Shared Spaces

When you round a corner and turn down a street, it either immediately feels good, or it doesn’t.  There is a sense of “rightness” in the space between one house and the next, or there isn’t, and the absence can leave you a bit unmoored.

Harmony is most likely the missing element.  When present, you sense it as the underlying explanation for a fine street whose parts fit together in a cohesive whole.  When in harmony, no matter the style of the neighborhood, the whole works together and the individual pieces don’t fight with one another.  There is a sense of regularity and order.  

A Rhinebeck Village House

This most often occurs in historic districts, where memorable landscapes occur because multiple properties share basic guiding principles, often without conscious intent.  Buildings are about the same height, sidewalk materials start out consistently bluestone until heaved out of place and replaced with concrete. Trees are spaced regularly down the length of the street and remain there until the end of their lifespan.

I moved to Livingston Street 150 years after the village pattern was laid out; the street trees and houses were in place.  Trees were planted along both sides of the street, one for each house. There are now increasing gaps as the aging maples are taken down; on our block we have lost three just this year.

The Demise of a Street Tree

Municipal maintenance for street trees and sidewalks has disappeared from Rhinebeck.  It is a source of constant disgruntlement to residents.  The village used to maintain the trees and sidewalks which are on public property, but elected officials changed the law a few years ago and now the homeowner is solely responsible for the repair and maintenance of these village-owned assets. You can imagine the level of contention between the players – homeowners, village officials, the village’s Tree Commission and the power company.

Concrete Replacement of Bluestone Sidewalk

  

Our supplier of power, Central Hudson Gas and Electric, has its own set of concerns.  It requires a large cleared space to maintain the power lines and prunes accordingly, leaving a battlefield of mutilated trees.  Main Street is particularly grotesque.  With autumn leaves falling, the horror of injudicious pruning reappears. The Tree Commission, not unreasonably, wants to remove the aging trees and replace them with younger, newer, and much shorter trees virtually starting all over again.  Some residents have organized to stop the current pruning practices, while others are pushing for burying all powerlines underground, causing the budget watchers to shudder.

A Street Tree After Pruning

We mourn the loss of our old trees. It takes 10 years or longer to produce a reasonably mature tree, and to many of us trees are the best measure of a civilized landscape.  A community in which mature trees survive and young trees are planted regularly demonstrates a sense of time, history and continuity, absent in the usual speculative real estate scramble for higher and better use.  The streets in which fine old trees survive are the showplaces of a community.  These neighborhoods are in large part one of the economic drivers that brings visitors to Rhinebeck.  

Winter is coming, and with it everyone seems to disappear indoors. The early morning gardeners are still out in heavy jackets, but not much longer.  The first snow arrived on November 15th, and with it the last of my fall planting – a new witch hazel, climbing hydrangea along the fence, oak-leaf hydrangeas, a few fothergilla, and a flirtation with red-twigged dogwood. 

My Garden, the First Snow of the Season

A few of us with shared spaces continue to plan through the winter. On Livingston Street we have a few of these, effectively erasing property lines.  A back yard linking two families for decades is graced by an ancient oak, unfortunately in questionable health.  

I share a semi-sunny/shady property line with my neighbor and co-conspirator Marian, and we confer continually about our successes and failures.  Marian is better than I about facing up to the shortcomings of the site, and is more realistic and measured about the selection of plants.  I am unwise enough to try almost anything, believing that we have more sun than we actually do.  

Our successes have been bearded iris (Marian), coneflower (Marian), epimedium (Marian), phlox (Marian), brown eyed Susan (mine). Our failures have been peonies (mine), baptisia (mine), thalictrum (majorly mine).  We had a nice display of daffodils this spring (ours).  I tried hollyhocks against the fence this year, but I’m not optimistic about their return next spring. 

However, my optimism is not totally dead, and by next spring I should have some decent photos. This troubled zone is my favorite part of the garden; a gift to myself in the sharing of it with a friend.

