupts her mid-sentence. “You do a lot that more than a small part!” she tells Claire. “You do a lot!”
She ticks off all the ways Claire has contributed: maintaining the deer fences, setting up the sprinkler systems and the timers, building and maintaining the birdhouses, putting up the tomato and herb harvests when Dorothy is traveling, covering the garden beds when frost threatens, building a cold frame, edging, mowing… the list goes on.
Asked about Dorothy’s role in the garden, which lies hidden down a long driveway on the island’s Back Shore, Claire says simply, “Dorothy puts her hands in the dirt.” Asked to describe the garden itself, Claire answers in one word: “Heaven.”
Claire, who is 84, likes to sit on a swing and watch Dorothy, 78, prune and plant. It’s peaceful, she said. Their garden is a spiritual place with a gong, a rock pit that Claire built, and prayer flags. In season, Dorothy, in overalls, spends eight hours in the garden each day, Claire said. Just four, Dorothy protests. Claire mumbles something about six.
A photo of Dorothy and Claire’s garden taken on Dorothy’s iPad. Cady captures a lot of moments in her garden on the device. (Anna Chadwick/Staff Photographer)
“It’s really nice to just see her doing all her gardening,” said Claire, who grew up on a farm in Rumford. “She’s among all of the stuff that’s just growing and living. That’s why I fell in love with her.”
EMBRACING COMMUNITY
Dave and Paula Palma failed — their word — at gardening three times: at their homes in New Jersey, in Massachusetts and their first house in Cape Elizabeth. It was always the same problems: lack of sunlight and an abundance of hungry rodents. “It just never worked for us,” Paula said.
Now in a smaller home, they’ve narrowed their scope to window boxes and a modest pumpkin patch.
Dave and Paula Palma are especially proud of their garlic harvest. They started with 6 heads and now grow 150. They cook with it and give a lot away. “Everyone in our neighborhood is walking around with it,” Dave said (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
Their real pride and joy is their vegetable plot at Cape Elizabeth’s Gull Crest community garden, a project the couple started during the pandemic, when, like so many others, they were looking for a safe way to keep from going stir-crazy.
The plot gave them that and more. They had fun gardening together. They got to know a “phenomenal” community. “Dave and I, we love everyone there,” Paula said. It was peaceful spending time with each other without constantly buzzing electronic devices.
And with the Gull Crest’s fence and full sun, they finally found garden success, growing cucumbers, zucchini, sugar peas, spinach, herbs and garlic. A lot of garlic.
The Palmas have been married for 36 years and have three grown children. When they started dating as college sophomores, “I’m pretty sure we weren’t talking about gardening,” Dave said. That aspect of their relationship “didn’t really get going until we got to the community garden and we had some success,” he said, emphasis on “some.”
Their garden, they say, is just successful enough. “Last year, the cucumbers just downright sucked and we didn’t really care,” he said, laughing. “I don’t want to get any better at gardening. I like that we’re at a point where this is just fun and we get what we get.”
“If it becomes stressful,” Paula said, “then we wouldn’t do it,” Dave finished her sentence.
GROWING AN INHERITANCE
In June 2024, when Brianna Gammons and Steven Arsenault moved in to their first house in North Deering, they got a happy surprise: A ready-made garden.
The previous owners had been passionate gardeners. The tomatoes were already in the ground. There were four raised beds with, among other items, peas, radishes, mustard greens, melons and walking onions, a type of onion that produces baby onions on stalks instead of flowers. The rhubarb, a cutting from the previous owners’ parents’ 50-year-old patch, was going gangbusters.
Steven Arsenault and Brianna Gammons outside their home in Portland. They inherited a garden when they bought the house two years ago, and their interest in gardening has grown. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
“It was probably 6 feet tall, taller than my head,” Brianna said. She’d never tasted rhubarb before, but she was an avid cook and she dove right in, making “everything you could think of” that summer, a rhubarb crumble, rhubarb simple syrup, even pulled pork with rhubarb.
She also dove into gardening. Though she and her fiancé — their wedding is in May — had mostly lived in Boston apartments since college, she took to it like a hummingbird to bee balm.
Brianna Gammons stands in her garden by the thriving rhubarb patch she and her fiancé Steven Arsenault inherited when they bought their house. (Courtesy of Steven Arsenault)
In their first summer, the couple mostly just harvested and tried to figure out what had already been planted — an ongoing process. Their second summer, Steven built a lettuce table and drew a diagram so they could track what they had and what they might like to do in the future.
This coming summer, Steven plans to build a trellis for cucumbers.
Brianna has grown vegetables from seed and has saved some for next summer. Last year, the broccolini and kale were not a roaring success. “We had the cabbage worms on those,” Brianna said. She struggled to get the carrots to germinate. But she mastered tomato sauce from her own tomatoes, and is eager for the two young apple trees to begin to fruit. “That will be really cool.”
Steven credits Brianna with 90% of the work. But listening to him talk, you wonder if his math is off.
He confesses to being 100% in when it comes to garden building projects. They share the task of mowing: Steven does the front yard, Brianna the back. Steven helps with weeding and harvesting, especially when, say, the tomatillos suddenly all need picking at once.
The only fighting they do in the garden, Steven joked, is against the weeds.
And if sometimes things don’t quite go as planned — what gardener doesn’t face that? — no problem. “We’re just experimenting,” Steven said. “It’s fun. The bank has us here for at least 30 years, so we got plenty of time to iterate on it.”
Comments are closed.