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A Year in Our Gardens
Letters by Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy

By Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy
Illustrated by Martha Blake-Adams

University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2001 The University of North Carolina Press.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0807826030

Introduction

My husband, Craufurd, and I moved to Montrose twenty-three years ago. We had spent the previous ten years looking for it. At first we wanted a place with more room for a garden. We lived near the edge of the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and within two years of moving there, I ran out of space. I never thought twice about making a garden. My grandparents had gardens; my parents had gardens. I thought that everyone with any land at all cultivated it. I made my first garden in 1963 and never got over the thrill of growing plants well, combining them because of their forms or the color of their flowers. I believe I inherited my love of flowers from my mother and my appreciation for trees and shrubs and the quality of the land from my father. Horticulture was an endless world to explore: more plants to grow, different conditions to experience, and the need for more land led Craufurd and me to investigate properties in the surrounding area.

    We settled on Hillsborough, North Carolina, primarily because of the quality of its dirt. It is a lovely old town, first developed because native Americans and later European settlers needed fertile land to support themselves. My father spoke in hushed tones about the quality of the soil in this area. We knew of several attractive properties on the edge of town and waited until one came on the market. I often wondered what lay behind the fence separating Montrose from St. Marys Road. We saw it first the day we came to meet the son of Alexander H. Graham, the third generation of the Graham family to live on the property. Mr. Graham had recently died, and there was a chance that his sons would sell it.

    The property was first subdivided from a nearby plantation in 1799. In 1842, William A. Graham, later governor of North Carolina and secretary of the navy under Millard Fillmore, moved to the property. Susan Washington Graham named it Montrose, after the town in Scotland from which the Grahams originally came. The Grahams began the gardens, planting trees that still remain on the property, and, we believe, laying out the kitchen garden, now our main sunny garden.

    For me it was love at first sight. I liked the large, bright Victorian house and loved the little law office behind the main building, but I immediately wanted to work in the garden. The soil in the kitchen garden had been freshly tilled and was a rich red-brown clay loam. I had never seen anything like it.

    On August 4, 1977, Craufurd and I moved to Montrose, and my life took on new meaning. At last I could make the garden of my dreams. I would run out of time, never run out of land.

    For the first year I did very little gardening. I noted the way the shadows fell, explored the terraced woodlands, and greeted each season with excitement. Masses of bulbs appeared in unexpected places near the shrubs that bordered a field. I had brought from my first garden old bulbs that I thought I could never replace. But then they were what emerged from the soil here. There were old forms of narcissus, wood hyacinths, and fall-blooming crocuses. It was the most exciting year ever. I was on the ultimate Easter egg hunt.

    I began in a tentative way to make my own garden here, at first feeling like an intruder but gradually feeling accepted. I honored the shape of the garden. For the first three years we, too, grew vegetables in the large kitchen garden. We grew beans, corn, spinach, melons, lettuce, beets, potatoes, carrots, and three dozen tomato plants planted in cages built by Mr. Graham that we purchased from the estate. What we couldn't eat or give away, I froze. We had tomato juice from our property every single morning during those years.

    Gradually a feeling of discontent crept over me. I didn't want to grow vegetables and spend every evening of the summer freezing them. I was curious about other plants I might grow. I was more interested in flowers, shrubs, and trees than in vegetables or cooking. In addition, I found it increasingly frustrating to have to come in out of the garden on beautiful sunny days to teach children piano and harpsichord—as I had done since college days.

    In 1984 I began a small mail-order nursery to give me a further excuse to be outside. I had discovered the precarious position of cyclamen in the wild and learned that there were few opportunities to purchase nursery-propagated plants in this country. I thought that developing a nursery would enable me to give up teaching music and devote my time to the garden.

    I began by offering cyclamen, boxwood rooted from the plants on this property, and a vigorous strain of Primula x polyantha I had discovered at a nursery nearby. For the first time in my life I had perennial primroses that returned year after year and set seed. I had no trouble germinating the seed and had developed a fine strain of heat tolerant, fragrant flowers. For two years I ran the nursery in the morning and taught music in the afternoon. The nursery grew in every way. I needed help with propagation and packing.

I first became aware of Allen Lacy when Craufurd reported that he was enjoying the column by a garden writer in his daily Wall Street Journal. How could this be? What was a Wall Street gardener? I had visions of J. P. Morgan in a high collar with a long cigar, giving orders to his estate staff. Craufurd then started bringing the Journal home, and I read Mr. Lacy's columns during my lunch. What a surprise! Here was a garden writer who did not just write about plants or gardens. He wrote also about philosophy, religion, history, and current events. He embedded his horticulture in the wider world, not just on Wall Street but on any street. And he had style—the power to entertain, to amuse, and to inform.

