rhododendrons beneath the birches
The exquisite flowers of mountain laurel

Robert Gillmore’s Residential Landscapes

Robert Gillmore’s best-known gardens are Evergreen, his woodland garden in Goffstown, New Hampshire, and The Birchwood, his woodland garden in Montgomery, Vermont, but his work also includes major residential landscapes in Bedford, Dublin, Fremont, Hillsborough, Manchester, and New Boston, New Hampshire, and Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Three of his gardens—Tiadnock, in Dublin, New Hampshire; Water’s Edge, in Bedford, New Hampshire; and the Nelson garden, in Manchester, New Hampshire—are described below. Others will be described (and illustrated) later.

Naturalistic Landscaping on a Minimountain

Around the turn of the 20th century, wealthy families from Boston, New York, and other urban centers began building large, handsome summer “cottages” in Dublin, New Hampshire.  They came to escape the heat of the city and to enjoy the area’s lakes, forests, and mountains—especially its views of Mount Monadnock, the iconic, ledge-topped summit after which the southwestern region of New Hampshire is named, and which had been made famous by such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  Dublin was New Hampshire’s equivalent of Bar Harbor, Maine; the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts; and the Adirondack Mountains of New York: rural retreats for the rich that were both rustic and luxurious at the same time.

Most of Dublin’s mansions commanded views of Dublin Lake or Monadnock itself and often both.  They were big enough to accommodate large families, visiting relatives and other guests, and squads of servants.  Many were built in the Shingle Style, so called because they were clad, not in imposing brick or stone, but with simple wooden shingles, often stained dark brown, which made these often-massive arks actually resemble humble country cottages—despite the fact that they were often ten times as large.

Tatnock was one of Dublin’s grandest summer “cottages.”  It sits atop its own minimountain above Dublin Lake, and it looks not so much up at Mount Monadnock as across to it.

Tatnock is approached on a .3-mile drive that climbs through the woods on long, elegant switchbacks.  After the first 500 feet, the road switches dramatically back to the right, curves to the left, and soon levels off in front of a large, weathered shingled structure.  It’s a spacious three-bay garage/barn with what was originally an apartment for live-in staff in the back.

Here the road makes another left turn, thereby completing a broad switchback to the left, and immediately passes a vast, solid drift of ferns carpeting a steep slope on the right.

Now the road becomes a corniche on the edge of Tatnock’s little mountain.  On the right, the land rises up through a pretty, open, sometimes grassy woods.  On the left, the road is both bounded and supported by a low, wide, smooth wall—an unbroken, 600-foot-long band of cut and fitted stone that doesn’t end until it reaches the mansion itself.  Beyond the wall, the forest falls away so steeply that only the tops of the trees can be seen.

The corniche makes a long, gradual, rightward curve around the eastern slope of the mountaintop.  Then it curves more sharply as it bends along the southern slope of the promontory.

Suddenly you see the manor house, on the left, and, left of the house, the long, 3,000-foot-high ridge of Monadnock, sweeping up to the horizon less than a mile to the southeast.

The handsome, dark-shingled, two-story residence rests snugly on the edge of its mountaintop, where it captures not only its awesome view of Monadnock, but a near-180-degree panorama of forests rolling to the horizon.

The road levels off and runs parallel to the long axis of the mansion, passing tall, thick plantings of ancient shrubbery—rhododendrons, mountain laurel, mountain andromeda, and highbush blueberry—on both sides of the road.

Finally, the road ends at a small parking area near the northwest corner of the house and close to a cutting garden and potager enclosed in a handsomely crafted solid wooden fence stained the same dark color as the house.

The Pinetum

Coleman and Susie Townsend purchased Tatnock in 1993, and they spent most of the following summers restoring the house and refurbishing the overgrown gardens immediately surrounding it.

When Coleman first called me, in 2010, he was ready to do more work on the grounds, and especially to start working farther away from the house.  After we toured the property, we agreed that my first project would be the gray granite ledge on the east side of the residence.

This vast, rolling rock—nearly 75 feet at its widest point, almost 150 feet at its longest—is like the bare summit of Monadnock itself and dozens of other ledgy hilltops where centuries of fierce wind and rain have scrubbed away thin soils and exposed the bedrock beneath.

Coleman had already imagined that the ledge could be an exciting naturalistic landscape, an idealized version of a New England mountaintop.

Before I arrived, he had asked his talented caretaker, Tom Vanderbilt, to remove the remaining patches of dirt and weeds that nature had still not stripped away from the rock.  (A combination of a power washer and a shovel did the job.)

When Tom had finished, the surface of the ledge included handsome, smooth, mostly rounded convex rock—most of which had already been exposed and polished by nature—and several rather rough, not-so-attractive concavities, many of which had only recently been cleaned out.

The concavities, however, were not a problem; they were an excellent opportunity.  This is why:

The most scenic mountaintops are never only ledges.  They’re ledges interspersed with hardy trees and shrubs—junipers, spruces, and blueberry bushes, for example—which create a beautiful contrast to the rock.  In fact, these ledge-and-shrub compositions are what make many mountaintops natural rock gardens.

I proposed that we transform the ledge into a naturalistic ledge garden by filling the rough concavities with loam and adding plants.  Coleman agreed.

How we chose the best plants for the ledge was an excellent illustration of how landscape designers begin by selecting categories of plants rather than specific varieties.

  • For one thing, we wanted mainly low plants because the ledge lies on the sight line between Tatnock and Mount Monadnock, and we wanted nothing that would block any view of the mountain (or, for that matter, any other part of the vista).
  • We also wanted evergreen plants, because we wanted to enjoy foliage year-round, not only in the warmer months.
  • We especially wanted evergreen shrubs, because they would mass in and create year-round shade—just like a tree canopy in a forest.  This low shade cover would suppress weeds and help keep the soil cool and moist—especially important on this sunny, windy site where soil might quickly dry out and weeds might flourish.
  • We also wanted creeping evergreen shrubs that eventually would not only cover the soil beneath them but also spread luxuriously over the ledge.  That requirement eliminated virtually all broadleaf evergreens (such as rhododendrons and laurel), nearly all of which grow upright, not along the ground. It also ruled out many needle evergreen shrubs as well.
  • Finally, we wanted needle evergreen shrubs that would withstand not only harsh winds, but also the intense heat that the ledge produces on sunny summer days.

All these considerations pointed to junipers and pines, both of which tolerate heat better than spruces and firs (which prefer cool, moist conditions) and which suffer wind better than hemlocks.

For the most exposed, central part of the ledge, we chose ‘Albyn’s prostrata,’ a variety of Scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris) that, like all Scotch pines, is very hardy—it’ll survive even in Zone 3 (average minimum temperature: -40 degrees Fahrenheit).  It spreads six to eight feet wide, but grows less than a foot high in windy sites like this one.  Plus it has a unique picturesque, irregular growth habit that connotes the windswept character of a mountaintop.

