Plant what you love.
“I’ve refined my garden every year,” says Ina.
She started her yard’s landscaping with
crabapple trees. “I didn’t have much of a
budget,” she says. So she bought 25 small
trees. “Saplings,” she says. “Basically sticks.”
But her patience paid off—each spring clouds
of crabapple blooms color her yard.
Ina’s flower gardens resemble the blurry
brilliance of an Impressionist painting, with
purple hazes of spiky anise hyssop, airy
Verbena bonariensis,
big balls of white
hydrangea blooms (she has 60 bushes), and
blue bursts of caryopteris. She chooses the
flowers for the bouquets they’ll make. “I plant
varieties that you could never buy in a flower
shop—like nigella. After the flowers fall off, I
love the seed pods in arrangements.”
Her garden design is formal—with a
twist. Ina has parterre gardens, a series of
symmetrical flowerbeds edged in clipped
boxwood hedges. She tweaks the formality
by filling the beds with masses of the same
flowers in the same color. “I like blowsy
gardens, but I don’t like messy ones,” says
Ina. “So, the plan was to make big flower
plantings hedged in a formal parterre.”
Best of all, with dinner minutes from the
table, Ina can gather a quick bouquet. And,
to quote Ina, “How cool is that?” GS)
3 8 MARCH 2 0 0 9 BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS
