Wretched Excess

In our 20-foot-by-65-foot vegetable garden we grow corn, okra, lettuce, chard, dill, carrots, summer squash, winter squash, artichokes, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, leeks, beets…. and green beans.


I have no argument with the first 15 items on the list. There is nothing so flavorful as sweet corn eaten minutes after it was picked or a salad topped with tomatoes still warm from the vine. These are the reasons we garden. Even when there is excess (think zucchini), there are friends with whom to share the bounty or, if your friends begin avoiding you because they know you come bearing suitcases full of the stuff, you can foist the surplus on people who unsuspectingly leave their car windows rolled down in parking lots. We have disposed of zucchini in exactly that fashion on more than one occasion.

But zucchini is a vegetable that must be eaten fresh. No one would ever think of canning or freezing summer squash because they’d find nothing but mush when they sampled it in January. Not so green beans. Green beans have pretty much the same taste and texture whether they’re eaten fresh or frozen.

For reasons I cannot fathom, this year Betty planted two ‘wide rows’ and one ‘standard’ row of green beans, with the idea that we’d freeze what we didn’t immediately eat. She apparently used varieties with names like ‘Maxi-Yield’ and ‘Garden-Glut’ because we began getting green beans at the beginning of July and are now picking – and I promise I am not making this up –five pounds or more of beans from of the garden every day.

The first week was wonderful. The yield was maybe 20 or 30 long, luscious beans a day, perhaps ten minutes worth of picking in the cool late afternoon. Once home, we pinched off the ends, threw them in a dish, steamed them for three minutes and we had fresh, delicious green beans; high in vitamins and good for us to boot.

Then the yield bounced up to about 60 green beans a day. Fifteen minutes of picking and ten minutes of snipping ends. OK, we cooked half and froze half (two minutes in boiling water, then rinse under cold water to stop the cooking, arrange the beans on a tray, stick them in the freezer overnight, then bag them and return them to the freezer until needed). I could cope with that.

But then both double rows went into full production. Suddenly, we were spending more than half an hour spent stooped over picking under a blazing sun with suffocating humidity, pinching ends for another 45 minutes, and then lining up green beans on trays for half an hour. First, it was one double-decked tray of beans to blanch and freeze and then two double-decked trays. One night this week we processed two double trays and still had green beans left over. Did I mention we are running out of space in our freezer?

Dealing with the excess has required ingenuity. Our town’s food cupboard had only one distribution in July, which didn’t make a dent in the surplus. Thankfully, there’s another this week. At last week’s Wednesday Evening at Elm Bank lecture, we offered green beans as kind of party favors to thank people for coming. This morning, a friend brought us two baskets of blackberries. She left groaning under the unexpected weight of more than five pounds of green beans. Fortunately, she’s a Vegan. Unfortunately, her children are at camp.

The last row of green beans, a standard-width one, was planted late, intended for September production. For the past week I have been guiding runners from the winter squash toward the young plants. With luck, by the time the green bean plants should be flowering, they’ll instead be engulfed by squash leaves. They will not be missed.

There is joy in seeing plants first emerging from the ground in May and early June. Alas, the mind does not contemplate the work that will be involved when, as in the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, the green beans keep maturing by the hundreds every day, demanding to be picked. The great gardening guru Roger Swain calls one of the joys of summer the ‘wretched excess’ from the garden. This July and August, being a grower of green beans makes it easy to understand the ‘wretched’ part of that statement.

More Gardens by the Sea

Yesterday’s forecast for Boston included oppressive humidity and temperatures near ninety. In short, a perfect day to be in Maine. And so, armed with the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days directory, we set out early in the morning for Kittery, just over the New Hampshire border.


What most people know of Kittery is the unfortunate collection of outlet malls that beckon at the first few exits of the Maine Turnpike. In stark contrast and just a few miles away, Route 103 hugs the coastline, offering a picture postcard view that has changed little in half a century. The Conservancy put together three gardens in Kittery, two of them on the ocean and the third on a marsh with ocean views. Herewith, a report, alas, without photos of the first garden.

