A chance encounter on an Amtrak
train led me to a small village and Carrie Tuhy’s enchanted cottage and
garden. The conversation was of nothing
more consequential than the proximity of rail service from Manhattan to the
Hudson River Valley, where Carrie spends whatever time she can carve out away
from the city. “Do you think it’s possible,” I asked, “to find a modest house
in a small village on a street with sidewalks and neighbors?” “I just did that,” she replied,“ and invited
me to tea that afternoon.
Carrie is a former magazine editor
(Real Simple, Instyle) who is now the co-founder of Second Lives Club, a blog
for women who are jumpstarting the next phase of their lives, which she did
with a retreat from the corporate world and the purchase of her house. It is a picture-perfect, 1940’s Cape with
three rooms down, two rooms up and a bath-and-a-half. On a corner lot, it has a front yard, a side
yard, a back yard, a picket fence, and a very ambitious, aging garden.
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| The Cottage in Spring |
Carrie bought the house from a
couple in their eighties who were reluctantly leaving to mover closer to their
children. The wife was a passionate
gardener, and left all her tools behind with Carrie. “I had never had a garden, and I didn’t drive
when I first came here,” Carrie said.
“It didn’t matter, because the house was in walking distance to
everything. “ For someone used to
Tribeca this was a calm transition, and a car didn’t appear until later. Probably when she realized you can’t garden
without one.
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| Viburnum Anchoring the Front Door |
The house is located at the
improbably-named corner of Mulberry and Chestnut Streets. I walk by often, since as a result of that
chance encounter I am now renting a small apartment nearby. It’s allowed me to take photographs in the
garden’s moment of tidiness in early spring, to the fullness of late spring,
through the over-blown summer, and into the fall and winter.
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| The Side Yard |
“The garden is the work of the
three women who lived here over a long period of time – 60 years -- and it’s
taken me five years to begin to understand it,” Carrie reports. A tidy picket
fence surrounds the house, with a few ornamental trees planted inside the
fence. They are almost crowded out now
by the trees outside the fence, installed by a zealous village street tree
planting program.
The long border lining the walk to
the front door is a fine example of why such borders should always be
perpendicular to the house rather than parallel. While looking down the length of the border
from the house to the street you see none of the empty spaces that are
inevitable in a mixed border. Only when
you are parallel to the border do you have an opportunity to examine all your
mistakes.
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| The Long Border |
Carrie’s long border covers the
seasons from early spring bulbs, through peonies and iris in late spring, to
phlox and its companions in the summer.
The hefty viburnum anchoring the corner of the front steps is replicated
in the long border by baptisia and a few sub-shrubs that serve the same
purpose.
Alongside the house is a crowded
group of spirea ready for division, leading to a trellised alcove, the first of
a number of garden “rooms.” Directly off
the sunroom, the trellis is graced by an apple tree, espaliered by Carrie. About 9 x12, this small room is perfect for a
morning coffee, or afternoon tea and a nap.
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| The Sunroom Terrace |
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| The Shed's Interior |
The aforementioned sunroom is ideal
for a writer, but it is a shed in the garden that has captured the writer’s
heart in Carrie. “I thought I would be
able to write there, like Virginia Wolfe did at her writing lodge at Monk House
in East Sussex. It has become instead a
theatre of memory, filled with souvenirs of travel and sentimental objects
considered too personal for the more public rooms.
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| The Shed's Exterior |
The shed is added onto
periodically, but still remains unused. Two windows were given as a birthday
gift from an admirer long and sadly gone.
A daughter’s desk occupies one end of the shed; a bench sits outside the
door for contemplating the garden and the passage of time, which is unavoidable
while sitting on a garden bench.
And so the editor steps in. Gardens are not static, and for every
gardener there is a moment when just enough becomes too much. The small ornamental trees are battling with
the street trees. Perhaps the formal
herb garden in the middle of the rear garden should be replaced with a calm
lawn. Perhaps the vines, if thinned,
would let a little air in. Isn’t the
once-sheltering clematis now a shroud?
Have the roses on the trellis stopped blooming?
The editor begins to edit, but it
requires learning a new vocabulary and a new language. Plants are not as orderly as words and
sentences, but that is what second lives are all about, isn’t it?
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| Carrie in the Garden |