    Then, to my amazement, I began to note in these columns small references to Durham, North Carolina, and even to an old school and college friend, Martha Bell (as she was when I knew her). How could this be? Was the Wall Street Journal pursuing its regional strategy to the extent of providing its columnists with references they could add for local color? At a party one day, I learned from a friend, Joanne Ferguson, that the answer was that Allen was "one of us." He was a Duke graduate twice over and was even at that time editing Elizabeth Lawrence's book, Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins, which Joanne had acquired for Duke University Press, where she was executive editor. "Write to him," Joanne said. "He's civilized and will certainly reply." And so, in 1985, I wrote my first letter to Allen, telling him about my new little nursery specializing in endangered cyclamen. He wrote back quickly, as Joanne had suggested he would.

    Allen came to Montrose in May 1985. I thought he was charming. We wandered around the place. I won't ever forget that day. We discovered some mutual interests and shared values. I discovered that we had similar backgrounds. Our first gardening experiences had been with bearded irises. Mine never bloomed; Allen still remembered that the first plant he ever bought was an iris called 'Happy Days', a yellow cultivar that he first got in full bloom. What was really important when I met Allen was that it was the first time in my life anyone had asked about my interest in gardening and actually seemed to listen to my answer.

    Allen wrote an article on Montrose for American Horticulturist and then for the New York Times when he became garden columnist for the "Home" section of that paper in 1986. We quickly discovered the power of his praise. One day while Craufurd and I were eating lunch, someone from Dun and Bradstreet called. It seems that after one of Allen's columns mentioning Montrose Nursery appeared, someone contemplated buying the nursery but couldn't find any record of its existence. We had to inform the caller that the business was still only at the "mom" stage, with "pop" engaged elsewhere, and that the venture capitalists would do better to spend their time on other prospects.

    I had just come to the point where I felt enormous pressure at running this nursery alone. Allen called one morning, and I said I didn't know where to turn. Quickly he responded, "I know just the person—Martha Bell Blake-Adams. I'll call her now." He did, and she came to work with me within a week. About this time I also hired Douglas Ruhren and Katia Wolf, who did much of the propagation for the nursery, and Ruth Batchelor, who weeded the garden and helped with shipping. These people were the nucleus of my tiny staff.

    The nursery grew beyond my hopes and dreams and eventually became a burden, finally taking every minute of my time and energy. I hadn't time to look at the garden, much less work in it. In 1992 we had a series of tragedies that affected everyone working here. First, the large old Magnolia acuminata that was a hallmark of the property fell crashing to the ground. Then my mother died. Two close family members of my staff died. And finally, and most tragically of all, a dear young employee, Johanna Petty, was killed in an automobile accident shortly before her twentieth birthday. It brought me to my senses. I realized that we don't always exit from this world in the order in which we enter it. I still didn't have my garden. I made the decision to have one final year with the nursery and then devote the remainder of my life to the horticultural development of the land at Montrose.

    It was the second-best decision I ever made (the first was when I married Craufurd Goodwin). The garden blossomed. We turned the old kitchen garden into a series of gardens unified by the color or peak season of the plantings. The aster border came first, then the purple and orange border, and then the blue and yellow sunken garden. The old grape arbor was replaced by a magnificent lath house designed and built by Wayne Hall and underplanted with shade-loving plants. We made a memorial garden for Jo Petty. It peaks in July and August, her birth and death months. We turned the circle in front of the house into a foliage garden, with interest primarily in fall, winter, and spring. We rejuvenated the old rock garden that had probably been originally planted in the nineteenth century. We made a scree garden by tilling masses of stones into an area that was formerly lawn and planting small plants and those requiring excellent drainage. We ripped out the ivy lining the walk leading to the house and planted a collection of old dianthus cultivars I had been accumulating for years. We developed walks through the woods, where the land had been terraced in the 1930s for erosion control. In 1998, the year of the correspondence reproduced here, we began planting the final third of the kitchen garden, making a May garden, a new aster border, and a double shrub border. We dreamed and planned and planted. We explored plants of all sorts, buying no more than one plant of each cultivar or one packet of seeds and saving the best seeds from each year for the next. It is my great adventure.