What more do you need to say about a garden whose owners are thoughtful enough to provide live music for your enjoyment? Four generations of one family have lived for roughly 90 years at what is now a compound on Pepperell Cove, with generous views back to the Piscataqua River. A common garden binds what is probably five acres, three homes, a pool house and a wonderful, freestanding English greenhouse. The gardens are heavy on lilies and dahlias. They flow in a delightful pattern, following the natural contours of the land. An undulating daylily border follows the shape of the cove.

This is a garden that, while probably aided and abetted by outside maintenance, is definitely one individual’s vision. The identifying tags are hand-lettered and the breadth of specimens bespeaks a passion for the genus Liliaceae. The eye for the unusual also shows in the placement of specimens that punctuate the gardens. For example, on one side of the kitchen garden was a blackberry lily (Belamcanda chinensis which is not a true lily but, rather, part of the Iridaceae family). A few feet away, a pale blue Lisianthus bloomed shyly amid brassier specimens.

The music was an unexpected but welcome accompaniment. A guitarist and a keyboard/horn player offered soft, new-age-type music. There was a marvelous off-shore breeze that kept the air temperature in the low seventies. We could have stayed all day.

Usually because of a desire for privacy, the ownership and history of most Open Days gardens are limited to the names of the owners, and sometimes not even that. No so Braveboat Harbor Farm, where the legacy of Calvin and Cynthia Hosmer is everywhere. Most poignantly, there is a memorial bench overlooking the ocean. The Hosmer’s names are inscribed on the bench and, in the center, embedded in the granite, is Cynthia Hosmer’s wedding ring and the date, December 28, 1928. The Hosmers purchased the point of land in the late 1940s, spent six years clearing brush, and nearly fifty years creating a garden. While I neglected to bring a camera, I located some very nice photos taken by Karl Gercens in 2009. The middle one is of the memorial bench.

The garden, while attractive, is somewhat overwhelmed by its setting. There is a mown path to the rugged shoreline and a walk along that shoreline, from which not a single house is visible. The Hosmers were avid conservationists and deeded an easement on the bulk of their property decades ago. Instead of shingle-pile megamansions, there is only ocean, rock and a windswept meadow. What a legacy.

The third Open Days property billed itself as a ‘gardener’s garden’. It could be more correctly called a ‘landscaper’s garden’, an instantly mature garden put together at great cost within the past few years and destined to be ripped apart as the plantings outgrow their allotted spaces. It was beautiful, but it was also the least interesting of the three gardens.

A Garden by the Sea

When the temperature hits the nineties and the dew point soars into the mid-70s, most people hit the mall, the beach or the air conditioner control. Gardeners, on the other hand… go visit gardens. And so, yesterday, with the thermometer registering 93 degrees, we visited four of them.

Three were part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program, which focused on the town of Dartmouth. Dartmouth, in turn, is on Buzzard’s Bay next to New Bedford and the prospect of a cool, off-shore breeze added to the anticipation of the day. There was a refreshing breeze, though alas, from some direction other than the bay.

Garden owners write their own descriptions for the Open Days Directory and those paragraphs say as much about the people involved as their properties. When we were chosen in 2008, the Garden Conservancy’s form came with a plea to hold the description down to 150 words and to keep it factual. Through assiduous re-writing we got ours down to 148 words with nary an adjective in sight.

As a result of our own experience, we tend to rule gardens in or out based in large part on the clues in the descriptions. One open garden yesterday began with this sentence, ‘Come see one of the most gorgeous properties on the South Coast.’ It may have been the most beautiful property on any coast, but there was something off-putting about the boast. Another garden owner tipped his or her hat to no fewer than six designers. We took a pass on both gardens.

But one garden description in particular caught our attention, It was spare in its wording and focused on providing an overall feel of what the visitor would see. So, after an obligatory visit to Frog Landing (designer Nan Sinton’s terrific garden) we set out for Sea Thrift.

