On Her Turf

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On Her Turf
Given her large suburban yard, Gail Gee could have done what most of her neighbors do: Turn it over to the mow-and-blow brigade. Instead, she decided to cultivate a sophisticated garden.

Given her large suburban yard, Gail Gee could have done what most of her neighbors do: Turn it over to the mow-and-blow brigade. Instead, she decided to cultivate a large, sophisticated garden

Good gardening is all about planning. Which is why, early one morning last September, just as the lawn mowers and leaf blowers were beginning their daily assault on the suburban greensward of Howard County, Gail Gee had an ear out for a different sound: the growl of a creeping tractor-trailer.

An hour after sunrise, the driver pulled into the dead-end street on the side of Gee's three-acre garden bearing the goodies: bag after bag, pallet after pallet of pine fines mulch, a pine bark chaff beloved by serious gardeners for its soil-like properties. By hand and machine, Gee and a friend used a Bobcat to unload and store the booty, each stack a measure of the work ahead.

Through the fall and winter and into spring, the 5-foot-2 Gee spread the many hundreds of bags like a blanket over her precious plants. As the 47-year-old toiled, images of spring -- when her garden would be at its peak -- danced in her head. The result of all this work is on display now: a garden that is glossy-mag gorgeous. The tulips are stunning, the bearded irises are just about to pop, and everywhere leaves are emerging in a hundred shades of green and maroon.

Each spring, in fact, Gee's garden is fuller, richer. She's worked her clay field for 14 years, the past six with increasing direction and skill. Beginning with the usual suburban model -- thousands of square feet of formless lawn -- she's created a garden of colorful borders, perennials and bulbs, rare shrubs and trees, decorative arbors and gazebos, patios, stone paths and bright, heavy trellises bowered with clematis. Once a neophyte with much enthusiasm but little success, she has shown what can be done when you pursue a passion for gardening to its limits.

"I've never seen it before," says Carl Hahn, a retired director of Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, and Gee's adviser and friend. "When she isn't gardening, she's studying gardening."

How Gee came by these virtues is a tale in itself.

Gee and her husband, Vince Campanella, built their Fulton Estates home in 1992, in what was then an exurban outpost. Today, their brick colonial is the smallest on the street; set back 75 feet from the curb, it's spacious and comfortable, but not the trophy 7,000-square-foot chateau that has come to define the 21st-century dream house. To the right, the property adjoins a side street, to the left, a neighbor.

Most of the floral action takes place out back. Here, a deck surveys a deep and broad parcel of land that slopes away to a distant stand of trees buffering a horse farm. In the far left corner, the eye is drawn to a shaded woodlot, about one-third an acre of oaks, tulip poplars and hickories.

At the couple's previous home, in Takoma Park, Gee had dabbled in planting the basic impatiens and petunias. But she found her burgeoning interest in gardening stifled. She'd grown up in Ohio on an 18-acre property with ponies. Takoma Park might as well have been midtown Manhattan.

Campanella, 61, is not a gardener. He had a stock windfall in his company that allowed him to retire at 40 and turn his attention to his own passion, playing the horses. He has made a second career of handicapping thoroughbreds and buying into horse syndicates. He's a smart gambler, and he was wise enough to see that Gee was like a latent bud that needed the nourishment of space to bloom. One day, he let slip that he would like a nice yard. An innocent remark, seemingly, but he was lighting the fuse to a rocket.

Gee went scouting in the exurbs between Washington and Baltimore, and found their current home. Suddenly, life presented her with a three-acre tabula rasa and the funds to make something of it. She had the naive enthusiasm of a new gardener who believes anything is possible.