To add variety to the planting, we also chose Juniperus horizontalis ‘Bar Harbor.’ It grows only 6 to 12 inches high, it spreads as much as 8 feet wide, and, like many junipers, it’s hardy to Zone 3.  We planted it along the strip of grass beside the upper part of the ledge and in the less exposed lower section.

We also added a dwarf white pine (Pinus strobus) for accent in one of the larger masses of ‘Albyn’s prostrata.’

Tom began the project by filling in most of the concavities with loam.  That, of course, did two things at once: It buried the ugly parts of the ledge and it created planting pockets.  Happily the pockets were deep enough to hold enough loam to plant the shrubs, and many were large enough, long enough, and/or close enough together so they made possible large, solid drifts of evergreens that trailed down the rock.

I planted the shrubs about three feet apart—close enough so they would mass in soon—and I added generous amounts of peat moss to the backfill to help keep the soil moist.

When I was done, we christened the ledge “The Pinetum,” the venerable word for a garden composed entirely of needle evergreen (coniferous) plants.

Like the mountain view from the Birchwood, the Evergreen Foundation’s woodland garden in Montgomery, Vermont, the view of Monadnock from Tatnock is most dramatic when you can see not only the top and upper slope of the mountain, but its entire three-mile-long face, which sweeps more than a 1,000 feet up from the deep valley in front of it.

This sublime view was needlessly obscured by more than half a dozen giant white pines growing on the bluff on the eastern edge of the Pinetum.  Coleman agreed that the trees should disappear, and when Tom cut them down, he opened up a perfect, uncluttered panoramic vista of Monadnock.  Gardening-by-subtraction rarely yields such stunning results.

Conveniently, the bluff at the edge of the Pinetum plunges hundreds of feet into the forest.  Most of this precipitous slope drops so far that most trees growing on it will never block the view of Monadnock.  Only trees on the upper part of the slope—those nearest the Pinetum—could ever obscure the vista.

To present this from happening, Tom regularly trims the uppermost slope with a weed whacker.  The results of the cutting, however, are never—can never—be attractive, so the cut area need to be screened from view.

That was accomplished by planting an irregular row of evergreen shrubs along the very edge of the bluff.

Along the rim of the more exposed upper part of the Pinetum, I planted two-foot-high Big Tuna mugo pines.  Like other mugos, they’re very hardy—they’ll survive even in Zone 2—they grow very slowly, and, on this windy site, they’ll grow no more than eight or ten feet tall (and that only after many years).  The mugos are tall enough to hide the upper slope directly below them, but they’ll never grow so high that they’ll hide any of Mount Monadnock.  They also complement the other needle evergreen shrubs in the Pinetum.  In all, they’re a perfect plant for the job.

Along the edge of the lower Pinetum I added a row of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia).  It’s not as tough as the mugos or other pines—it’s hardy only to Zone 4 (average minimum temperature: -30 degrees Fahrenheit)—and it doesn’t like harsh winds.  But the lower Pinetum is more sheltered than the upper, and the new laurel is especially valuable because it extends an existing row of laurel on the west side of the Pinetum (see below).  Like the Big Tuna mugos, the laurel is high enough to hide the unsightly cutting on the upper slope of the forest; but it’ll grow no more than six or eight feet high, so it’ll never obscure Monadnock.

Coincidentally, there’s another group of mugo pines along the western edge of the Pinetum.  Unlike the Big Tunas, they’re immense: as much as 12 feet high—taller than most mugos ever grow.  And that’s their shortest dimension:

They’ve been bent over by decades of wind and snow, so some of their limbs, while not high, are as much as 20 feet long, and some branches, sprawling over the ledge, are an incredible 10 inches thick—as thick as the limbs of many large trees!  This magnificent mass of shrubbery may be more than a century old, because, for all we know, it was planted when Tatnock was built. These ancient trees are not only an imposing mass of handsome evergreen foliage.  They’re also an astonishing collection of branch sculpture.

What should we do about them? Coleman wondered.

Cherish them, I answered.  Amazing pines like these take more than a lifetime to create. They’re unavailable at any nursery at any price.

Coleman agreed, and I began to refurbish them by pulling out the few weedy herbaceous plants that cluttered the otherwise solid sweep of dark green foliage.

Then, as with any woody plant, I pruned away limbs that were dead, broken, or otherwise unsightly.  Many of the unattractive branches were the bare lower sections of large limbs that emerged from the ground in the shady bottom of the mass, which was much too dark to grow needles.  These bare limbs couldn’t be cut off, because the upper parts of the branches, which were exposed to the sun, supported the enormous plumes of needles that made the pines so impressive.

Instead of cutting these branches, I planted more mugos in front of them, and the new shrubs were just high enough to hide the bare lower stems.  The new mugos made the existing mass not only greener but fuller and lusher.

When the restoration was complete, the sweep of mugos became an even more impressive accent on the edge of the Pinetum.

There’s another striking mass of old shrubbery on the western edge of the lower Pinetum: a long row of mountain laurel, with skinny, lichen-encrusted limbs that reach as high as ten feet, and gnarly, hoary trunks that have grown more than six inches thick at the base.  Like the aged mugo pines farther north, these shrubs may well be more than a century old, and they exhibit a priceless picturesqueness that comes only with age.

These venerable plants had been left to face the elements alone for decades.  They were choked with goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria), tree seedlings, a tough wild spirea known as hardhack, and even a small white pine, all of which threatened not only the appearance but the very existence of the laurel.

I pulled out wheelbarrows full of unwanted brush and other weeds—the pine, alas, was so big I had to cut it down—and I pruned off piles of dead and broken limbs.  As usually happens, this subtraction made the laurel look fuller and more impressive all by itself.

To make it even lusher, however, I cut off some of the longest, leggiest, most unsightly branches, and luxurious flushes of new foliage soon exploded around the cuts.  That was no surprise, of course, because the foul weather had made the laurel super hardy over the years, and its root system had grown only bigger and stronger.  Removing competing plants left them with more water, nutrients, and light.  As Tom remarked, the grooming gave them “a fighting chance,” and they leapt at it.

A tongue of rock on the westernmost edge of the Pinetum extends between the ancient groves of laurel and mugo pines and ends beside the lawn that slopes away from the south side of the mansion.

Running through this part of the ledge is a shallow, natural rock tunnel—part staircase, part ramp—that makes a perfect walkway between the lawn and the lower Pinetum.

I made this pathway even clearer and more inviting by installing plants on each side of it—more mugo pines and sweeps junipers and, next to the lawn, a group of dwarf Colorado blue spruces.

