SEAFORD, Va.
At 75, Pamela Harper still spends most days in the garden, transplanting this, pruning that, mentally cataloguing her successes and failures.
After 30 years tending the same acre and a half, you might think her gardening journey would be drawing to an end. Think again.
"I have never seen gardening as something you have , it's something you do ," she said. This may seem an ever more radical notion in an age of television makeover shows and instant gardens, but Harper embodies a different, more enduring philosophy about life with plants, and one that has resonated throughout the land.
She has written a number of influential books on gardening, including "Color Echoes: Harmonizing Color in the Garden" (1994), which expanded traditional methods for achieving color unity in gardens. (The book prompted one online reviewer to call her the Julia Child of gardening). Harper has spent much of her life evaluating garden plants, often through the lens of a camera. As a horticultural photographer, she has a library of 150,000 slides.
Her contemporary house is embraced on one side by a backwater of the York River, seen through a colonnade of old loblolly pines. But the street side is a long, deep series of shaded garden beds, full of large ornamental tree specimens and dainty wildflowers alike, and everything in between. It is an Aladdin's cave for plant lovers, constantly changing and consciously not a static, polished show garden.
It stands out for its lushness in a subdivision where most people came for the boating and the fishing. Harper turns down requests for garden tours by groups she regards as little interested in gardening and more consumed "by what I call nosey parkering." she said. This is a British term for voyeurism. Harper and her late husband, Patrick, emigrated from England in the 1960s, and her innate need to garden has accompanied her to Connecticut, Maryland and, for much of her life, in this Tidewater landscape where frosts last until late March, as in Washington, but where amaryllis bulbs will grow happily in the sandy soil.
Harper has seen a revolution in American gardening in that time. More than that, she has been one of its voices.
In "Designing With Perennials" (1991), readers found guidance at a time when gardeners in the United States were discovering perennials beyond peonies, hostas and bearded irises. Suddenly, Harper was imparting practical, insightful information in the same lucid style as English-based writers, but with firsthand knowledge of gardening on this side of the pond. Plants she introduced to a gardening generation, once unfamiliar, have become mainstream.
At the time, certain perennials and grasses came to represent this herbaceous frenzy, including fountain grass, black-eyed Susans and the now disgraced loosestrife (too invasive). She wrote, with prescience: "Design based on the same few perennials, no matter how good they may be, will ultimately become as stereotyped and boring as the lawn and foundation plantings they replace."
To avoid cliches and to design effectively, she counsels, the gardener must broaden his or her knowledge of plants. How do you achieve this? Slowly, and by doing , not having .
Indeed, as instructive as her writing remains, it is only by seeing her in the garden that you see Harper's unsated curiosity at work.
When Hurricane Isabel flooded her place with salt water, she saw the rapid decline of many azaleas but sporadic damage to her hydrangeas. Half of her mopheads died back, "but the serratas were not damaged. Interesting."
We come across a small variety of the Japanese snowball viburnum that, nevertheless, has reached 10 feet in 15 years. "I have seen it recommended for rock gardens. It's not for rock gardens."
In a series of large beds, separated by winding paths, interesting ground covers and late-spring bulbs abound, including a variety of wood anemone called 'Blue Eyes.' The more popular and related Grecian windflower is devoured by the voles. Then there's the crinkleroot toothwort, a wildflower for the shade garden. "By the end of June it disappears and comes up again in October, great for planting under [deciduous] shrubs," she says.
And speaking of shrubs . . .
Shrubs are perhaps the most underused class of actors in the garden, other than such standbys as oakleaf hydrangeas, a few viburnums and witchhazels, and a raft of broadleaf evergreens. Harper sees the untapped potential of the Alexandrian-laurel, an evergreen that grows to three feet; or the Choisya 'Aztec Pearl,' an eight-foot evergreen shrub with clusters of scented white flowers that bloom in spring and again in the fall.
She is also partial to small trees, suited for small gardens or tucking in between shrubs and perennials. There's the unusual redbud 'Pauline Lilly,' with salmon flowers. As it fades, a little tree named yellowhorn is still smothered in white-and-yellow, fragrant blossoms. Harper believes it deserves to be far better known and grown. (Its botanic name is Xanthoceras sorbifolium ).
"From the beginning shrubs have been my favorite thing, but over the years I've grown enormous amounts of perennials. Now I'm adding fewer perennials; I'm trying to cut down on maintenance so it remains manageable," she said.
Apart from the salt damage, the hurricane toppled big trees and opened up to sunlight areas previously planted for shade. The storm, which made landfall in September of 2003 in the Outer Banks and then blew up the Chesapeake Bay, set her garden back five years. As devastating as it was, it was not the blow it might have been for a gardener whose art is never finished. Long ago, she learned to live with the ravages of time, the way the years have turned a simple hedgerow of red cedars into an avenue of trees, of which about half are dying from old age. No problem, the trunks simply serve as posts for interesting climbing vines.
A nursery area next to the house is full of cuttings and seedlings, and when she lifts an embedded pot, you see black soil down to about a foot and sand beneath it. At first, it was just sand, but when gardening is in your blood, you can actually change the color and nature of the earth.
Sometimes hurricanes force makeovers of parts of the gardens. More often, Harper finds areas that are tired or not working, and she will try something new. This keeps it fresh for her. She is mindful, too, that this is a thrilling time in gardening when a great number of plants are available from an increasing array of sources, fueled by the Internet.
When her husband died five years ago, she decided to stop writing. Now she gardens for herself, and each year brings something different, such as a long and measured spring that has kept plants in bloom and lent an intensity to leaf colors.
Toiling away can bring its aches and pains, "but if I'm working outside, the day just flies by. Whether I'm working in the garden or taking photographs, it's sheer bliss, and I get totally lost," she said. "There isn't anything else I would rather be doing."