The Shared Garden, at its First Expansion

A Brief History of Rhinebeck Gardens

When Gail Wittwer-Laird and I finally settled down to design the garden at 71 Livingston Street, we were already deep into the context of Rhinebeck’s historic district.  We had done our research and set ourselves a commitment to honor the Hudson River’s landscape past. 

In my Rhinebeck neighborhood – the residential streets of the historic district – two-story houses with a basement, attic, small front and large backyard are common.  The most important houses often anchor the corners, with the exception of Chestnut Street with its grand houses and very deep setbacks.  The largest houses in the village probably sold off surrounding land at one time, the only remaining evidence being the occasional adjacent barn.

A House On Chestnut Street

Livingston Street is a typical mid-19th century village street.  A scattering of houses – some earlier, some later, some modest, some more affluent – line both sides of the street.  The houses may differ, but most lots are uniform. They are long rectangular plots, the house set close to the street, perhaps a barn, shed or garage tucked in the rear.  Because this pattern was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late 19th century, there is a body of literature both of the period and later to guide our thinking.

We started with the earliest 19th century designer of houses and landscapes, Andrew Jackson Downing. His books – A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Victorian Cottage Residences, and The Architecture of Country Houses – were enormously influential as the primary texts for the design and landscape of Hudson River country homes.  

Downing's Victorian Cottage Residences

By the late 19th century large landholders of great wealth were building elaborate gardens in the Italian style; gardens planned as outdoor drawing rooms, completely isolated from the natural areas surrounding the estate houses.  Balustraded terraces rose four to five feet above the lawns below, which linked the surrounding fields and meadows.  

The terraces were accessible only from several rooms of the house, and were to be used solely by family and guests.  The remaining large open areas were approached through a gate, past a gatehouse and up a long drive.

      

A Grand Italian Terrace

The landowners employed architects and builders, and their craftsmen learned new techniques and styles.  Craftsmen and artisans employed in the creation of these gardens soon modified and reproduced them for village houses and began to work for village homeowners of wealth and substance. 

Downing’s ideas eventually filtered down to owners of the smallest village houses.  He would have had an even greater influence had he not died in 1852 at age 36 in a fire on a river steamer, leaving the field clear for Olmsted and Vaux.

       

Today, Downing is best known (and well loved) for Victorian Cottage Residences, first published in 1842 and succeeded by several editions.  It became a guidebook for owners of small village residences, laying out in detail how the properties should be used, down to specific planting plans and maintenance expectations of family members. 

The ornamental part of the garden would lie in front of planted trellises, with the working garden discretely in the rear.  The vines he recommended for covering the trellis are ones we still use today: several varieties of honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria and roses.  His lists of suitable trees, shrubs and flowers would still serve today’s gardener well. 

A Downing Plan for a Village Garden

The kitchen garden was hidden behind the trellis.  Downing knew that the more common vegetables could be purchased as cheaply as they could be raised and recommended growing only the earliest and most delicate fruits and vegetables –strawberries, asparagus, peaches – and devoted less than one-third of the area of a standard lot to the kitchen garden. 

In the early 19th century people of means bought their plants from nurseries, but many households depended on traveling salesmen.  Flower agents used to canvas country towns from house to house.  Sometimes they came with a catalog, but often they had only a single plant.  Chinese wisterias and fringetrees were sold this way, as were clematis jackmanii, which could be seen to adorn porches up and down the block.  In Concord, Thoreau recalled a certain rhododendron sweeping his village, sold to all by a single agent. 

Downing was a proponent of bedding masses of low-growing flowers in patterns – a distinctly Victorian preference, now almost completely abandoned. You might still see it at classic racetracks like Belmont, where the bedding concept was in full force as annuals stayed in place for the duration of the racing season.  

My first professional job was at Belmont, where I marked up huge rolls of plans with an X in color for each of the thousands of red, white and blue petunias which would then be grown in vast greenhouses in preparation for the June planting. 