    Craufurd works with me, advising me and controlling my exuberance and desire to have plants everywhere. He makes most of the stone walls, prunes and thins out the woods, and keeps the fields and lawns mown. He also does the grocery shopping, and during the nursery years he did almost all of the cooking. Together we have a vision for the future of the land we care so much about. We want to protect it and all the creatures that share it with us. We continue to work to realize that dream.

    In December 1997, I wrote to Allen Lacy to ask whether he would be interested in writing to me and hearing from me for a year, possibly resulting in a book. He had recently had surgery and was about to undergo surgery again, and I thought such an exchange of letters might distract him. I was also curious about how we could both live in the same USDA Zone, Zone 7A, and not be able to grow all of the same plants. I wanted to hear about his weather, the light, and the constant wind he had to cope with. I wanted to tell him about my joy in winter, the sounds of the woodland birds and animals, and my distress in summer. I knew we would have to do this with the possibility of others reading over our shoulders, but I wanted the letters to be personal—and Allen and I both tried to forget about potential future readers.

    Neither of us could have predicted everything that happened in the year of our letters. Looking back over it, I don't believe I would have attempted such a thing if I had known what I had to deal with. I also think the letters were, for both of us, the most constant element of the year.

—Nancy Goodwin

Nancy has made a good start in her introductory comments, but I'd like to fill in some blanks, starting with 1985 and her letter to me about her new nursery specializing in endangered hardy cyclamen. I had just written a column for the Wall Street Journal praising a mail-order nursery, now long since defunct, that was offering several species of these plants. In rather overheated prose, the nursery reported in its catalog that the cyclamen tubers it peddled had traveled long distances on camel trains with brass bells all ajingle. Nancy writes above that she had been enjoying my pieces in the Journal, but she tactfully omits any mention of my cyclamen column. It proved that I was terribly ignorant of something I really ought to have known. Hundreds of thousands of many species of wild cyclamen were being collected illegally from rocky hillsides in Turkey and the Middle East. These lovely little plants, with flowers like tiny pink or white butterflies, were consequently endangered in their native habitats. One of Nancy's purposes in starting Montrose Nursery and raising cyclamen from seed was to enable American gardeners to grow them in good conscience. I don't think she said it to me outright, but she probably felt strongly that I should not use my horticultural pulpit to publicize nurseries that traded in illegally collected plants.

    Shortly after I received Nancy's letter, my wife, Hella, and I drove through the wonderful gates of Montrose and up the long, winding driveway to its beautiful white house set in the midst of white oaks, pecan trees, a fine deodar cedar, and one of the largest specimens in the eastern United States of Magnolia acuminata, the cucumber magnolia. There were many subsequent visits, at every season of the year.

    Montrose Nursery quickly became legendary among American gardeners, not only because of its conscience-friendly cyclamen but also because of its wide offerings of choice, often rare, perennials that could withstand the horrendous summer heat and humidity of the North Carolina Piedmont. It also introduced a number of plants, such as boltonia 'Pink Beauty' and heuchera 'Montrose Ruby', that have become staples of American horticulture.

    On a couple of occasions, Nancy visited the garden Hella and I were making near the Jersey Shore, in the southern part of the state. We occasionally chatted by telephone, but we also wrote long letters to each other at sporadic intervals. If I recall them correctly, they were more like parallel garden monologues than like dialogues with the real back-and-forth quality of true conversation.

    In December 1997, when Nancy proposed that we revive our correspondence, but on a more regular and systematic basis, I was more than agreeable. There were some major differences between us. She gardened on deep and fertile clay loam. I gardened on a thin layer of acid sandy soil sitting on top of 3,500 feet of gravel. She tended a large and ever-expanding series of gardens that were reckoned in acres, while our house and garden at the Jersey Shore sat on a suburban lot just 100 by 155 feet. Winter, she often said, was her favorite season; I would be perfectly content to leap right from Christmas to St. Patrick's Day.

    There were also similarities between us. Nancy and I had both gone to Duke University in the mid-1950s. We had not known each other, perhaps because I majored in English literature and she in music. Music was another bond between us, as we shared a passion for classical music—Bach, Handel, and Mozart in particular—a passion equal in both longevity and intensity to our love of green and growing things. And, in a really remarkable coincidence, Dr. Richard Sanders, Nancy's father, had in my senior year been my professor in a course in Victorian literature. Nancy and Craufurd also shared with Hella and me the fact that the real estate we occupied had considerable history to it.

