A Tale of Two Gardens, Part Two

A visit to Nancy Hughes’ Brooks Terrace garden reminds me that gardens are more than just pretty to look at or food for the table. Sometimes they’re a connection to the past.

Hughes, a Realtor with Caldwell Banker, lets me know right away that the real gardener in the family was her Dutch grandmother. “She had peach and plum trees, and currant bushes” along with her vegetables and flowers.

Ten years ago, Hughes looked out on a shady undeveloped lot taken over by a 6-foot-wide pine tree. Now the back of her home is a grassy yard surrounded on all sides by neat rows of colorful beds — beds along the fence, beds along the side of the house, beds along the deck.

Every plant is neatly confined, but the number and color of the mixture of perennials and annuals is immense.

A whimsical mini-metal greenhouse Hughes found in the trash serves as a planter for some impatiens.

Lavender and sea grass sway in the wind along the sunny side of the house.

Roses, orange cosmos and zinnias fill out another section.

A large blue hydrangea anchors a corner.

She points out the variegated nasturtiums that thrive on poor soil.

Sedum is beginning to pop up. In the fall she’ll also have mums.

A vegetable garden along the side of the house contains tomatoes, cauliflower, eggplant and zucchini.

Hughes’ green thumb secret? She weeds everyday, and constantly moves plants around until she finds them their happiest spot, often separating plants that have taken over too much of a section.

She also reseeds from year to year with seeds gathered from cosmos, for example, at the end of the season.

Her top secret? Her Dutch grandmother, who regularly gathered whatever was leftover in the kitchen — egg shells, potato peels — and threw it out the back door into the garden.

This method sometimes leads to surprises. Nestled between the flowers is a tomato plant, and in another bed, a rogue squash is holding its own.

Plopped into the middle of all this order is a tiny house in need of paint, with sloping windows and a tattered roof.

Hughes explains that when she was a child, her father made her a play house, which she loved. When her own children were born, her father constructed another play house, and sent it to his grandchildren from New York.

It has sat in Hughes’ backyard for decades and one senses it’s not going anywhere soon.

“I really enjoy it,” says Hughes. “My deck is another room in my house in the summer,” she says, “and I love to sit and look at my garden.”