Sea Thrift sits on six acres at the head of Apponagansett Bay and the owner has a pleasant view down to the water. The rambling house, built by a whale ship captain, dates to 1860. What was delightful about the garden was that it didn’t overwhelm the visitor, yet it showed intelligence and a keen eye for horticulture (a two-page description of plantings including full binomial nomenclature was available at the check-in table). There were more than 40 varieties of Japanese maples scattered around the property, as well as a specimen columnar Acer saccharum ‘Newton’s Sentry’ that was a virtual 30-foot-tall flagpole.

The property was full of surprises: woodland trails that provided cool shade on a hot day, sitting areas with bring-a-smile-to-your face lawn furniture, and striking juxtapositions of texture and color in unexpected places. After we walked the property, the homeowner was generous with his time in explaining some of the thinking that went into the design.  The three photos in this post were taken yesterday at Sea Thrift.  Double click in them to get a more detailed view.

Sea Thrift was the kind of garden you hope for on a hot summer day; a garden you learn from. A garden that sends you away smiling.

"Knee High by the Fourth of July"? Guess again!

If I don't write a lot about our vegetable garden, it's because vegetables are... well, boring.  ("Plant a radish, get a radish not a Brussels sprout...")  When ever I read someone waxing rhapsodic about the joys of wide rows or some new kind of beet, I turn the page. 

And so here is a mercifully brief update on our vegetable garden, which is not on our property but, rather, is part of the Community Garden a mile away.  We have a 20'x65' plot, intensely planted at this point with lettuce, beets, chard, dill, green beans, okra, peas, summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, eggplant, artichokes(!) basil, carrots, parsnips, peppers, leeks, onions... and corn.

There are three squares of corn, each at least five rows by roughly ten plants.  We planted the first square with a variety called 'Quickie' from Pinetree Seeds on May 15, two weeks earlier than is considered safe in New England. Spring thus far had been warmer and wetter than normal and so we decided to push our luck.  Quickie is, as the name implies, a fast-growing corn - 65 days from planting to maturity.  It's a hybrid, bi-color corn that is advertised as being especially sweet for northern climates.

There's an old saw about corn's progress: 'knee-high by the Fourth of July'.  Quickie met that standard by mid-June.  As the accompanying photo attests, this corn has, 49 days after planting, reached a height of nearly five feet.  The stalks have already tasseled out and each one bears several ears.  The corn is obviously immature, but July 20 seems like a realistic date to be enjoying fresh corn.

As to the rest of the garden, we're enjoying lettuce, peas, chard, herbs and beets; and our first zuccini is ready to pick.  Double-click on the photo at right to get a sense of how the garden is designed.

(Follow-up note:  we picked our first sweet, ripe ear of 'Quickie' corn on July 15. )

In Pursuit of a Little Hanky Panky

There are days that are meant for working in the garden, there are days that are meant for reading a good book indoors, and there are days that are meant for… driving to the ends of the earth in search of the perfect hosta.


To say that Mason Hollow Nursery is located off the beaten path is to imply that there is an actual path to the nursery, beaten or otherwise. It is located in Mason, New Hampshire and, if there is a physical town, we have never found it. Were there a town, it would be located about ten miles over the Massachusetts border above Fitchburg, except that we did not start our expedition from Fitchburg but, rather, from The Fells, fifty miles north in Newbury. But I digress.

To get to Mason Hollow Nursery, you must first find Parker’s Maple Syrup Barn Restaurant, which the Mason Hollow website treats as a navigational feat akin to, say, finding the George Washington Bridge from the New Jersey Turnpike. In reality, you can travel for hours, fastidiously following tiny signs nailed to telephone poles and trees. Once at the restaurant, you see signs for the nursery, which is ‘just 1.6 miles farther on’, mostly over dirt roads.

Sue and Chuck Andersen (that's Chuck facing the camera on the right) run Mason Hollow as both a business and a labor of love. It is open five days a week and, one weekend a year, they entice a lot of people to visit with the promise of hot dogs and ice cream while you shop. With more than 650 varieties of hosta in their collection plus hundreds of perennials, there’s a lot of shopping to do. The ice cream, incidentally, is excellent.

We made the journey because their website lists among their collection, a hosta called ‘Hanky Panky’. As the accompanying photos show (double-click on them to get larger versions), this is not your grandmother’s, or even Tommy James and the Shondells’ hosta. ‘Hanky Panky’ has leaves in three tones: a dark green surrounded by gold border with a narrow, cream-colored thread between the two patterns. Moreover, as the season progresses, the yellow edge changes to white with an unusual light green overlay. How did it get the name ‘Hanky Panky’? Because it’s a sport of ‘Striptease’. (And, just to show that breeders who name hostas have a wonderful sense of humor, there’s another ‘Striptease’ sport called ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’.)

Betty encountered ‘Hanky Panky’ while judging horticulture at a flower show several weeks back. She came home talking about it at length, which is a reasonable data point to infer that it will soon be in our garden, assuming that a good-looking specimen can be located. We are approaching 100 named varieties of hosta and have just opened a new bed to accommodate the growing collection.

You do not go to a nursery like Mason Hollow and walk out with just one plant. We came away with six, including one hosta called ‘Madam’ and other with the terrific name ‘Olive Branch’. The fern collection also continues to grow apace and Sue threw in a small tiarella as a ‘thank-you’.

We live in a time when, all too often, we go places because they are convenient: the McDonalds is just off the exit ramp and the Barnes and Noble is at the mall. All Big Macs taste exactly alike and B&N will reliably have the new Martha Grimes at a discount. When it comes to gardening, though, identical isn’t necessarily better and knowledge counts for a lot. Mason Hollow features extensive and intelligently designed hosta gardens showing their offerings at maturity. The staff understood what we were looking for and where to find it. If they didn’t have it, they could recommend something very close.

Service like that is worth a lot. Even a very long drive in the country.

The Xeric Garden Hits its Stride

It would be easy to claim, with perfect 20/20 hindsight, that the Xeric Garden was always part of our master landscaping plan.  It would, however, be a fib.  The xeric garden began as a disgusted response to a six-foot by ten-foot patch of weeds where no grass would grow.  Betty hoed up the weeds and planted some catmint (nepeta) in the spot, flanked by some Joe Pye weed (eupatorium) that thrived in an equally inhospitable nearby spot.  The two cultivars grew happily despite searing, all-day sun and benign neglect.

Let's step back a pace or two.  Every lot that has a sidewalk also has an easement between the street and that sidewalk.  It may be two feet wide in an urban setting or it may be eight feet wide in a less dense suburb.  Most often, that easement is planted with grass, often augmented by utility poles (hence the 'easement' desciption).

The easement hides two irrevocable truths.  The first is that underneath a veneer of topsoil is all the crud that the builder needed to dispose of, whether five years ago or a hundred.  The second is that - at least in New England - the easement will collect snow pushed up from the street by plows during the winter, and that the snow will be laden with snow-melting chemical laid down in the early stages of the snow storm.  Those two truths combine to make easements inhospitable to anything except stuff highly tolerant of abuse - meaning weeds. 

Which is what led to that first experiment five years ago.  For the first five or six years we lived on Wild Holly Lane, we did everything possible to grow grass in the easement.  We seeded, transplanted, sodded and pampered the area, all to no avail.  In hindsight, it made no sense because, fifteen feet away, we were ripping out grass to continually expand our street-side shrub bed. 

When the first rectangular patch worked, we added a second, flanking bed, which also thrived.  That's when Betty came up with the idea of ripping out all 960 square feet of our easement and planting a Xeric garden - a bed of perennials that would thrive in an abused area and require no watering beyond what was needed to establish the area. 

It took two years to accomplish because the process involved not only ripping out the weeds, but the depleted topsoil as well.  The entire site was dug down to a depth of fifteen inches, from which was removed rocks of every imaginable size, cans, lengths of cable, plastic bottles, chunks of concrete and even remains of workmen's lunches.  What remained was primarily sand.  We then filled the trench with a mixture of compost and chopped leaves which we mixed with the sand.  A contractor with a backhoe could have accomplished all this in a day.  With just a shovel, it took a good bit longer.

The six accompanying photos (double-click on them to get a full-screen view) show the Xeric garden as it looked this morning, June 14.  I've walked around the beds (plural because it is bisected by the driveway) clockwise starting from the east.  In the top photo, the yellow flowering shrub is genista, which has a roughly three-week bloom in June.  The grasses will send up plumes in August.  The daffodil greens in the foreground will be cut down in July as they yellow; the entire bed is heavily planted in spring bulbs.  The second photo picks up the bed at the nepeta in full bloom.  It is about to be severely trimmed back to give the variegated eupatorium between the two clusters time to grow and bloom in August.  In the foreground is one of the dozen or so sedem plantings that will enliven the fall, and just starting to grow is a bed of agastache that will start blooming in late August and still have its azure blue flower stalks into October.  Beyond the catmint is more eupatorium which, if the deer leave it alone, will bloom in August.

The third photo looks back east from the far end of the garden.  There is more genista, a baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight' that bloomed back in May, and a soft yellow achillea that just went into bloom last week and will be a highlight of the bed for the next month.  Hidden by the genista are a variety of perennials, including yellow gallardia which, once it starts blooming, doesn't stop until there's a hard freeze.  The fourth photo looks east across the driveway with yet another genista in the foreground, showing the sweep of the Xeric bed beyond.  As soon as this particular genista has finished blooming, it will be trimmed back to allow a Himalayan indigo to get more light for a late July-August bloom.

The fifth photo shows a quickly spreading and prolifically flowering delosperma, blue rug junipers and short grasses.  This is the most abused part of the bed as this is where snow from the driveway is deposited and where ice may endure until mid-April.  The sixth and final photo shows the plots of thyme that are now well established and growing quite well along - and into - the sidewalk.  There's a plan to extend the thyme border.

The Xeric garden attracts bees and butterflies, as well as lots of walkers.  Alas, none of our neighbors have evinced an interest in following our lead to creating a prettier - and more ecologically prudent - easement.

Open Day at the O'Callahans

It is a-near annual pilgrimage for us. On a June morning that may be brilliantly clear or threatening rain, we will embark on an 80-mile journey to an enchanted garden. It does not matter that we have seen this garden half a dozen times over the past decade; all that is important is that, for an hour or so, we will experience something that comes close to the idyllic.

The garden of Juan and Bunny O’Callahan sits on six acres overlooking Little Narragansett Bay, just outside of Stonington, Connecticut. Once a year - or every second year – they open their property for the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program. Today, June 6, was the chosen day as noted in the Open Days Directory, and it has been marked on our calendar for months. Our goal is always to arrive as close to the 10 a.m. opening time as possible so as to see the gardens without the crowds.

This garden is stunning both for its location – a 270 degree view of the bay, the ocean beyond, and Stonington Village – and for the breadth of the garden. For starters, six generously sized cutting beds with a variety of flowers and bulbs (peonies, lupines and poppies were in special abundance today) and a vegetable garden all enclosed in a yew hedge, the better to keep out both deer and the stiff ocean winds.

A sunken garden is built into the rock ledge next to the seawall, and it is truly a “secret” garden – there is no hint of it until you are upon it. Once inside, there masses of huechera all with long stems vibrating in the breeze and succulents growing in the ten-foot-high rock wall face.

Nepeta – catmint to the rest of us – is a unifying element across the property. It is used in long, undulating rows to break up the lawn and to border other beds. Today, it seemed every catmint plant was blooming a brilliant blue. Also in their full glory were hundreds of lupines, which can be found in many of the perennial beds.

It is a garden that seems the same, even as it changes. We have watched the rehabilitation of a pond take shape over the past several years. On this visit, it seemed finished, overrun with bull frogs and with a spouting fountain. On a visit a few years ago, the O’Callahans and a neighbor had planted an unused field in red poppies, with results like something out of a Monet painting. Alas, that experiment hasn’t been repeated.

The O’Callahans have always been generous with their time on their Open Day, fielding questions from dozens of visitors. And, because there is always something new to discover, we had questions of our own. Behind their greenhouse and surrounding their compost pile, we spotted a thicket of multi-stemmed shrubs with maple-like leaves bearing clusters of some tiny, green, immature fruit. We were stumped. Bunny O’Callahan, though, had a ready answer: red and black currants. Because they were linked to a disease affecting white pines, their cultivation was banned for the better part of a century. The ban has been lifted in certain states, including Connecticut, in recent years.

Well-contained Enthusiasm

I was at the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, standing in a queue for drinks. Directly in front of me in line were two gentlemen, both silver-haired and attired in gray, chalk-stripe suits that spoke of both good tailoring and good breeding. They said little during those few minutes I was behind them, but one sentence continues to ring in my ears with a clarity undiminished by time.

“Penelope,” one of the men said to the other, and then paused for just a moment before continuing, “has a £100 a week perennial habit.”

He said this with neither anger nor regret in his voice. It was a statement of fact; tinged with opinion only in his use of the word, ‘habit’ in describing Penelope’s voracious gardening budget. I swiftly did some currency conversion in my head: at the then-current exchange rate, Penelope was buying up $182 a week worth of salvia, astilbe and hosta.

When I returned and handed Betty her drink, I related what I had just heard and I said, “Don’t ever again fret over what you spend on gardening. You will always be a rank amateur.”

We had a pounding rain here overnight and one of my jobs this morning was to empty saucers from the various containers around the property. Saucers with water in them mean containers can become waterlogged, which leads to root rot.

Somewhere along the way, I began counting the containers surrounding our home. I found 52 and am not certain I got them all.

Now, one or two are just for show – unplanted behemoths that are in perennial beds strictly as focal points. Some others are long-term homes to plants that we overwinter, such as a beautiful burgundy loropetalum or the stone planter given by Betty’s garden club that is home to a fern that returns majestically every May.

The core group of containers – medium and large terra cotta, glazed ceramic or high-quality foam ones – numbers about 35. Betty has been diligently planting them for the past month, filling them with an amazing array of mostly annuals but also including perennials, tropicals and a few shrubs; none of them common.

Those containers are scattered around the property, bringing color to otherwise bare areas of asphalt, concrete or rock. Some are awaiting permanent assignment, such as a large, colorfully planted pot that will sit atop a clutch of prominently visible daffodil greens once those greens have started to yellow later this month.

There are multiple containers along the sidewalk that will fill voids in the perennial beds as June bloomers pass. There are six containers on our deck, turning an otherwise drab structure into a colorful annex of the garden below it. Two matching metal urns are overflowing with color on either side of the front door. Large containers bring drama to the spaces between garage doors and still others fill an awkward, dark corner.

Does this count as a ‘container habit?’

Hardly. And, were it so, then I would be the principal enabler. Betty takes me plant shopping at her peril. I’m the one saying, “Don’t you want another of those?” And, at container sales, I’m the one piling the cart to overflowing, with Betty ordering me to put them back.

It isn’t even a container obsession. Rather, it’s an appreciation for what can be wrought by mixing plants of differing heights, bloom size and color into a small space, and then massing the resulting containers into a pleasing arrangement. It’s art using a different palette and medium.

So, to the gentleman at the Chelsea Flower Show, I say, “Hooray for Penelope.” I hope that she, too, is still creating art of a different kind somewhere in the U.K.

Now You See 'Em, Now You Don't

We don't make nearly enough use of spring ephemerals.  Perhaps, in New England, that's because they're not supposed to live, much less thrive.  Tell that to my bluebelles.

We lived in Virginia for eight years and came to love the annual, massive display of Virginia bluebelles at Manassas State Park.  They carpeted acres of that park for a few weeks each March, then disappeared as if by magic.  When we returned to Medfield, we decided - against the advice of nurseries - to try some two clusters in one of our shade gardens.

The result can be seen in the two photos.  The one above (double-click on it to see a larger version) was taken in early April.  There are the bluebelles, now eight clusters and growing.  They provided color for three sweeks when there was nothing else in the bed.  The photo at right is from the same vantage point last week.  The bluebelle foliage is still there - barely visible - crowded out by the hosta and emerging astilbe.

By mid-June, the astilbe will be in flower and the bluebelle foliage will have completely disappeared.  It's a terrific use of two plants in the same space, and an opportunity to extend the color season.

The Perfect Driveway Edge

I can state with some degree of confidence that for the first five-plus decades of my life, I never thought much about edging my driveway. I had a string trimmer and, twice a year, I’d dutifully create a moderately straight demarcation between asphalt and grass. On a scale of one to ten of satisfying activities, it was a solid ‘one’.


Then, a few years ago I found myself at Hidcote on a mid-May morning. Hidcote, for the garden-impaired, is one England’s (and the world’s) great gardens. It sprawls across the Cotswold countryside near the village of Chipping Campden and is, as Michelin would put it, ‘worth a journey’.

Anyway, on that May morning, I was savoring the gardens when I happened to look down and see the world’s most perfect pathway edge. Instead of grass butted up against macadam, this path contained an inch-and-a-half wide dirt channel on either side. The grass was crisp and green up to the channel, which was perhaps an inch deep. Nothing grew in the channel.

Can you get rapturous about a ditch?

Yes, the gardens were spectacular, but I had to know about this ideal edge. And so, with Betty rolling her eyes, I went off to find someone who could tell me about how it had been made. I assumed it was done with one of those half-moon edgers wielded by someone with a perfect sense of touch and infinite time.

A docent was pleased by my question, put her finger to her chin, and then pointed to one of the garden ‘rooms’ nearby. “You’ll likely find him working over there,” she offered.

A few hundred feet away, I found a young man wielding a tool with two wheels and what looked like a bicycle chain ring. He easily pushed the tool forward, one wheel on the path. Grass and bits of garden debris sprayed out as it clattered. He did this for perhaps fifty feet, then lay the tool on the sidewalk and swept up the clippings. As he did, what remained was that perfect inch-and-a-half-wide channel.

“I think I know what I want for my birthday,” I said. Betty rolled her eyes again.

Upon returning to the States (when you’ve just come back from England you can say things like that), I made a beeline for Home Depot. There was no such tool, I was assured, but they had something even better - the eight-pound, gas-powered Lawn Boy Micro-Trim, and for the unbelievably low price of just $189.98.  I did what I should have done in the first place and made a beeline for Will’s Hardware, where I am locally famous for my idiosyncratic requests.

The manager, Randy, and I leafed through several catalogs and finally settled on a Deluxe Mechanical Edger ($34.95). It wasn’t exactly what I had seen at Hidcote but it was close enough. A week later, I had it in my hand (birthday we damned - I had to have this thing).

Now, twice a year (more often if there’s a group coming), I get to use my Deluxe Mechanical Edger. It makes the same satisfying clacking sound that I first heard that morning at Hidcote. The channel not only looks terrific, it is practical: it carries away rainwater, preventing ponding on the driveway.

It takes perhaps five hours to do our 220-foor driveway with its curves and parking aprons. I’m spending about an hour each morning this week on the project. It’s eminently satisfying and the result looks like a million bucks. Best of all, for a few hours, I feel I’m back at Hidcote. And that is a very satisfying feeling.