In the literature of village gardens, nobody superseded Downing until the1920’s when Fletcher Steele started writing about the small garden.  As with Downing, this was not Steele’s primary work; he was a designer of very grand gardens with a distinct turn towards modernism.  The stunning Blue Staircase at Naumkeag alone is worth a trip to the Berkshires.  

The Blue Staircase at Naumkeag

His wonderful 1924 book Design in the Little Garden positions the home garden as a withdrawal from the outer world. Seclusion is the first and most important of garden qualities; unlike Downing, Steele believed it was not possible to live at ease in a front yard.  He could not conceive of anyone bringing a book and a rocking chair to a front porch.  

Steele would be puzzled by the uses of front porches today and its public quality. In some Rhinebeck houses the steps of the porch is a like a city stoop; it is an invitation to stop and chat or a place to sit and watch the world go by.  The raised porch however implies a degree of privacy; if you see a neighbor reading a book you would not be inclined to disturb her. 

Gail and I were captivated by Design in the Little Garden; the example Steele uses could have been lifted straight from Livingston Street.  He creates a fictional block, Maple Cove Avenue.  Three imaginary houses, Numbers 11,13, and 15 are set on uniform lots, 75’ x 125’, but the landscape in each is treated differently.  

            

Design in the Little Garden

They each incorporate the necessities of the time: a garage sometimes in the front, sometimes in the back at the end of a long driveway; privacy; a drying yard; space for vegetables and fruit; an assortment of porches in front and/or back; some lawn with hedges and flower borders.  No. 13 has a formal garden, No. 11 an informal garden and No. 15 an example of what not to do – the house set far back and too much of the lot opened widely to public view.  Each house has its lessons about what works and what doesn’t.

A Dooryard Garden

The front dooryard garden, almost an anachronism today, was a staple of early gardens.  In colonial times the dooryard garden was always fenced and gated.  It was carefully cultivated and enclosed the most prized flowers.  Starting with early narcissus there were always a few red and yellow single tulips, followed by phlox, the only native American plant.  The most glorious was often the early red ‘piny’ as peonies were then (and sometimes still) called.  

There might be a few shrubs, a lilac and perhaps viburnum.  By the 19th century spirea and deutzia had arrived from Japan as had flowering quince and cherries.  Almost all these flowers can be seen in gardens today, but the spireas and deutzias have fallen out of fashion.  In a dooryard garden like the photograph above, plants were left growing in one spot for a very long time eventually shouldering one another aside like children growing up in the same family. 

Small gardens everywhere in the world are almost always hospitable. They are domestic in scale and tailored to the needs and wants of the owners.

This was our goal for 71 Livingston Street.  If there was an early garden here, all traces of it were gone. It was a bare plateau with only a few of the easiest of plants to grow – hostas and daylilies.  The maples and black walnuts planted at the time the house was built in 1865 remained on the perimeter.  This was all we had.  We started with a clean slate.

Designing The Garden

 Over the years my gardens have tended to look alike.  I have my favorite plants and use them so often they have become that hated word -- my ‘signature.’

To cast a fresh eye I asked Gail Wittwer-Laird to join me on this garden.  An academically-trained landscape architect with a few years in the gardens of Italy, an adventurous eye and endless patience, she is my perfect partner.  No detail was too small to fuss over.

To begin, our base map was a standard block and lot plan available from any municipality.  Then we did our ground-truthing -– checking to see that the information was accurate.  Gail began by measuring, photographing and laying out a plot plan with the major features correctly located.

The Side Yard, Before We Started

The back yard was a blank slate, used in the past only as a dog run, the dogs kept safe and deer kept out by a 5’ tall hog wire fence.  It was in deep shade, a row of black walnuts to the west, Norway maples to the east. The most beautiful aspect of the site is the way the light filters through the black walnuts, dappling most of the garden.  As with many great beauties, deception lies at her heart.  In this case, the black walnuts became an intractable problem, turning the prospective garden into a war zone as the walnuts came crashing down in their late-summer season.

From the beginning I wanted a simple, elegant plan for the garden, somewhat formal in character and in keeping with the flat rectangle we were given.  But the longing for simplicity was muddled by my early use of three different areas for sitting.  

 

The First Sitting Area

The first was a sunny spot on the western property line, directly under the walnuts.  The second spot, also under walnuts, was at the rear of the property in front of a recovered bed.  The third, walnut-free, was under the Norway maples on the eastern property line. The most important sitting area, off the kitchen, did not yet exist.  It was a doormat of small concrete slabs, wet with runoff from the roofline, also under walnuts.

As for our program, there were no activities to accommodate, no vegetables to harvest, no sports, no water, no play equipment, no sandbox, no swing set.  Visiting children could play hide and seek, find treasure with metal detectors, ride bikes on the street, or hold tea parties.

For terraces, we experimented with a series of pods determined by the need to move around the garden as the walnuts grew and threatened to fall: function over form. But given our predilections we chose form over function and settled on an axial pattern – aesthetics over utility.   

We Start The Terrace

We started with a 22’ x 15’ paved rectangle off the rear of the house, and a false perspective created by narrowing the brick-edged beds as they moved towards the back of the garden.  A firm horizontal line running from the center of the house straight through to the rear of the garden kept us on course.

One of the decisions firmly set from the very beginning was the focus on a large lawn.  There is nothing quite as calming as a long, cool, green lawn, and in my dreams I saw protective borders, portable chairs and table, arbors and croquet sets, a writer's hut at the bottom of the garden – all very Virginia Woolf.  But if a lawn is to invite you to linger, it has to be intimate, to have a sense of enclosure.  Unless you are blessed with a river or a lake you will have to build your own enclosures – buildings, walls or shrub borders.

The Lawn at Bellefield in Hyde Park

This key decision was – to be polite – counterintuitive.  Some might even say misbegotten.  Most gardens today are planned to remove as much grass as possible minimizing both labor and water consumption, then planted bed by bed, pocket by pocket as the mood strikes.  We held onto the idea of a long, wide swath of lawn, and developed the garden as a single encompassing design, visible from the moment you enter. 

A large panel of lawn – or a green garden -- is no different than others in the need for privacy and a bit of seclusion. We started at the boundary lines and worked inward.  Our borders are generously deep, larger on the east border than the west as our carefully plotted centerline when laid out did not divide the property equally.  Nonetheless our borders are generous enough to mask the discrepancy on the east, while opening up the views worth capturing on the west.

Gail and I talked and plotted and planned and sketched for almost a year before we put the plan out to bid.  Our goal was to install the woody plants, the trees and shrubs, in the fall of 2015.  The herbaceous material would wait for the following spring.

Plans flew back and forth courtesy of Autocad and UPS.  The design was completed and priced down to the last detail before a shovel hit the ground. This was a process Gail and I were both familiar with, having worked on public parks together.  Now the process was scaled down to an average building lot.

After more than two summers daydreaming and a year planning, work began.  By the end of 2015 the beds were planted and edged in brick, gates and friendly fences appeared, a terrace was set, an arbor and trellis were added, an old well house shored up, a table and chairs delivered.

A Corner of the Garden Today

Although I live alone I am not the sole arbiter of this garden. There is large cast of opinionated contributors: Gail Wittwer-Laird, landscape architect and longtime colleague; Natalka Chas, planting designer who had worked for years on my prior garden; Dennis Gendron of Twin Brooks Gardens, our principal contractor; Delfino Martinez, master stonemason; Brian Tamm and Dan Frank, superb carpenters, and Daniel Horne who takes care of the garden as if it were his own. 

As all gardens do, this one ranges back and forth in time through past gardens and considers why we build gardens, the importance of place, why we long for calm green spaces, what we see in them, their poetry and their place in the imagination.  And always the season ahead; the conviction that if you plant bulbs in the fall you will be here in the spring to see them bloom.

From Brooklyn To Rhinebeck

Last week I worked on two posts at the same time -- one on my first garden in Brooklyn, and the second on the Rhinebeck garden.  I was well into both when I realized that the two neighborhoods were almost identical in character, despite being separated by 100 miles and 75 years. 

In 1943, the country was deep into the Second World War and our family on East 9th Street was no exception. I grew up on this leafy street in Brooklyn with an extended family in a big house with a front yard and a back yard, and from the beginning of the war until the end the back yards were turned into Victory Gardens.  We all became gardeners.

WWII Victory Garden Poster

During the war years almost all farm food production went to the armed forces, and so we started to grow our own. Children were fully mobilized for the war effort.  We made rubber band balls (for what end we never knew), we made silver balls from the foil in our parents’ cigarette packages (for what use we never knew), we harvested our vegetables and pulled them in wagons to wherever we were supposed to deliver our crops.  In our games we became heroes and spies, hiding in the spaces between garages, jumping off roofs to safety, decoding secrets and saving lives. 

WWII Era Service Flag

Every house on our block had a flag in the window with a blue star for each person in the service.  We children were The Blue Star Brigade, selling 10cent War Savings Stamps door to door, pulling our wagons behind us.  We were sheltered from the worst; there were no gold star families on our block.  Everyone came home.

At the war’s end the front and back yards returned to their old patterns. The front yard had the expected azaleas, while the back yard was a square plot of grass bordered by neighboring garages.  We had laundry lines and three plant varieties in narrow beds: a red climbing rose on a small arbor, green and white hosta – our school colors -- and the money plant, sporting silver dollar-like seed pods.  

Lunaria, The Money Plant

The back yards were not for sitting. If you sat outside in good weather it was on the walk running from the front steps to the sidewalk, or on the steps themselves.  We played board games on the steps or ball games in the street.

Seed-starting and beginning botany occurred in school, where we set seeds in wooden cream cheese boxes discarded by the appetizing stores.  In those years cream cheese was sold from the box, by the slice, and everyone started their seeds in these boxes -- a perfect size for deep, schoolroom windowsills

My inner garden life, as so much else, started with a book.  At age 6 I was given Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden.  I didn’t covet her garden, only her garden apron.  It had four pockets – one for a ball of string, one for scissors to cut the string, one for pencil and paper to make note of what she wanted to plant, and the last for a tape measure to lay out her rows.  

"Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden" - Published in 1924

My childhood copy was long gone, but I when I started this blog I tracked down an early edition.  No wonder I loved it; I looked like the little girl on the cover – curly blond hair, a navy blue dress with white rickrack, a little red wheelbarrow.  

The book covered every task a child would need to start a garden, ably assisted by family and neighbors.  It had a strong supporting cast: a doting uncle who supplied tools, a devoted father who taught her everything, a mother who kept the household running, a mischievous boy next door, a best friend and, most significantly, an elderly woman in a wheelchair who gave Honey Bunch her late husband’s secret snapdragon seeds, which at book’s end won her First Prize in the garden show.

Many years and many gardens later, I’ve fetched up on Livingston Street in Rhinebeck, another quiet street lined with large Norway maples entering their decline.

Livingston Street

After years of gardening on top of an isolated mountain on the other side of the river, I wanted to live in a house on a block with neighbors, sidewalks, and streetlights.  What I didn’t see then was that without deliberate consideration I had recaptured the street of my childhood, the quiet neighborhood, the familiar faces, the sense of home.  

The inescapable difference is that there are no young children on Livingston Street.  On East 9th Street most households were, like mine, multi-generational.  On Livingston Street there are visiting grandchildren and that’s about it. But one hopes.

I rented #71 for a few years, and when I was finally able to buy the house the garden came first.  I was years behind my self-imposed schedule, and so the garden was fully conceived, planned and installed with mature plants in a single year.   It would be the last in a long line of gardens I have owned, worked in, and written about. 

       

Before We Started

Next Post: The Rhinebeck Garden Begins: Nuts and Bolts.