I also created a wide, semicircular ledge step at the upper end of the walkway, at the edge of the lawn, simply by removing the turf that grew on top of it.  Another lovely example of gardening by subtraction.

Another big old shrub—a highbush blueberry—was growing by itself at the edge of the ledge walkway.  It was eight feet high and wide when I first saw it, and it made a handsome accent amid the evergreens.  As with the other old shrubs already on the site, I pruned away its dead wood, weeded its site, and, to give it even more presence, added several mid-height blueberries to the little island of dirt around it.  Now the lone blueberry is part of a larger grouping that gets more imposing every year.

The Woodland Garden

When I first toured Tatnock, I was delighted by the woods on the north side of the drive, opposite the main house.  They were filled with so many ornamental assets that they could be transformed into a handsome woodland garden at relatively little cost.

From the drive, the woods sloped upward, toward the highest point on the property.  Because of its thin, stony soil, most of the forest was dry and attractively open, with just a few oaks and other hardwood trees.  There were also attractive stone features, including handsome granite glacial erratics and a smooth, flat-topped ledge escarpment.

Happily, the woods right beside the drive was more level and slightly moister, and it supported carpets of moss, drifts of native blueberry bushes, and a few small hemlocks.  There were also large, robust sweeps of mountain andromeda (Pieris floribunda) and a few Catawba rhododendrons, all planted by a former owner.

Like Japanese andromeda (Pieris japonica), mountain andromeda is a most welcome ornamental plant.  It’s one of the hardiest broadleaf evergreens—it’ll survive in Zone 4; its shiny, dark green leaves resemble mountain laurel; and its fragrant, white, lily-of-the-valley-like flowers bloom in April and May.

But even though these woods were so close to the house—and right beside the road that led to it—and even though their existing aesthetic assets were visible from the road, they had received virtually no attention.  Like many residential woodlands, they simply languished, a diamond in the rough that remained (literally) uncut and unpolished.

After the Pinetum was finished, I persuaded Coleman that we should finally reclaim this jewel.

I began by grooming the site.  I gathered up the dead wood, and Tom carted it away.  I pulled up the brush and cut down the smaller hardwood trees (happily there was very little of either).  I enhanced the sweeps of andromeda and the blueberry patches by removing everything (except moss) growing within or around them.  When the andromeda and blueberries competed with each other, I favored, of course, the more glamorous andromeda (a no-brainer).

Then I laid out the paths so that they both led to and enhanced the best features of the site.  I curved them around the glacial erratics; between the carpets of moss; around the sweeps of blueberries and andromeda; and up the ledge escarpment and along its wide, smooth top, which afforded long views of Monadnock through the trees.

I made a new path beside the largest sweep of andromeda by pulling out the lowbush blueberry patch beside it.  In a wonderful symbiosis that happens often in naturalistic gardens, the rocks and the plants defined the paths, and the paths nicely offset the plants and the rocks.

Tom and I also smoothed out the natural ramp at the eastern end of the ledge by adding fill and coating the fill with a thin layer of topsoil.

When all this work was finished, the woods were no longer an uncertain, scruffy mishmash, but a neat, open, more attractive, more inviting landscape that made the most of its natural aesthetic assets.

As with most woodland gardens-in-the-making, however, its existing assets were not quite enough.  Some parts of the woods had enough trees, shrubs, rock, and moss to fill the space and define the paths.  But much of the woods was too open, too empty.  It had enough trees and rocks, but it needed more plants—more shrubs—in the middle layer, not only to furnish the woodland, but also to create interest and invite people to enter and explore the space.

What kind of shrubs?  The best plants for the woods are broadleaf evergreens (such as mountain andromeda).  They tolerate shade, they’re hardy (to as much as Zone 4), they produce often-striking year-round foliage, and many sport colorful berries or flowers.  Two broadleaf evergreens—rhododendrons and mountain laurel—produce the most colorful flowers of all of them, but rhododendrons can create flowers in the shade more readily than mountain laurel.  That’s why rhodies are arguably the very best shrubs of all for woodland gardens.

In the relatively open eastern end of the woods, I added Catawba rhododendrons.  Small clusters of Catawbas created a broad, funnel-shaped entrance beside the drive, while more rhodies delineated paths that led up to, and along the top of, the long ledge escarpment.  Still more rhodies defined other paths.

For variety, I also lined the paths with a small cluster of mountain laurel and two groups of leucothoe, a low evergreen shrub with pointed leaves shaped like the head of a spear.  Leucothoe’s small clusters of small flowers are as modest as rhododendron blossoms are spectacular, so it’s best used only occasionally, as an accent, and/or when a small plant is required.  I used it in Tatnock’s woodland garden where I didn’t want to hide ledges or larger evergreen shrubs behind the leucothoe.

I also added hemlocks to the upper slope of the new garden, both to separate it from the ungardened woods higher up the hillside, and to give the new garden a stronger edge.  To make the new planting look as natural as possible, I scattered the hemlocks in a very irregular line.  I also planted many of them next to the existing hemlocks, so they would look like they were part of a colony of trees, of different heights, already on the site.  Because the slope gives all the hemlocks extra “height,” the trees provide the woodland garden with a very rough, naturalistic wall, which both offsets the shrubs and rocks below it and helps give the garden a strong presence, especially when seen from the drive.  This effect will only increase as the hemlocks grow.

To help ensure that all the new shrubs and trees in the woods would flourish, I planted all of them in small mounds of new loam, which I amended with peat moss.

The open, sunny west end of the Woodland Garden was marred by a large utility pole: Its long, straight, obviously non-natural shape—fully visible from the drive—ruined the otherwise natural-looking character of the woods around it.

The solution?  Make the pole disappear.

One way to make an unwanted object in the garden less visible (if not totally disappear) is to paint it dull black.  That color seems to be the least visible one in the palette, partly because it’s arguably the dimmest, darkest of all.  You might think that another color—gray, dark green, or dark brown, for three examples—might be better camouflage, but dull black seems to stand out less than any other.

Tom painted both the pole and its metal guy wires.  But even dull black failed to make the pole disappear completely, so we decided to surround it with evergreen trees.  We chose white pines, partly because they’re among the least expensive, fastest growing evergreen trees in cold climates; partly because they tolerate heat and drought better than other evergreens; but mainly because there was already a large white pine tree near the pole, and the new pines would complement it.

Now the pole is almost completely shrouded by a thick sweep of pine foliage.  And it’ll disappear totally when the pines grow and fully mass in.

Around the House

After the Woodland Garden was planted, Coleman turned my attention to the north side of the main house.

To reach the front door of the building, you descend a handsome flight of fieldstone steps from the drive and alight in a charming, almost secret sunken garden.  It’s about 25 feet square; and it’s embraced on three sides by the wings of the house, and on the fourth side by a large boulder and the small mound of shrubbery that separates the sunken garden from the drive.

