And just maybe, ready for prime time
by Jim Dodson
On a warm and dry afternoon last October, as I mulched and watered my front yard’s 35 parched azaleas in the middle of the most punishing drought in memory, a shiny, white Volvo eased into my driveway.
A pair of well-dressed women emerged and introduced themselves as committee members from the local council of garden clubs. They had something to discuss.
For an instant, I wondered what crime I might have unwittingly committed. Unnecessary strain on municipal water supplies? Had neighbors complained about my loud (and entirely inappropriate) oaths issued at a rainless sky?
Instead, the first woman smiled and reached for my grubby hand.
“We understand you have a lovely garden,” she said, “We’ve come hoping to view it and ask if you would be interested in having your garden featured on the 2026 garden tour in June.”
Between us, they could have knocked me over with a packet of Burpee seeds. In my time on this Earth, I’ve built three ambitious landscape gardens and never given a passing thought that somebody might wish to see them. Especially a lot of serious gardening somebodies.
My first garden was built on a heavily forested hilltop in Maine, a classic New England woodland garden created on the remains of a vanished 19th-century farm that my cheeky Scottish mother-in-law nicknamed “Slightly Off in the Woods.” It was the perfect name because the only people who ever saw it were the FedEx guy and tourists who’d taken a wrong turn onto our dirt road.
“Nice layout,” the FedEx guy once remarked with a smirk. “But why build a garden like this that nobody will ever see?”
“Because I see it,” I said. “It keeps me sane in a crazy world.”
He thought I was joking. But any serious gardener will tell you that time spent in their garden is a cure for whatever ails the spirit. Most of us, in fact, never imagine that others will desire to see our gardens. We create them for us. It’s the closest we can get to playing God, as a famous English gardener named Mirabel Osler once said to me.
My second garden belonged to a cute little cottage in Pinehurst that my wife, Wendy, and I rented in hopes of eventually buying. The previous owner, an elderly gardener, had let his 2-acre garden run amok. I spent a year cutting back overgrown azalea bushes and battling wicked wisteria vines and even recovered a “lost” serpentine brick fence that had been swallowed whole by English ivy. I also built a beautiful wooden fence around the fully restored garden — just in time for disaster to hit.
The week we planned to officially buy the place, the kitchen floor collapsed, and we discovered that black mold was running like a medieval plague through the walls and floors. We moved out that same afternoon. At least the garden looked fantastic.
Finally, there is the garden where the women from the garden council and I stood that afternoon. It is, without question, my final garden and, therefore, a serious labor of love.
A decade ago, we moved back to my hometown, taking possession of a charming midcentury bungalow built in 1951. I grew up two doors away from this lovely old house and always admired it. The owners were my parents’ best friends. Their grown children were thrilled when they learned that a pair of Dodsons would be their childhood home’s second owners.
And so, we set off to fully restore the property.
As Wendy got to work on the interior, I confronted the long-neglected garden. It took a year of weekends just to clear dying trees and dead shrubs from the front yard before I could turn my attention to the backyard, which was so wildly overgrown I nicknamed it “The Lost Kingdom.”
Over the next decade, neighbors and friends got used to the sight of me getting gloriously dirty every weekend, rain or shine — digging holes, building beds, hauling in new soil and manure, eventually planting a dozen flowering trees in the front yard alone, with banks of hydrangeas and azalea bushes, inspired by a former neighbor who did the same during my childhood years.
In due course, our “east” garden became a flowering space with a tiered stone pathway and lush beds that are home to autumn sage, Mexican sunflowers, purple salvia, society garlic, Mexican petunias, Gerbera daisies and red-hot pokers. Knock Out and old-garden rose varieties preside over a trio of butterfly bushes that monarchs swarm upon on late-summer days.
In the former Lost Kingdom out back, I built an Asian-themed shade garden that’s home to nine Japanese maples, scores of autumn ferns and monster-sized hostas. The final touch was a stone pathway that winds through this tranquil, hidden space, though only I and our three dogs have ever followed it.
Which brings me back to the lovely women from the council.
I thanked them for considering my garden for their June tour but pointed out that drought had taken an alarming toll. Moreover, mine was still a young garden, a mere decade old. It needed time to heal and find its way.
“Another year perhaps?” I suggested.
They wouldn’t hear of it. “Everyone’s garden has been beaten up,” one of the women reminded me. “But come spring, they always bounce back like a miracle. Yours will, too.”
So now, friends, April is here and I’m a man in constant motion — fussing, fixing, weeding, mulching, trimming, planting new things and getting gloriously dirty. A garden, of course, is never finished. There is always something to do, to change, to add or subtract, or simply fix. Nature abides
no slackers.
Nothing could make me happier than to welcome folks to my reborn garden this spring.
Don’t mind my grubby hands, though. A gardener’s job is never done. SP