In Praise of Small Pots

       A garden large enough for even a brief stroll brings more to the eye than I can absorb or record in a single stroke.  In my garden, 120 feet deep, a walk with a notebook ends with at least two pages of notes. Six astilbe here, plus a few more ferns filling in nicely there, a crowd of hellebores at the corner, and so on. 

I tend to see the Big Picture and overlook the Small.  But last year a visit to Pondside Nursery introduced me to the pleasures of tiny plants: thrift, miniature daisies, carpet tulips.  Something is always happening in even the tiniest of pots, a single blossom to be removed, a decision between pinching back to encourage fullness or prolonging the life of a single brave cosmos. 

       

Plumbago with Unidentified Companion

To keep up with an inventory of small pots my day starts early – up at 6:30, one double espresso with milk, and then the watering starts.  I use an elegant watering can, a pleasure to carry, the gift of two gentlemen gardeners. I prefer it to a hose; although it requires walking to and from the kitchen sink it provides marginally more exercise than standing still with a hose on “mist.”

I have another system if I must be away for a few days.  I water well and leave saucers filled with additional water under every pot, save the biggest.  Everyone fusses over root rot, but I’d rather risk that than death by drying out.

The Beginning of the Terrace Pot Garden

My terrace inventory so far: One dahlia, one plumbago, 4 oxalis, 2 helichrysum, 1 calocasia, 1 alocasia, 1 nemesia, 2 tiny blue unidentified South African plants.  These are augmented by a few larger pots, a mandevilla “Alice DuPont” (soft pink and not garish), and one hefty palm.

Mandevilla 2018

“Alice Dupont” was the first mandevilla to appear on the market.  Named for the owner of Winterthur, I found it in their gift catalog in the early 1990’s. I bought two, one was left in a sunroom where it climbed to the ceiling, through the roll-up bamboo blinds and was left there, dead, for at least a decade. The other mandevilla went to Saretta Barnet where it was well watered and climbed to her second story deck. This is a photograph of me standing next to it. 

Mandevilla 1992

Indoors, I have two myrtle topiaries in the smallest of pots, switching their locations every two weeks.  One is in a sunny window; the other on the mantelpiece in a deep interior room.  Two weeks in the sun and two in the dark seem to work well enough so that the plants don’t notice the change.  At the time of the switch-over they get minimal haircuts to trim their neatly rounded shape.

Sunny Beech Street Verge

Every day on my morning walk to the Mobil station to pick up the NY Times, I pass a sunny verge on Beech Street planted with pots of marigolds, cleome, tomatoes and odds and ends that need more sun than the homeowner’s backyard offers.  I have no such sunny verge on Livingston Street; my trash yard is the only place bright enough for annuals.  It was formerly home to garbage cans, old tools, and broken chairs.  It is now a gravel piazzetta, and houses to plants deserving more sun than I can offer elsewhere – zinnia and cosmos (flowers of childhood and my early gardens), pots of kitchen herbs and, the occasional odd experiment, this year nigella.

The Piazzetta

I’ve always planted pots with a single variety as opposed to elaborate mixed pots. If you pot up one variety to a container you can group them anyway you like, changing heights and relationships by placing a few on inverted pots.  I have only one mix – a rectangular zinc container at the front door.  It’s always a palette of green and white – caladium or a variegated-leaf geranium, bacopa and scutellaria.

Complex arrangements of three or more varieties in a pot with a strong architectural presence is fine in a house with a strong architectural presence, or lining restaurants and shops where you need to make a statement that will draw customers in.  Bread Alone in Rhinebeck is a fine example of this. Natalka Chas does all the flowers and seasonal pots, inside and out, in Rhinebeck and their other locations. She is a master of the combination of scale, design and variety. It’s worth dropping by.

If you want to experiment with complex pots, the most deliriously ambitious book on pot gardening is Ray Rogers' "Pots in the Garden". There is so much you can take from it, even if you only want a sprig or two. (Timber Press, Amazon, $18.90 new.)