The floor of the sunken garden is a simple carpet of grass, but the grass was ringed on all sides by a perennial bed lushly planted with some of Coleman’s favorite flowers.

Over the years, he successfully maintained the bed himself.  Like many amateur landscape gardens, it was a bit busy—but only a bit: The busyness was easily fixed by removing some of the less happy perennials and expanding the size of some of the remaining groupings.  It became a satisfying linear bouquet of flower colors and foliage textures.

Farther away from the house are thick stands of large shrubs—notably rhododendrons, mountain laurel, and highbush blueberries.  They line the drive, and they fill the oval island in the center of the loop at the end of the road, near the entrances to the house.  Like the mugo pines and mountain laurel next to the Pinetum (described above), they were planted decades ago.  They’re now as much as eight feet high and many are even wider.

Like the shrubs near the Pinetum, they were all healthy.  They needed only grooming.  I pruned off all the dead and broken branches, thinned out awkward limbs, and, where necessary, reshaped several specimens. I also cut back branches of adjacent shrubs that were making a visual mess by growing into each other.  Tom carried off piles of debris.

When we were done, the shrub masses were neater, more gardenlike.  Almost every plant looked better, and every one now occupied its own discrete space, where it could be easily seen and appreciated.

When I began working at Tatnock, most of the main house was nicely edged by foundation plantings (including the flowers in the sunken garden, described above).  A notable exception was the east side of the house: From its northeast corner to the screened porch on its southeast corner, the only foundation plant was a single inkberry (Ilex glabra), and the lush plantings just around the corner, on the north side of the house (described above), made the deficiency glaring.

This was an opportunity to add a sweep of Old Gold junipers (Juniperus chinensis ‘Armstrong Aurea’), which would bring rare year-round yellow-gold foliage color to the property.  Beginning at the northeast corner, I planted the row of junipers along the foundation, then around the inkberry, then along the foundation again, ending the sweep just before the stone steps leading up to the porch.  The junipers nicely frame the inkberry, which is now a graceful small tree.  Also, the junipers direct the eye to the porch steps.  On this windy site—just a few feet from the upper edge of the Pinetum—the junipers will probably grow no more than two feet high and four to six feet wide, which is a good size for the space.

In front of the new junipers is a narrow strip of grass that connects the drive to both the porch and the upper Pinetum.

On the eastern edge of the grass, opposite the Old Gold junipers, is a stocky young pine tree.  When I first saw it, it was marred by a few courses of scruffy dying branches near the ground.  I pruned the offending limbs and added a circle of junipers below the tree.

On the northern edge of the grass, next to the drive, I saw part of a smooth, flat rock barely visible below the turf.  That, I thought, might be a vestige of a stone walkway that once led from the drive to the house.  I dug the turf away from the stone; it turned out to be about 14 inches across—just about right for a stepping stone—and it was still firmly seated in the ground.  Then I guessed where another stone might be and dug there; I uncovered a second stone, about the same size and shape as the first.  I repeated the process four times, with similar happy results.  When I was done, I had revealed a charming curving pathway that led from the drive to the beginning of a path that ran between the plantings on the south side of the house.  Less than an hour of gardening by subtraction revealed a feature that must have taken at least three or four hours to create.

South Garden

The south facade of the main house, and the space just south of it, is Tatnock’s most formal landscape.  The middle of the facade, on the first floor of the house, is a loggia supported by wide white columns with Doric capitals.  Descending from the loggia are twin flights of massive stone steps, one heading east, one west.  The classical, bilateral symmetry of the steps echoes and reinforces the classical architecture and symmetry of the loggia.

In the center of the vertical stone face of the stair mass is a formal fountain, with sculpture on the rock wall behind it and a traditional cedar bench in front of it.

The bench faces a large, level rectangle of grass, on the far side of which is a long, rectangular ornamental pool.  Like the stairs, the fountain, the sculpture, and the bench, the pool is centered on the loggia, and it reinforces the bilateral symmetry and the measured, formal geometric style of the entire composition.

Along the back side the pool is a solid sweep of P. G. hydrangea, which separates this part of the grounds from the naturalistic South Garden below it.

This imposing space was complete before I came to Tatnock, and it needed no further work.

The South Garden was another matter.  It’s a collection of (mainly) large deciduous shrubs and herbaceous perennials, and most them had grown so big and tall that—like the mature shrubs on the north side of the house (described above)—they were growing into each other and threatening to make a visual mess that, if unchecked, would get only worse every year.  Also, like the ancient mountain laurel on the edge of the Pinetum (described above) parts of the South Garden were being invaded by goutweed, bracken fern, hardhack, and other unwanted plants.

The South Garden also included an artificial pool and a 50-foot-long stream that Tom had built years before.  It was hard to see the water features because they, too, were badly overgrown.  Also, much of the pool was out of sight because the garden paths approached only its eastern edge, and no path came closer than two yards away from it.

As I did elsewhere at Tatnock, I began with gardening by subtraction.  I opened up the streambed simply by weeding out undesirable plants and pruning the ones that remained.

Coleman and I opened up the east side of the pool by relocating a small group of sheep laurel (Kalmia angustifolia) elsewhere. In their place we routed the path to the very edge of the basin.

On the west side of the pool, I uncovered the ledges leading up to the water by removing the shallow turf and two dozen small tufts of blue fescue on top of it.  The fescue was relocated to the bare ground below a large mountain laurel nearby; now, instead of choking in the turf grass, it’s thriving in its very own space, slowly becoming a solid sweep of blue foliage that nicely offsets the laurel.

After the ledge was bare, I added beds of loam and relocated Japanese barberries (Berberis thunbergii) to the site.  Because they’re among the showiest plants on the grounds, they do several things well: Along with the ledge, they’re a strong, contrasting focal point on the southern edge of the South Garden.  They draw the eye upward from the grass, toward the pool.  And they define a route along the ledge that invites passersby to ascend the rock and look at the water.

Artist’s Studio

About 50 feet below the South Garden is a handsome, square, dark-shingled, one-room cottage known as the Artist’s Studio.  On one side of the building is a flat square of turf, about the same size of the Studio, that’s bound on two sides by a three-foot-high fieldstone wall.

This little outdoor room has the property’s most intimate view of Mount Monadnock.  One casually leans against the stone wall and gazes, not up but over at the mountain, which is only a few miles away and looks even closer.

When I first saw the Artist’s Studio, it seemed unconnected to the rest of the property, mainly because it was separated from the South Garden by a vast sweep of empty lawn.  There was no path, no obvious route to the Studio, nothing (other than the building itself) that invited you to walk down to it.

My solution was a grass path, edged by ledge and cranberry cotoneasters, (Cotoneasters   beginning just below a wooden footbridge across the artificial stream in the South Garden, and ending at a short flight of stone steps in front of the Artist’s Studio.

