Uniting Formal Structure With 'Messy' Beds

This week, Belmont Patch begins its annual series profiling gardens in the community and their creators. If you tend a bucolic space  -- with flowers, shrubs, vegetables, aquatic plants -- or know of someone else who does, please contact us in the comment section and tell us a bit more about it so we can write about its glory.

For Jeanne Mooney, gardening serves as a blank page or canvas that awaits her creation.

“It’s my pallet, my musical score, my pen and paper,” she said.

“Part of gardening is playing around with things – seeing what will do well where, looking for the right soil conditions, seeing what will happen over the winter, and I do a lot of reading and observing.”

Mooney said she has always loved gardening, ever since she was a young child growing up in Westchester County, New York.

“My mother had roses, a flowering crabapple and a woodland backyard,” she said. “I learned a bit from her but when you have your own house, you experiment with gardening more seriously.

And that’s what she and her husband, Joel, have been doing with their English cottage garden ever since 1999 when they moved from Harding Avenue to their new home on Oak Avenue.

When they purchased the 1902 Tudor revival house, the yew hedges that rim the property were just knee-high and the landscaping consisted of some of the existing foundation plantings in the front and south side that have since matured.

The lawn wrapped around the south side of the house to the back where a two-story addition had been added in 1997.

There was rough grading there and an over-grown five-foot wide rear border with some tired Mulberry trees. Mooney said those trees were loved by the birds but knurled by growing through the fence.

The new homeowners also inherited a pea stone driveway extension on the north side.

Changes over the past 12 years

If shown pictures of the outdoor space when the Mooney family first moved to Oak Avenue, you would hardly recognize it as the same grounds today but for the yew hedges.

In fact, the only thing that remains in the back from 1999 is an enormous tree peony that was a quarter of its current size. Mooney’s first acquisition was a small Japanese white birch that stands tall in the revitalized back border along with other trees and shrubs she has carefully selected and planted.

She and Joel have worked steadily over the past 12 years, hiring a designer to help conceptualize a master plan in 2000, and then contractors for various hardscape and construction additions implemented over three phases. They have now realized the scheme of various garden “rooms” combined with informal beds heavily planted for multi-season interest and color.

The rooms begin with a pea stone path on the south side marked with a trellis covered with clematis Montana, then a pergola built by Joel and covered with climbing roses, clematis and hops; a patio enclosed inside a low stone wall with a barbeque area -- just outside the kitchen door -- where the family cooks year-round; a pond (currently inhabited by tadpoles); a garden shed built in lieu of a garage; an evergreen hedge and a bluestone path on the north side; and a front garden with a young, fragrant Styrax obassia, and morning glories Jeanne cultivates from seed climbing up the front hedge.

The abundance of perennials and shrubs is too numerous to list  but Mooney’s favorites include astrantia, astilbe, clematis, daylilies, hostas, various geranium hybrids, filipendula, joe-pye weed, thalictrum, and roses including a thornless Zephirine Drouhin growing on a custom rebar trellis.

Throughout the garden, Mooney has placed nine hand-blown glass balls made in the Berkshires just for “fun” and a splash of unexpected color and texture amongst the natural plants. To encourage visiting birds, she has several bird bathes, as well as water flowing over a large stone above the pond.

The joy of tending the earth

Mooney wants to see continuous bloom in her garden and gets it from early spring bulbs until late fall when tall grasses frame the pond.

Although she doesn’t have to weed that much, there’s still plenty of work deadheading, moving plants around, cultivating seeds and rescuing plants that are either unwanted by others or in less than perfect health.

Her husband keeps extremely busy maintaining the yew hedges that he trims three times each season by hand, taking a full day each time.

“I do more of the day-to-day stuff and am always out here working on something,” Mooney said. “In fact, my garden beds are in better shape than our bedrooms, so it’s time to have a bit more balance maintaining the inside of the house,” she confessed.

If there’s one thing Mooney has learned in all the years she’s been gardening, it is patience.

“There are certain things we do as gardeners that give us immediate gratification and others take time and a lot of patience,” she said. “You’re not in control. There’s the weather and pests to consider and sometimes they cause great disappointments.”

But, each spring, it’s always amazing for Mooney to see what crops up.

“I change things around each year and love to see what appears in the garden,” she said. “I like having things to look forward to and that’s a huge incentive for gardeners. I’m also fortunate to have fellow gardeners in our neighborhood – we’re constantly sharing ideas and solutions – that’s why garden clubs are so great.”

Rescue and sentimentality

Mooney hates to see anything wasted and, as a result, has taken on plants that friends and neighbors no longer want or fit in. With such a snowy winter, Mooney pointed out, her evergreen hedges took a beating.

She also had a large rhododendron that emerged with damage so she went shopping to look for another to replace it.

“I just wanted to create a screen in that area of the garden,” she said.

But, at about the same time, Mooney learned her neighbor had a dwarf blue spruce and a small cut-leaf maple looking for a home so Mooney adopted them.

She planted the spruce immediately, but “I put the maple in a large pot in the border, thought about it, and then decided to leave it there so it stands in the bed at just the right height next to the spruce - the contrast in color and texture is great,” she said.  

Last year, she replaced a juniper that wasn’t doing well in the garden bed along the south side of her house with a Pinus korgiensis Silver Ray, a less-than-healthy tree she found in the “remains” section of a nursery.

“I put it in the ground last fall – I dug a good hole, amended the soil, fed it, and it’s now thriving,” Mooney said.

She’s also quite sentimental and, when her husband’s family sold their farm in upstate New York, Mooney dug up and brought back raspberry bushes, monarda perennials, two milk cans with tractor seats as their tops, and various fossil-filled stones that are now part of her Oak Avenue garden.

“I like to re-purpose things,” she said, pointing to an old chamber pot holder she picked from the curb and was refurbished by Joel in short order with a wire brush and some spray paint. It now holds two pots overflowing with flowers.