The Five Gardens of the Year.
Driving down Ponus Ridge in late March, I’ll see small patches of purple pushing up through the snow. Not in beds, right in the lawn. Crocus. One week and they’re gone. But for that brief window, they tell me one thing clearly: Winter is ending.
You can tell a lot about a house from the containers at the end of the driveway, changed out each season: what a chef might call an amuse-bouche. Or an entire landscape – trees, meadow, beds, that clearly didn’t happen all at once. Big or small, planned or improvised, every property here is carrying some version of a garden.
After crocus, daffodils follow, and there is no better show than 30,000 of them at Irwin Park. I plant 1,000 bulbs every year with an electric drill and a corkscrew auger. They naturalize in the woodland, where deer leave them alone. It sounds excessive, but this is the time of year when we all need a little color in our lives.
The late spring garden comes after the final frost. Peonies. They come back every year and resist the deer. This is also the time to address what’s getting away from you. In the meadow, that means Japanese stiltgrass. They say if you can stop it from going to seed for three years in a row, you win. Ask me in three years.
Roses sit in between. Late spring into summer. Waveny’s Rose Garden, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted — the same firm behind Central Park — was restored in the 1990s and again more recently. It’s still the backdrop for bridal pictures, but the roses are no longer the main event. They’re part of a larger planting.
The summer garden is something else entirely. The Land Trust sells tickets in late June to the firefly show. The meadow starts to carry its own weight. At the end of the driveway, the containers change out of spring — no more pansies. Geraniums, maybe lantana, something that can take the heat and be read from the road. Around the pool, it’s different again: tropical, more water, more attention.
Frank Sparks at the New Canaan Men’s Club grows champion dahlias. Last fall, this octogenarian pulled a Tom Sawyer on me — an evening at dusk, digging up precious tubers with surgical precision just before the first frost claimed them.
The fall garden is asters. The color shifts. The meadow holds later into the season. The containers change out geraniums and lantana for mums, ornamental kale, maybe grasses, and the end of fern season. At some point, they’ll be cut greens and branches for winter.
The winter garden has no flowers. It’s structure. Stone walls. The shape of the trees. The contour of the earth. Magnificent boulders. What’s left when everything else is gone.
And public gardens. The Beautification League (founded 1908) plants and maintains the roadside triangles and Irwin Park. The New Canaan Garden Club (founded 1909, a founding club of the Garden Club of America) maintains the rose gardens at Waveny.
There was a time — late 19th into early 20th century — when it was in fashion to bring rare and unusual plants to Connecticut. The New York Botanical Garden, founded in 1891, trained many of the people doing that work. Some of the species we see today — Japanese maples, rhododendrons, copper beech — trace back to New Canaan amateurs and professionals who studied there, planting specimen trees whose stories are lost but are now part of the town.
At Lee Garden on Chichester, Faith Kerchoff and a small group from the Beautification League maintain what started as George Lee’s pet project dating to the 1950’s. Two and a half acres of azaleas, rhododendrons, and a shade garden under a canopy of trees. Not static. They’re pruning, pulling invasives, replanting what doesn’t take. It’s often called a secret garden.
And then there are places that aren’t gardens at all. Bristow Bird Sanctuary, dating back to the 1920s and recently restored. Senator Symington’s property. Forty acres of Audubon land in Silvermine. Not planted or arranged. They’re held. Maintained. Left alone where possible, managed where necessary. Not everything that is cared for is designed.
In a town of million-dollar houses, it’s no surprise we maintain million-dollar gardens with the same enthusiasm. And we should. Like a grand piano in the living room, or books on the shelf, a garden says something about the owner that fine moldings and trendy carpet never will.
The meadow is something else again. Our land trust is restoring meadows on Canoe Hill, Davenport Ridge, and Silvermine. There’s been a lot of interest in meadows lately, but they don’t just happen. You have to put them back. Native species, one by one, because they are food. They work together. They bring in bees, butterflies, birds, insects, and the things that eat them.
Bill McDonald’s meadow has been 40 years in the making. Bill’s secret to one million fireflies starts with clean water sources and no pesticides. The synchronous fireflies show in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, draws massive crowds for a few weeks each year. What he has here, on a smaller scale, no busses, no lottery access, is the same idea — and it’s rare, and it’s priceless.
Left alone for a decade, my wetland meadow was overrun with Japanese stiltgrass, an invasive that crowds out natives and provides no food or habitat. Restoring it means three years of pulling or cutting to prevent seeding, while reintroducing wetland species that bloom across the season and can live with the deer. The accompanying chart is one way to make sense of what feels chaotic and random, helping a self-taught gardener know what to expect.
Buyers coming out from the city often ask what it costs to maintain one of these gardens. The answer is whatever you are capable of. These gardens expand. To look their best, they can consume us. They’ll take all you give them. For some people, that becomes the reason to leave. Sellers tell me, “If I can’t take care of it, I must pass it on.”
For many of us, gardening connects us with our childhood and family. Digging in the dirt with our parents. Learning where food comes from. Mowing the lawn for an allowance. The smell of freshly cut grass. Or just driving New Canaan’s narrow streets in summer and catching a whiff of something in bloom.
When we bought our house on Oenoke Lane, one tree crowded the pool. Too big, too awkward. We cut it back by half, figuring it was a junk tree and might have to go. The next year it produced one gorgeous, oversized Granny Smith apple, and we were hooked.
John Engel is a broker on the Engel Team at Douglas Elliman and an iPhone gardener, using the latest plant identification app to divide the world into flowers and weeds. The discovery of hundreds of invasive euonymus on his property demanded action. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Check out John Engel’s Podcast, Boroughs & Burbs, the National Real Estate Conversation here.
Read this article on the New Canaan Sentinel website here.
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