I began by uncovering all the rock and ledge that—like the rock next to the western edge of the pool (described above)—was only an inch or so beneath the grass above the Artist’s Studio.  When I was done, I had revealed two attractive masses of rock and ledge, each a yard or so wide and several yards long, with a long, narrow strip of grass between them.  The grass, framed by the rock, became the path to the Artist’s Studio.

I made the composition larger by adding a sweep of 24 cranberry cotoneasters along the outer edges of the rock/ledge and in the few remaining pockets of earth within the granite.  The gray rock nicely offsets the cotoneasters, which cascade over it.  The new vignette not only leads you from the South Garden to the Studio. It also breaks up what was a much-too-large sheet of grass.

The Drive

Tatnock’s dramatic .3-mile driveway is much more than just the road to the house.  It’s a private parkway through the forest.  With Tom’s help, I also groomed this forest, hauling away dead wood, weeding out small trees, and pruning a few larger ones to emphasize their stout trunks.

When this gardening-by-subtraction was complete, the drive curved through an open, parklike woodland of handsome, mostly large trees and vast sweeps of ferns.

I suggested to Coleman that, if we planted the drive with sweeps of mountain laurel and rhododendrons, it would be an extraordinary .3-mile-long garden lined by low walls of red, pink and white blossoms from mid-spring to summer.

Unfortunately, I had to stop working at Tatnock—as well as several other projects in Dublin—in 2013 because I needed to attend to Evergreen, [link] the Evergreen Foundation’s woodland garden in Goffstown, New Hampshire, and to begin work on the Birchwood, [link] the Foundation’s second woodland garden, in Montgomery, Vermont.

I never found time to work on Tatnock again, and—after 29 years of ownership— the Townsends sold the property in 2022.

The couple were extraordinary stewards of an extraordinary site.  Coleman reached out to very able landscape designers and avidly embraced their ideas.

Tatnock was easily my most exciting, most rewarding project.  The experience was humbling.  There is so much beauty here, I told myself; you are privileged to be here; be worthy of the place. Whatever you do, do no harm.  But I also bathed myself in the joy of the experience. My tape deck boomed Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture while I shaped century-old shrub masses; the glorious musical accompaniment was worthy of the moment.

Coleman’s tenure, and the work of his designers, is celebrated in an article by Robin Sweetser in the November/December 2025 issue of New Hampshire Home.  Titled “A Unique High-Altitude Garden,” the 7-page story includes 7 photographs by Joe Valentine, a talented amateur landscape gardener and photographer.  (Juniper Hill Farm, Joe’s garden in Francestown, New Hampshire, has also been featured in New Hampshire Home in an article written by Robin and illustrated by his photographs.  The story, “Winter at Juniper Hill Farm,” appeared in the January/February 2026 issue.)

A final note: Because different professionals shaped Tatnock, the property has become a palimpsest: Later designers changed—overlayered—at least some of the work of their predecessors.  One always hopes that every change was—and always will be—for the better.

Consulting the Genius* of Water’s Edge

Named for its location on a pond in Bedford, Water’s Edge is one of the best designed residential gardens in New Hampshire, and it was once on the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program.**

Its success is mainly the result of four things:

One: Mature trees and shrubs—both single specimens and large, luxurious sweeps—form lush plant masses and create big bursts of both foliage and flower color automatically, with only minimal care.

Two: A large, natural-looking berm, planted with rhododendrons, blocks the sight and sound of traffic on Wallace Road, thus preserving the property’s estate-like privacy and tranquility.

Three: Groves of mountain laurel and massive white pines, already growing on the site, have been groomed—through a process I call gardening by subtraction—to create impressive woodland gardens, and:

Four: A wooden arched bridge, itself a charming bit of garden sculpture, links the shore of the pond to a tiny island, thereby incorporating the island into the garden. The island expands the garden’s views across the water.

All four features are described in detail below.

Water’s Edge was built in 1987 by Jim Hamm, a professional contractor and talented amateur landscaper who also designed the property’s first plantings.

In 1996 Jim Ham sold Water’s Edge to Jack and Carol Booher, who completed the landscape. Carol gave the property its name.

Water’s Edge demonstrates how you can create color and interest not only with the blossoms of annual and perennial flowers, which require considerable maintenance, but also with the flowers and especially the colorful foliage of trees and shrubs, which require little care.

The driveway at Water’s Edge descends to the house between slightly raised banks, making it an allée, or tunnel, of big, mature shrubs that rise above your head. These understandably popular plants—installed years ago by Jim Hamm—include:

  • Forsythia (Forsythia x intermedia), whose new leaves create huge displays of pure yellow for weeks in springtime;
  • Burning bushes (Euonymus alatus), *** named for their brilliant red fall foliage;
  • A row of purpleleaf sand cherries (Prunus x cistena), which sport dark purple leaves from spring through fall, and fragrant, tiny, pinkish white flowers in May;
  • Eight massed Japanese barberries (Berberis thunbergii atropurpurea),*** renowned for their intense dark red three-season foliage and red berries in autumn; and:
  • Golden Hinoki falsecypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Aurea’), whose evergreen needles are a warm golden yellow when young and bright green when older.

The shrubs are powerfully offset by junipers (Juniperis spp.), which cover the ground in thick evergreen carpets.

Water’s Edge also demonstrates how gardens are most impressive when plants are arranged in large sweeps or drifts.

A thick sweep of junipers, for instance, overhangs the entire 30-foot-long fieldstone wall that runs along the parking area in front of the garage, below the steep slope near the bottom of the driveway.

Above the junipers is a smaller sweep of forsythia, another clump of burning bush, and a cluster of bearberry cotoneaster (Cotoneaster dammeri). Like most cotoneasters, this species has little glossy leaves and red berries in the fall, and it’s known especially for its profusion of low branches that arch every which way. Unlike other cotoneasters, however, this one has a bonus: it’s evergreen, so its foliage can be enjoyed year round.

Still higher up the slope are two sweeps of spirea. One is Anthony Waterer (Spirea x bumalda ‘Anthony Waterer’), which produces carmine-pink flowers June through August as well as colorful deciduous foliage: reddish-purple, with pink highlights, when new; deep green when mature; and reddish-purple again in the fall. The other spirea is Goldmound (S. x b. ‘Goldmound’), which sports gold leaves from spring to fall and pink flowers in June and July.

Closer to the driveway is a Japanese tree lilac (Syringa reticulata), a splendid accent with fragrant, showy foot-long clusters of white flowers in June.

A birch (Betula), whose white bark provides year-round color, is another accent.

