Garden tour means season’s in full bloom
SANDY LINDH KNOWS WHAT IT TAKES TO ACHIEVE AN ENCHANTED AND VOLUPTUOUS ENGLISH GARDEN
If Sandy Lindh had her druthers, we would all have a garden.
Not the simple zinnia and marigold variety, mind you, but rather the lush orchestrated English country gardens with their oversize personalities. Our gardens would have clearly defined edges and focal points and precisely manicured lawns that stay green in the dog days of August.
That means giving up entire weekends weeding, dividing, transplanting and pruning. That is exactly what Lindh and her neighbors did in the tiny hamlet of Stanford Dingley outside of London where she once lived.
“Every weekend, we would ‘potter’ in the garden,” says Lindh, “from sun-up to late afternoon when a gin and tonic would be nice, sitting under a honeysuckle arbor.”
It’s quite the bucolic scene she paints, where weeds dare not intrude, where living with the enemy (particularly rabbits) is endured and where riots of four-foot purple alliums and spires of foxgloves stand as smartly at attention as the guards at Buckingham Palace. There is much careful cosseting of each enchanted garden “room” with its individual curated palette of colors, textures and shapes. Such a fecund landscape is surely for the workaholic.
That’s where Lindh comes in. She does all the work for you, from design to implementation. She is an experienced landscape designer whose company, English Gardens and Designs, boasts a healthy roster of clients in Fairfield County. Their plots range from mid-size to grand estates. Last year, her own garden in Riverside, where she now lives with her husband and two daughters, was the darling of the visitors last year on the annual garden tour sponsored by the Greenwich Botanical Center. This year, on June 7-8, tour visitors will discover two more gardens designed by Lindh.
Lindh studied landscape design in Britain and later at the New York Botanical Garden to understand horticulture sensibilities of the American homeowner. What she finds here, she says, is “people love to look at their gardens, not so much work them.”
She herself is a compulsive potter, so that when she moved here almost 15 years ago, she could be found every day, not just on weekends, creating “a voluptuous English garden,” as she describes the finished canvas of her land. When new friends saw what she did with the long sinuous border that meanders to completely encircle her large rear yard, they hired her to design their own properties.
Sitting in her office, where everything is bright pink (her signature identification from pens to notebooks to handles on pruning shears), Lindh says, “I love looking out the window of my office. I think what an absolutely beautiful garden this is. Look at all the happy birds.”
“Gardening is very therapeutic,” points out Lindh, who, incidentally is a topiary specialist, aka Perpetual Pruner.
As anyone who has tilled the soil knows, gardening requires both optimism and pragmatism. No poetic garden comes into being without work, but once the spade is put away, a wonderful sense of contentment is experienced.
Anyone who dreams of a miniature Sissinghurst Castle Garden in their own backyard will need to potter at least on the weekends.
The Grandiflora Garden Tour 2019 sponsored by the Greenwich Botanical Center is Friday, June 7, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For tickets and further information, visit www.GreenwichBotanicalCenter.org or call 203-869-9242.
“EVERY WEEKEND, WE WOULD ‘POTTER’ IN THE GARDEN FROM SUN-UP TO LATE AFTERNOON WHEN A GIN AND TONIC WOULD BE NICE, SITTING UNDER A HONEYSUCKLE ARBOR.”