I met Patty’s garden before I met Patty. As I wove my way through the flowers, brushed up against random rows of butterfly bushes, ducked under the vine-covered arbor to her front door (There is a front door in here, right?), I suspected that an unconventional, spontaneous person lived here.
Gardens may be many things — floriferous flings, places for show, corners of compulsion — but they’re always a dead giveaway to the gardener’s personality even their profession.
What started as a hunch became a full-blown calling. I’ve now carved out a niche in this uncrowded field of one, a field I call garden profiling. The possibilities are infinite; here are two and a half.
Patty’s garden has the carefree informality of a cottage garden. It engulfs her house in a profusion of old-fashioned flowers: foxglove flop over her front walk, roses cascade over a low picket fence. There’s no grand plan, no plant list or a prescribed amount of space between plants. Instead, everything is crammed together; thick, natural and unruly, like Patty’s hair. Her close plantings mean she spends less time weeding, more time dreaming. In a neighborhood where lawns dominate, she has none. There are no boundaries either; her garden follows the natural contours of the land and dissolves into the woods.
Her color combinations are spontaneous and unusual, too. Masses of orange-red poppies collide with lime-green Lady’s mantle in large curvy beds. When I ask her about compatible colors, she says, “Nothing in nature clashes.” No slave to flower fashion, Patty gardens to please herself. Never a victim of the latest marketing schemes touting “the must-have plant of the season,” she’s more likely to use their marketing materials as mulch.
An experienced profiler like myself can tell that Patty doesn’t spend a lot of money on her garden. She’s transplanted many of her plants from her aunt’s garden. The plants she likes are no-fuss, or they’re history. A weathered wooden structure is a couple pickets short of a fence and not straight. Here’s a woman who believes symmetry is overrated.
This is the place for invention and abandonment. In Patty’s garden I shed my inhibitions and, when it’s really hot, some clothing. Amid our convivial banter I forget the heat and enjoy the hummingbird on the bee balm and this uplifting drink she’s just invented.
“Say, what’s this drink called?” A hummingbird hovers near my glass, attracted by the cranberry color. “I don’t know,” she says. “How about a Hummingbird Highball?”
This is definitely not the garden of an actuary. Not these helter-skelter plantings. In an actuary’s garden, if the tag on a Shasta daisy recommends planting them 18 inches apart, by God they’re 18 inches apart. No, this is the garden of a graphic designer, known for her inspired use of color and unconventional old-fashioned typefaces.
Later, across town, the buzz of the electric trimmer meets me as I unlatch the gate to Malcolm’s garden.
Next Post: Find out why I sound so different in Malcolm's garden.