The concrete foundation of the house at Water’s Edge is nicely hidden year-round by these evergreen shrubs:

  • Meserve holly (Ilex x meserveae), valued for its lustrous, leathery, spiny, dark blue-green leaves.
  • Chinese junipers (Juniperus chinensis), whose sprightly arching branches make this species taller than creeping junipers.
  • P.J.M. rhododendrons (Rhododendron ‘P. J. M.’), which produce profuse lavender-pink flowers in April and evergreen leaves that turn mahogany in cold weather.
  • Emerald Gaiety euonymus (Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald Gaiety’), which sports variegated white-and-green foliage. Shade-tolerant evergreens, variegated euonymus cultivars are especially valuable because they create color—white or yellow—in the landscape automatically, year round, even in dim light. And because it’s a vine, euonymus can climb, bringing its color off the floor and onto the walls of outdoor rooms. The Emerald Gaiety at Water’s Edge spreads exuberantly around a lantern post and climbs up the brick wall of the attached two-car garage.

Opposite the house, on the edge of an evergreen woods, are wonderfully imposing sweeps of Catawba rhododendrons (Rhododendron catawbiense), some 12 feet high. Catawba rhodies have long, leathery evergreen leaves and big trusses of flowers in late May.

A Berm Creates Privacy and Tranquility

When I first saw Water’s Edge, its estate-like privacy and tranquility were both caused and compromised by its location. Most of the property is surrounded by either mature woods or a placid pond after which the little estate is named. But both the pond and the house—including two spacious elevated decks overlooking the pond—are barely 60 feet from Wallace Road, a busy traffic artery running north-south through Bedford.

Much of the road was partly screened by a belt of big white pines and Canadian hemlocks, but some of it—especially the section nearest the pond—was fully exposed. The sight and sound of cars, roaring by at 35 to 50 miles per hour, ruined the view and wrecked the otherwise placid mood of Water’s Edge. The noise actually made conversation difficult.

The solution was clear: Build a berm along Wallace Road.

Berms are ridges, made of sand-clay fill, gravel, sand, or similar inorganic material. They’re covered with loam and planted with trees or shrubs.

Berms are excellent sight and sound barriers, for many reasons:

  • They’re dense, so they block sound better than hedges and fences.
  • They’re opaque, so they block views completely.
  • They’re much cheaper to build than walls, and, unlike walls or fences, they cost nothing to maintain. (They can’t wear out—they’re dirt!)
  • Unlike fences, walls, and hedges, berms can be made any height and still be attractive.
  • Berms are also more neighborly than walls, fences, and hedges, because walls, fences, and hedges all look like privacy barriers. Berms don’t. Properly shaped and planted, they’re interesting land forms.
  • Berms are excellent platforms for plants, because the slope of a berm gives plants extra height and ensures that plants in the rear of a grouping are not hidden by plants in front.

Plants on berms, however, are not merely ornamental. They’re also like a hedge: they create even more screening on top of the berm and make it an even higher privacy barrier. Ten-foot-high shrubs atop a ten-foot-high berm, for instance, create a 20-foot-high barrier. Twenty-foot-tall trees on the same berm make a 30-foot barrier. And if the trees and shrubs are evergreen, the screening is effective year round.

Part of the berm at Water’s Edge is in heavy shade, so I planted it with rosebay rhododendrons (Rhododendron maximum).  Rhody maxies (as they’re often dubbed) are not as colorful as most other rhodies, mainly because their flower trusses aren’t as large or profuse. But they’re terrific screening plants, mainly because they grow big—more than 12 feet tall in cold climates. They’re also one of the few broadleafed evergreens that: (1) are hardy to Zone 3;  (2) bloom in July, when many shrubs have already finished flowering, and (3) blossom even in serious shade. Actually maxies abhor direct sunlight and are happiest in medium shade.

I planted a row of four-foot-tall maxies along the crest, or highest part, of the berm. The combined height of the berm and the shrubs on top of it provides almost eight feet of screening in the lowest section of the berm and more than 12 feet in the highest part. As the maxies grow, they’ll provide ever higher and thicker screening.

A single role of shrubs, however, looks stilted and very unnatural in a naturalistic garden; so I added more maxies below the crest. Now a pleasantly irregular grouping of shrubs swags gracefully up and down the upper slope of the berm. As the shrubs grow and mass in, they’ll look more impressive with every passing year.

The crest and upper slope of the berm near the pond is somewhat sunny, so I planted it with Catawba rhododendrons. The lower slope of the inside, or pond side, of the berm is shaded, so Carol Booher added colorful shade-tolerant evergreen ground covers: Vinca minor and Moonshadow euonymus (Euonymus fortunei ‘Moonshadow’), which has lemon yellow splotches in the center of its variegated leaves. In time the plants will cover the slope, and the euonymus will light up the entire space year- round.

The Catawba rhododendrons on the road side of the berm have massed in, and they look like a very tall, very wide rhododendron hedge. To the enjoyment of anyone driving by, they create a stunning 700-square-foot sweep of pink flowers every spring.

The Pine Grove

Nature has endowed Water’s Edge with many gifts. One of them is a grove of mature white pine trees and smaller Canadian hemlocks beside the pond after which the property is named.

The coarse trunks of the pines—some more than eight feet around and at last three feet wide near the base—are stunning natural sculpture, immense pillars of a great natural cathedral.

Together the pines create a canopy so thick that you can barely see the sky, and the grove has a hallowed dimness on even the brightest day.

When these giant trees shed their foliage, a blizzard of slender needles rains down and covers the floor of this space with a thick, soft, light brown carpet. The grove is so dark and the carpet so deep that nothing but the trees grows here.

This grove is an astonishingly simple composition consisting of its light brown needle carpet, gray-brown tree pillars, and a green wall of young pines and hemlocks in the background.

The grove is that rare and wonderful place where nature has not only created a garden all by itself, but, ironically, a garden more sublime than many human-made gardens.

When I first entered the grove with Carol Booher, I was awestruck.

“My God,” I exclaimed. “Look at what you have here!”

Carol didn’t share my emotion at first, partly because she saw not only the huge trees but also a jumble of fallen limbs littering the needle carpet, as well as more bare dead branches sticking out of the big, beautiful trunks of the pines, and a few small, scrawny deciduous trees cluttering the otherwise powerful simplicity of the grove.

I explained to Carol that I was looking past the clutter. I paraphrased Michelangelo’s famous comment that a sculpture already exists in the stone and that the sculptor merely reveals it by chipping away the stone around it.  Similarly—in fact, even more so, I said—this magnificent pine grove is already here. We simply have to reveal it by getting rid of the clutter.

What it needed, I said, was gardening by subtraction, a grooming process that, like Caesar’s Gaul, I divide into three parts:

  • Cleaning Up is removing all dead wood, standing and fallen, and any other debris or rubbish from the site. An exception can be made for a truly picturesque rotting log, one covered with moss or other attractive plants. But virtually all other dead wood is just litter that only detracts from, never enhances the composition, and should be carried away.
  • Weeding is removing any live plants that detract from the composition, and
  • Pruning is removing any parts of plants (usually branches) that detract from the site.

