A Grand Passion . . . For Gardening

High on a hill off White Hollow Road in Sharon, Lee Link, gardener, world traveler and spirited hostess, has made a garden that merges with the woodland on one side of her house and sets boundaries, on the other. She has transformed a challenging site. The property was long, narrow, steeply sloped, backed by rock ledge and confined by hedgerows when she and her husband, Fritz, bought it nearly 30 years ago. In the intervening years she has added to the acreage, so she could cut down the hedgerows and open up the views of rolling farmland and mountains, and, on a wet spring morning, threaded with mist. Link started her gardening education in Paris, during a two-year stint living in the Marais. The Parisian influence is evident in the pea stone covered parterre off her greenhouse. Does every gardener dream of having a greenhouse? They might if it looked like Link’s, which is ever so slightly rustic and tucked in behind the barn-style garage, and yet it still manages to have pride of place. And it is Link’s passion. “What I love is messing in the greenhouse,” she says. “It’s wonderful. But the downside is, I’m really tethered to it. I worry in the winter when the temperature goes down. We even have a generator for it, though not one for our house, which my husband thinks is slightly nuts.” The greenhouse allows her to indulge another passion: succulents. Massive potted agaves line a stone wall and inhabit corners of the courtyard. They live indoors in the winter and get moved outside in the good-weather months. Link loves pumpkins, too, and starts all of her plants from seed. She loves their architectural shape and the fact that they don’t need careful watering. Shape and easy-keeping are two qualities that define what she wants in her garden. She says she’s trying to pull back. “You can’t do it all. You have to figure out what you’re interested in and know where you want to put your energies.” She’s not all that interested in flowers. She loves shape. The pumpkin leaves fascinate and delight her. She recently replaced a large perennial bed in front of the house with three large Kusa dogwood trees with an under planting of ferns and grasses. Behind the house, only a little bit of lawn separates the woodland. Link edged it with hostas, ferns and other natives. “I think woodlands are very relaxing. They kind of take care of themselves.” She also has a laissez-faire attitude toward the snakes, all kinds of garden varieties, plus rattlers, for whom the rock ledge is prime real estate. Link’s garden, only some of which has been described here, is on the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days tour on Sunday, June 26. In addition, the gardens of Bunny Williams in Falls Village, Michael Trapp in West Cornwall and others in Litchfield County are on the tour. For directions and more information go to www.opendaysprogram.org