The Time For Gardens

It’s not easy, gardening in Connecticut, what with freaky weather, ravenous deer and rocks. Connecticut seems mostly made of schist and gneiss and precipitous drops and climbs.

   But gardeners of many kinds thrive here, among them Jane Garmey, a brisk and appealing Brit who never put spade to sandstone until long after she left Henley on Thames (yes, of regatta fame) in 1963.

   She is settled now with her husband, Stephen, in a comfy, 19th-century house in Cornwall, CT. It has white clapboards, of course, and 12 over 12 windows and plenty of gardening space out back.

   In her just-published book, “Private Gardens of Connecticut,â€� in collaboration with photographer John M. Hall, Garmey claims to have had zero knowledge of gardening growing up in England. Her only brush with horticulture had been occasional trips to London’s Whipsnade Zoo to  pick up elephant dung for an aunt’s roses.

   But here in Cornwall, she “caught the gardening bugâ€� as she writes in her introduction to this beautiful and entertaining book.

   “Gardening seems a later pleasure in life,â€� she told me a few days ago. In earlier years, though, she had other ambitions, which is why she left home in the first place.

   “For a girl in England there was nothing to do. Girls didn’t go to university. Girls didn’t do anything.â€� So Garmey came to New York, went to work at Channel 13 and founded a TV production company with Alice Trillin making arts documentaries for young people.

   She wrote for publications like The New York Times and Connecticut Cottage and Garden, where she worked with Hall. She put together anthologies on garden writers. And she wrote two cookbooks: “Great British Cookingâ€� and “New Great British Cookingâ€� bringing us such culinary treats as beefsteak, kidney and oyster pudding and a soup of hot cider and onions.

   Now, her son is grown, her work as a writer is established, and she has time to prune her columnar apple trees (one of them nearly to spiky extinction but she figures it will survive), to pleach and weed and feed, to tend to her several garden “roomsâ€� and check out other’s efforts statewide, 28 in all.

   Starting in the autumn of 2008, Garmey and Hall trouped all over Connecticut to look at gardens and photograph them for this book.

   Hall — large-format Mamiya camera in hand plus two digital cameras, and  a tripod for the tiny apertures and long exposures that make for infinite depth and crackling detail — along with Garmey, surveyed Connecticut gardens that were formal, that were intimate, that were personal or grand or unique. And while she took notes, Hall shot maybe 100 photographs during three or four dawn or dusk visits to each garden in the final selection.

   “I love to see the distance, to see through things going from one place to another, taking you away and going to something else,â€� Hall told me. “And I want to see the bones.â€�   

   It all works. His shots — Inge Heckel’s famous field of daffodils in Lakeville, Michael Trapp’s extraordinary paths and plinths and pools in West Cornwall, Bunny Williams’s sunken garden and perennial borders and generous archways in Falls Village, and all the rest in this book — are dense and seductive.

   The two visited gardens in every part of the state, in Lyme and Greenwich, New Canaan, Stony Creek and Branford, but almost half of them are in this corner of Connecticut. The idea was to describe gardens that were wild or formal, original, unique, special and interesting, with “the abundance of stoneâ€� that is the mark of many gardens in this state. And Garmey describes them with style and with admiration.   

   What the book boils down to is what Garmey calls “a personal and often idiosyncratic selection,â€� a selection of gardens that does not include her own, by the way.

   “My garden is not in this book. Nor should it be,â€� she says. “I love my garden, but I have no illusions about it.â€�

   Jane Garmey will be signing copies of “Private Gardens of Connecticutâ€� at Johnnycake Books in Salisbury, Oct. 9, from 5 to 7 p.m.; at Oblong Books in Millerton, NY, Nov. 6 at 2 p.m.