Gardening by subtraction is wonderfully economical landscaping. It requires the purchase of no plants or anything else. Nothing, after all, is added to the site; things are only subtracted. The garden is enhanced by labor alone.

Carol and her husband Jack pruned the dead limbs and weeded out the small trees, and Carol hired a high school student across the street to help her carry away the debris.

Carol then planted large sweeps of pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis). This reliable, shade-loving evergreen ground cover added welcome splotches of color to the brown needle carpet.

More important, the edges of the pachysandra beds define the paths through the grove and invite one to walk through it. One path runs beside the pond, providing continuous views of the water.

The Pine Grove, as it was soon christened, has reached its potential. Thanks only to gardening by subtraction, and a bit of careful planting, it’s now an extraordinary little woodland garden.

The Laurel Woods

Another of nature’s great gifts to Water’s Edge are large patches of native mountain laurel. At least 60 different shrubs —some as high as six feet; many grouped in large, impressive sweeps—are scattered throughout the woods.

Put another way, when the Boohers acquired Water’s Edge at least $10,000 worth of laurel (at retail prices) came with the property, and the shrubs were already planted, already acclimated to the site, and mostly flourishing.

Much of the laurel is in the relatively open woods opposite the front of the house. Here it was accompanied by still more gifts of nature, including wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) and partridgeberry (Mitchella repens), both native ground covers which produce thick mats of small, shiny evergreen leaves and red berries. There were also mosses and a patch of foxglove, a biennial that had apparently emigrated from elsewhere on the property

Like the Pine Grove, however, the Laurel Woods (as they were later christened) also contained unwanted sun-loving plants—tiny deciduous trees, little honeysuckles and other deciduous shrubs, as well as grasses and weeds—all growing scrawny in the shade, culturally and visually out of place in a shady woods whose essence is large gray-brown tree trunks and, especially, shiny, leathery, dark green evergreen foliage.

In the dim light, the impact of the dark and often low-growing evergreen foliage is easily compromised by anything that confuses the composition, or obscures or draws attention away from it. Any competing focal points must be subtracted.

Carol carefully weeded out the offending plants. A bit more light, water, and nutrients are now available for the evergreens. With less competition, the laurel is growing fuller and the evergreen ground covers are spreading.

In the empty spaces between the evergreens, Carol added small accents: shade-loving perennials such as variegated hosta, bleeding hearts, and brunnera.

Through only the wonderful, paradoxical economy of gardening by subtraction (plus a few more plants), Carol transformed a messy woods into a lovely woodland garden. She made the Laurel Woods the best that it could be.

Bridging the Island

Water’s Edge includes an especially fetching feature: a little roundish island, about 20 feet across, tucked into a small semicircular cove at the western end of its pond.

The curving edge of the islet roughly parallels the curve of the shore, just two or three yards away. The water between the shore and the island is a picturesque little channel edged with big rocks, which, thanks to shade and moisture, are partly covered with a thin coat of colorful lichen.

The nearly flat, mostly mossy surface of the island sits just two or three feet above the water, and when I first saw it, it was largely unplanted except for two hemlocks.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I asked Carol, if we could make the island part of the garden? People don’t want to just look at an island, I said. They want to walk to it, check it out, and savor its views across the water.

And wouldn’t an arched bridge, linking the island to the shore, also be a handsome piece of sculpture? I asked.

Carol thought it would, and I started to look into styles, manufacturers, prices, etc. An attractive, sturdy structure, I learned, would cost at least $1,000 and closer to $2,000.

When I returned barely two weeks later I had a delightful surprise: There, in place, was an attractive low arched bridge. Carol and Jack had made it themselves. And their design was ingenious.

At a lumberyard they had bought two pressure-treated planks, each 16 feet long, 12 inches wide, and 2 inches thick. They laid the planks on their sides at the end of the parking area in front of their garage, carefully placing them parallel to the edge of the asphalt.

Then, according to Jack, they took out “a big orange extension cord.” Carol held one end of the 25-foot cord at the edge of the parking area opposite the planks; Jack held the other end beside the boards. Then he used the cord like a giant drafting compass to draw an arc, with a Magic Marker, on each board. His arc began on the lower edge of each plank, two feet from the lower left corner; it rose to about eight inches high at the mid-point, and ended two feet from the lower right corner.

Then Jack used a jigsaw to saw along the arc. When he was done, he had cut out a 12-foot-long half moon—actually half of an ellipse—eight inches at its highest point. He fastened it, with glue and screws, to the opposite edge of the plank. When he was done, the top edge of each plank rose in a long, low, semi-elliptical arch—that’s the cut piece—and the bottom edge of each plank rose in an identically-shaped arch where the cut piece used to be. Both arches, of course, parallel each other.

The arched beams became the base of the bridge. Jack and Carol set them in place: parallel to each other, four feet apart, and reaching from the edge of the shore to the edge of the island.

Then they laid 24 2-by-6-inch boards, each four feet long, on top of the beams; each board ran from one beam to the other, overhanging each beam by an inch. Then they screwed the boards into the beams. The cross boards do double duty: they join the beams together, and they provide the decking, or walking surface, of the bridge.

Finally, Carol stained the entire structure.

Total cost? I asked Carol.

“Under $200.”

Carol placed a two-person wooden swing between the hemlocks on the island. The pleasing Adirondack-style swing is made mostly of cylindrical pieces of wood that resemble very small smooth logs. The rustic, unpainted, unstained piece goes nicely with the rustic, naturalistic island—and it provides a fine view across the entire pond.

Carol completed the composition by planting purpleleaf winter creeper (Euonymus fortunei coloratus) around the rocks on the shore side of the channel. This evergreen ground cover, which turns deep purple in winter, is gradually softening the stones by slowly creeping over and around them.

* The 18th-century poet Alexander Pope urged gardeners to “Consult the Genius of the Place in All”; that is, to pay attention to and build upon the special characteristics of a site.

** Burning bushes and Japanese barberries are now considered invasive plants.

*** Regrettably, Jack and Carol Booher no longer own Water’s Edge, and the property is no longer opened to the public.

A Lush, Private, Suburban Garden . . . on a Small Manchester Lot

After Jean Nelson visited Evergreen, she told me she wanted me to make a garden “just like it” in her back yard.

I had to tell her that I was flattered by her request but that it would be impossible to fulfill it: Evergreen covers almost an acre, and it has dozens of huge pine trees and sweeps of hundreds of big rhododendrons. In contrast, her back yard, on north Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire, had only a couple of big trees, just a handful of large shrubs, and—more to the point—was only about 50 feet square and surrounded by houses.