    When Nancy wrote me to propose an exchange of letters, I had just had surgery to open and replace a carotid artery that was 95 percent occluded. A routine chest X-ray prior to this procedure (the second endarterectomy on the same artery within five years) had disclosed a spot on my right lung, and more surgery was scheduled very soon. Nancy had undergone surgery herself a few years earlier, so she knew well the territory I was just about to explore with a great deal of anxiety.

    There is obviously less to tell readers about our garden than about the gardens at Montrose, because there is less of it. Hella, our two sons (Paul and Michael), and I moved over a quarter of a century ago to our bit of sandy earth in Linwood, New Jersey, at about 39ø N latitude and 74ø W longitude. Our old house, originally a farmhouse, part of it dating back to 1812 or so, now lay, with its much diminished land, on one of the most well traveled roads in our county. Suburbia had grown up around it; it had lost all traces of its agricultural beginnings. When the property became ours, it was landscaped in the familiar American pattern of foundation plantings around the house and a front lawn open to the street. We had no visual privacy from the constant traffic. To achieve some privacy, we began planting hedges of bamboo, bayberry, holly, vitex, and many other woody plants all around our lot. Today we have an enclosed garden. We grow a great number of annuals and perennials in a cottage garden where part of the old front lawn used to be. Shade-loving plants grow in another spot in front of the house in a small woodland garden. We have also installed extensive decks and pergolas in back of and to one side of the house, where we constantly experiment with gardening in containers.

    Montrose is a historic piece of property, and so is our bit of earth on Shore Road, although it has no name. We do feel, nonetheless, that our occupancy here is an act of stewardship, not ownership. We hope to pass the property on to its next occupants in much better condition than it was in when we obtained it.

    This hope is now assured, incidentally. In one of my letters to Nancy, I describe our old house and speak of it as sound. Not exactly, it turns out. And, writing now in early 2000, I have revisited a letter from early 1998 with a delicious sense of irony. Shortly before lung surgery, I wrote about a dream in which workmen discovered rot in one part of our house and then repaired it. I took the dream to have symbolic meaning only and to refer to my preoccupation with whatever that spot in my lung might turn out to be. Two years later, Hella and I have just been through the experience of rebuilding one-third of our house. We meant only to remodel the kitchen, but when Jim Brightly, our young builder, opened up the walls and floor, he discovered extensive termite damage. The oldest part of the house was, in fact, sound, having been built with well-aged, sturdy, first-growth oak. But the lumber used in an addition built sometime between 1910 and 1930 was inferior stuff. Termites had made a fine meal of it perhaps forty years ago. The construction, moreover was flimsy, with mere two-by-fours as floor joists, some of them nailed together in the middle. "Allen," Jim said, "the back of your house has been held together by paint and a lot of good luck." The house is now held together by much more, for Jim and his crew have rebuilt it entirely, from the ground up. It should be good for another century at least.

    A final thing Nancy and I have in common is that we do not garden alone, but with a companion who also happens to be a helpmate. Hella and I operate in somewhat different spheres, horticulturally speaking. I am better at identifying plants than Hella is, and I know more botanical Latin, but she has a far better eye and a much greater understanding of design, form, and color. Believing that I am absolutely incompetent at pruning, she handles most such chores, discouraging my use of saw or lopper. We confer increasingly on ways to improve our garden, particularly as regards plant combinations. Over the years, I have come to trust with absolute certainty her judgments of both plants and people.

In closing, a word is in order to explain that, as our letters reflect, Nancy and I have slightly different approaches to horticultural nomenclature. I resort to common or popular names, despite their undeniable ambiguity and lack of precision in many instances, far more often than she. This stylistic preference is partly a matter of inclination and partly a matter of habit in writing about plants and gardening for a general audience, including some people who may (wrongly) regard the use of scientific plant names as snobbish or worse. I also confess to at times getting weary of taxonomists telling us that the right name of the sweet autumn clematis is Clematis paniculata, then changing their minds and saying that it's really Clematis maximowicziana. Then, hardly have we mastered those seven syllables than there's another change, this time to Clematis terniflora. Nancy, quite sensibly really, doesn't allow irritation over a trifling number of instances of nomenclatural instability to affect her commitment to precise scientific terminology as it applies to plants. She and I also differ stylistically in treating scientific plant names that have also become common names. I am more likely to write dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff', and she to write Dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff'. What's really important, however, is what we both agree on: it's unquestionably a marvelous plant that everyone should grow.

—Allen Lacy

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Excerpted from A Year in Our Gardens by Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy. Copyright © 2001 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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