Using the Natural Enviroment in Landscaping | Gardener's Path

We arrived here in rural Rhode Island in time to catch the end of spring, and now summer is slipping into autumn. In these three months I can’t say that I have metamorphosed into a master gardener like Penelope Hobson or that our five New England acres in any way resemble the great gardens she created at Tintinhull.

Still, I have learned some things that I would like to share with you.

First of all, I have learned something about proportion. I remember that when I first started gardening in Baltimore, everything I planted in our townhouse garden outgrew its space by summer’s end.

Every August, my husband would complain that our garden was beginning to look like a jungle.

However, this spring when I began planting the flats of impatiens, coleus, and begonias that had filled the spaces between perennials in our city garden with color, they just sat in these large beds like displaced persons, looking lost and forlorn.

They do look a bit better now but our cool nights never allowed them to reach the size they grew to in Maryland. I had not taken into account the difference in scale and the difference in climate.

So, in July I stopped planting and instead began to look at neighboring gardens – and more importantly, to explore our own landscape.

The daylilies and plantain lilies were just coming into bloom.

As I raked several years’ accumulation of oak leaves from under the shrubs, I began to discover their shapes and to uncover clumps of small late-blooming plantain lilies, ferns, and rocks covered with moss and lichen. Like in Japanese gardens, these rocks are the true foundation of our New England garden.

During a late summer visit, my son and I decided to dig a