Jean replied that she knew all that. Nevertheless, she told me, she wanted her new garden to be as private, as secluded, and as lush as I could possibly make it.

Plus, she added, she was getting too old to take care of a typical perennial flower garden; she needed a landscape that—like Evergreen—would largely take care of itself.

Iwasn’t dismayed by her request. On the contrary, I was delighted. I had been hoping for years for a chance to tackle one of the most intransigent problems of landscape design: how to create, on only a small, urban lot, the kind of estatelike landscaping usually possible only on much larger suburban or country properties.

The solution for Jean’s yard was one she had seen at Evergreen: a berm planted with flowering evergreen shrubs.

Berms are artificial ridges, usually made of fill. When used to create privacy, they’re built along the edges of a property, then covered with loam and planted (usually) with evergreen trees or shrubs. The combined height of a berm and its plantings hides neighboring houses and other development. It helps create the welcome illusion that a house is not on a small, half-acre lot surrounded by other houses, but is a much larger property luxuriously festooned with many trees and shrubs. A berm can make the property feel much larger than it really is.

This is important because your landscape isn’t only the land that you own. It’s everything you see from your land. If you can see other people’s houses (and cars and telephone poles) from your garden, then those things are as much a part of your garden as your flowers. To preserve the visual integrity of your garden—its unity and special character—you need to screen out anything that doesn’t relate to it.

Iinstalled a U-shaped berm, ranging from two to seven feet high, along three sides of Jean’s backyard.

I planted most of it with sweeps of flowering broadleaf evergreen shrubs. These not only help screen the property year round (because they don’t drop their leaves in the fall). They also provide flower color automatically, in a five-month-long sequence of bloom that lasts from late March to August. These colorful shrubs included:

  • 16 Japanese andromeda (Pieris japonica) ‘Dorothy Wycoff,’ which produce bright red new leaves, red flower buds, and pink blossoms in late March or early April;
  • 6 P. J. M. rhododendrons, which display masses of pink-lavender flowers in April and rich dark burgundy foliage in the fall and winter;
  • 9 ‘Aglo’ rhododendrons, which produce bright pink flowers in mid-spring and bronze foliage in the winter;
  • 31 ‘Roseum Elegans’ rhododendrons, which sport red-pink flowers in late May;
  • 10 Rhododendron maximum ‘Roseum,’ which produce pink blossoms in early June;
  • 23 mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), which bear exquisite white flowers in June;
  • 8 Rhododendron maximum, a shade-loving species that displays white flower trusses in late June or early July.

So that these evergreen shrubs could create the highest possible year-round privacy screen, they were planted on the crest and upper slopes of the berm,

The rhododendron maximum were installed on the shadiest parts of the berm. The P. J. M.’s and andromeda, which enjoy full sun, were used in the brightest areas. The other rhodies and the mountain laurel, both of which like dappled sunlight, were planted in medium shade.

Berms need to be at least two feet wide for every foot of height. In most of Jean’s yard there was enough space to make the berm six or seven feet high—tall enough so shrubs on the crest would provide enough additional screening to hide neighboring houses.

In some places—beside the patio next to the house, for example—there was enough space to build the berm only two or three feet high; this was so low that shrubs on top of it wouldn’t be tall enough to provide enough screening. Here I needed evergreen trees instead of shrubs.

I chose 34 Canadian hemlocks because they can grow in either sun or shade. The hemlocks were already taller than the shrubs when I installed them, and they would quickly grow much higher. In one sunny spot I transplanted three Hinoki falsecypresses (Chamaecyparis obtusa) that were already growing in the yard. Neither evergreen proffers colorful flowers or foliage, of course, but they did the job they needed to do.

When all the evergreen trees and shrubs were in place, the one-story ranch house to the rear of the property was nicely hidden, and the two-story houses to the north and south were mostly screened as well—and more of them would disappear each year as the plants grew.

Besides the evergreen plants on the crest and upper slopes of the berm, I added deciduous azaleas to the lower sections to expand the garden’s bloom period even further. Because they weren’t needed for screening—indeed, they were too low on the berm to provide any more screening than that created by the berm itself—they didn’t need to be evergreen.

The azaleas included 18 Rhododendron mucronulatum ‘Cornell Pink,’ which unfurl their light pink flowers in late March, even before their leaves appear. They’re considered the first azaleas to bloom in the spring, and they rival the Japanese andromedas as the first shrubs to flower in Jean’s garden.

I also added eight plumleaf azaleas (Rhododendron prunifolium), which are one of the last azaleas to bloom: They blossom as early as mid-July and as late as August, and their large orange-red flowers can last until fall. They’re one of the last shrubs to bloom in Jean’s garden.

I also planted eight ‘Innocence’ azaleas, which are a variety of Rhododendron viscosum (swamp azalea). Their fragrant white blossoms appear in late June or July, and their leaves turn burgundy red in the fall.

When the berms were fully planted, the space became a lush cup garden, so-called because the viewer stands in the bottom of a cuplike space and is surrounded—almost embraced—by a wall of trees and shrubs that reaches higher than his or her head.

On the floor of the new garden I added sweeps of three shade-tolerant variegated white-and-green-leaf plants: ‘Emerald Gaiety’ Euonymus fortunei and ‘Silver Edge’ Pachysandra terminalis—both evergreen ground covers—and ‘Night Before Christmas’ hostas.

The plants bring bright white foliage color to the garden; and, unlike the flowering shrubs, which each blossom for only a few weeks at a time, the evergreen ground covers provide color all year long, and the hostas flourish from spring to frost.

I used all three plants to define a roughly circular path that allows the viewer to stroll along the bottom of the berm.

The white color of the plants is like a broad, low focal point, drawing the eye downward. This, in turn, makes the garden even more dramatic because, in the couple of seconds when the viewer raises his or her eyes from the ground and up to the top of the tallest trees and shrubs on the berm, the garden wall seems higher, and the garden seems larger than it would be if the viewer looked only at its trees and shrubs.

Jean’s new garden is rare: a lush, private suburban garden on a tiny lot in the middle of New Hampshire’s largest city. According to Jean’s daughter, the artist Judith Minzell, “it achieved what it intended.”

When people descend to the garden from Elm Street, turn the corner at the rear of the house, and suddenly see it, Judith told me, “eyes pop and jaws drop.” The garden is “absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful.”

Sadly, Jean enjoyed her new garden for only a few years before she had to sell her home and move to an assisted-living facility. 

Its new owners, Phil and Diane Martineau, kindly agreed to open the garden to the public as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Merrimack Valley Open Days Program in 2014. 

Arch bridge leading to the island at Water's Edge.

Photo by Eileen Oktavec

Arch bridge leading to the island at Water’s Edge.