A FAIRYLAND IN THE SHADE
AWAY FROM THE SUN THAT OTHERS WOULD CRAVE, BEVERLY SMITH BUILDS A BACKYARD SANCTUARY
One visit to Beverly Smith’s garden convinces you that she must have gardening genes in her DNA makeup. No obstacle, whether rocks, tree roots, clay soil, or deer and other foragers of the woods, deterred her from planting garden beds that stretch from the entrance to her property to the front door of her house. But shade? Ah, the bane of anyone dreaming of a floriferous swath of perennials kissed by summer breezes. That was a problem because Bev had shade in spades.
One afternoon last summer, Bev and I meandered along the paths that bisected her vast garden. Heavy downpours the day before had thoroughly soaked the ground and an earthy, musky fragrance permeated the air. I could smell the moss that thrived in the footpaths, as well as the wet earth beneath the mulch of wood chips. Before us was an astounding horticultural panorama that blanketed 20 garden beds over threequarters of an acre. While that may not be unusual in this fecund southern tip of Connecticut, this one is: It is almost completely in shade—and it is thriving.
“I’m not very good in the sun,” Bev admits, “so this was perfect.”
Twenty years ago when Bev and her husband, Mike, bought their new home in Cos Cob, there was no garden. Woods surrounded their house and banked the driveway on both sides. One day, as she looked out the large windows at the front of the house, Bev envisioned a garden, maybe only 10 feet in width. Little did she know what work lay ahead or where her dreams would take her.
Beneath the few inches of top soil Bev dug into was clay “so thick,” she says, “you could make pottery out of it.” And so deep, “there was another world under there.” There were so many rocks it was a wonder anything could grow. But hope springs eternal in a gardener’s heart. So does determination. Her intention, she says, was not to fight the environment but to work with it.
As a former school teacher and occasional wood and metal sculptor, she understood all about confronting challenges.
Bev used the stones to edge circular and angular beds and as she did so, a grid of pathways presented itself. In lieu of gravel or slate to carpet the footpaths, Bev chose moss. Rain and an overhead sprinkling system encouraged the moss to thrive and spread. Soil removed from the top few inches of the paths was added to newly created beds, thereby increasing the layers of topsoil in the beds. These were amended with compost, plants were snuggled in, and the stretch of garden inevitably increased outward, so much so that to keep track of what she planted, Bev keeps a record that comprises six typed pages of every plant in her garden. Alphabetically listed with botanical and common names, the plants often have notations such as “must have,” “great ground cover,” “best to leave this one undisturbed.”
Woodland Whimsy, as Bev calls her serene patch of earth, is a sanctuary. Cicadas had long gone to snooze away the day I was there as breezes skipped through the leaves of high-pruned native oaks spotted throughout her garden. A few brave rays of sun slithered through the overhead canopy like spotlights on an actor on a stage. A small fenced-in area close to the house protectsed sun-lovers like hydrangeas from patroling deer, but the true stars in Bev’s garden are nearly all shade-loving plants and their still-wet leaves glistened like jewels in a kaleidoscope of greens: emerald, burgundy, yellow, sepia. We were in the gallery of a garden artist.
Bev downplays the amount of work—four hours a day, four days a week in spring and early summer — planting, weeding, pruning, transplanting and digging, digging, digging, always keeping in mind color, form and texture to create harmony and interest. We reached a grouping of ligularia, whose yellow daisylike spires seemed at odds with their gaudy lobes of burnished-tipped green leaves.
“It’s my favorite plant,” Bev says of it but then she says that about every healthy specimen in her gardens.
Like the mahonia heavy with clusters of large seeds that look like black grapes, or the Japanese iris—“did you know that the people in Japan grew it on thatched roofs during WW II to save the ground for plantings of food crops?”—or the Deutschland astilbe—“a love of mine,” she says as we slipped pass its feathery greeting. In one bed, cimicifuga promised a glorious display in a few weeks, while maidenhair and Japanese tassel ferns were already strutting their intricate plumage.
And there’s art in every bed, beginning with the armless Venus de Milo that greets guests at the entrance to the garden. Alongside the red bridge spanning a dry stream bed lined with river stones, colorful glass wands by Chihuly student Merrilee Moore seem to undulate as if tickled by a whisper of air. Birdhouses abound and blue-colored fish are eerily erect in a dry pond. There is also a slate patio that Bev herself laid graced with wooden benches built by her husband—a fairyland grove for serving lemonade to friends on a hot summer’s day. Her garden is so happy, she says, that even chipmunks and slugs tend to stand back and admire the display rather than nibble away.
Two years ago, the Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut awarded Bev their coveted LOVE-LY Garden Award. Last spring, her garden was the favorite of visitors on the garden tour sponsored by the Greenwich Botanical Center. In answer to a visitor’s “how did you achieve all this?” came Bev Smith’s reply, “You start by digging.”