In my heavily shaded garden I’m ruthless with colors that don’t work and have even been known to cut back the flowers of hostas. In pots enjoying a bit of sun I’m more forgiving. With my morning coffee I can sit alongside an unidentified blue flower in an old Guy Wolfe pot on an even older lichen-covered stone table and do what I seem to do best -- stare off into the distance, ostensibly thinking.

An Unidentified Morning Companion

---

Correction:

Yesterday's reference to the Winterthur catalog should have read "early 1990's", not "early 1900's."  I would not have been around to see it in the early 1900's.  Thanks go to Joseph Kaufman, a careful reader in Jerusalem.

How Does A Garden Start?

Ideally, you study a site, consider the exposure, assess the light levels, analyze the soil, and factor in your lifestyle and the needs of your family. In reality, you find a house, indulge your desire for tomatoes (even though you don’t have enough sun, and will not be around to water), satisfy your lust for climbing roses (even though you don’t have enough sun for this either, nor do you have anything for roses to climb on), and then you stumble through a few years of expensive mistakes.

A clematis happier than it's companion rose. 

In my most recent garden – and I expect my last – I was saved from some mistakes because I was a renter before I became an owner.  What I was willing and allowed to undertake was limited.  A little tinkering with an existing bed was about it.  When I approached my landlady with the desire to make an ambitious garden, she offered to sell me the house instead.    

From the garden’s standpoint, I had the advantage of having spent several seasons just staring and imagining.  An excellent practice if you have a few extra years.  The design of the garden evolved slowly with the help of skilled artisans and practitioners, but that is the subject of another post.   What is useful to know at this point is that over many years and several gardens I have established a few rules for myself, some honored and others honored only in the breach.

Rule 1:  Respect your neighbors and the neighborhood. You will not have this to consider if you own a large property with no neighbors or are in the middle of a forest.  But if you are in a village or on a block with sidewalks and neighbors, whatever you do should be compatible in style and feel with whatever is going on next door and down the block.  You may not like it, but deal with it kindly.  Don’t build walls and plant dense hedges.  Try something soft and seamless; a mixed shrub border works well.  Or arbors and trellises will soften something you wish to see less of, without obliterating your neighbor.

Be aware of the effect of your street-side planting, its relationship to the house, passersby, and the rest of the block.  I am not happy with my work in this department, and instead of figuring out a good solution I am wandering around the neighborhood looking at front yards that are drearier than mine.  Below is an example -– a very grand house surrounded on all side by gloomy, thorny, unkempt crabapples.

A screen planting helping neither the house nor the street. 

Rule 2:  Take your time.  Give careful thought not to what you want your garden to look like, but how you want to live in it.  Do you want to have your morning coffee outside the kitchen door?  Do you want to hide out in a corner of the garden where no one will find you?  What do you want to see from your favorite vantage point?  I have fought all comers to hold on to a particular view from the kitchen table, through a glass door and up into towering walnuts.  All I want is more of the same – larger glass panes, thinner door frames, more to see.

Rule 3:  You will be gardening in a hostile environment, no matter how benign it seems. Be prepared and stay strong. There will moles or voles, squirrels or rabbits, hail storms or droughts, endless rainfall or none, strange mold and fungus, leaf rollers, mysterious viruses, odd disappearances and occasional resurrections.

Rule 4:  Try and hold on to something of the past, of the gardeners who have been there before you. Whether it’s the flowers they planted or the tools they used, save and continue to use and nurture what you can. 

A forgotten, purely decorative well house. 

When I arrived on Livingston Street my neighbor Marian Faux already had a flower border on the narrow panel dividing our properties. Over these few years we doubled it and then doubled it again, pushing the margins of what will tolerate only partial sun and black walnuts.  It has at last, in its fourth year, “come into its own.”  By this I mean Marian and I have become more accepting of its limitations.  

Rule 5:  No matter how much you are prepared to spend, it will cost more.

Given all this, why do we even start a garden? Why do we persevere? Pick any summer day, and you will have your answer.