On Her Turf

"I really thought in the beginning that I could learn everything I needed to know," she says. Ha.

What she discovered instead was that gardening is a complex endeavor that takes years to master. Gardeners are being asked, after all, to marry the science of horticulture with the art of design, topics that alone can consume years of formal study.

As Gee can attest, there are hundreds -- thousands -- of plants to buy and kill, no single source of good help, lots of dead ends and no finish line. It is, in short, a maze. And on this scale and with this intensity, it's an expensive one. Simply keeping the garden safe from deer, for example, requires 1,500 feet of fencing, most of it sturdy, eight-foot netting. When asked how much she has invested overall, Gee says, "Don't even want to think about it," and then deadpans, "I burn the receipts."

No wonder so many people turn to landscape design companies to install and plant a finished setting, and then hire crews to maintain it.

"That's most of what passes for gardening these days," says Hahn. "Superficially nice, but no soul."

Gee was always being pulled toward something deeper. Unwittingly, perhaps, she chose as her Eden one of the most difficult sites to landscape, the large, suburban lot. On just a quarter-acre, an intensive garden can be an all-consuming challenge; on three acres, it approaches in size some of the most ambitious gardens in the world. And the suburban landscape is an inescapable contradiction: Lots are open and expansive, yet cheek by jowl with the neighbors'.

For the first few years, Gee turned to landscape designers. But the more she read and taught herself about gardening, the more she realized that their proposals didn't connect with her vision. "I have a drawerful" of plans "that never saw the light of day," she says. "They didn't take into account the fact I considered myself a gardener."

So she read books, scrutinized catalogues and began visiting fancy gardens and attending lectures by the big names in the horticultural world. Her first serious design attempt created two opposing borders of perennials on either side of the expanse of lawn. In one, she tried to follow the color theories of the English matriarch of perennial gardening, Gertrude Jekyll. Between the borders, and set off a little, she had a large decorative gazebo installed. The deck behind the house perched over a large, U-shaped flower bed.

But her efforts were not satisfying, and she began to realize that she would never live long enough to figure it all out herself. She needed to tap more knowledgeable minds.

Gee had heard about Karen Burroughs in nearby Ashton. On two of their 18 acres, Burroughs and her husband had created a series of picture-postcard gardens, defining areas with fences, benches, arbors and terraces, and then planting them effusively with showy perennials such as peonies, flowering shrubs and old garden roses. Late spring had become a whirlwind for Burroughs, a time of bus tours, garden parties, and appointments with magazine photographers and writers.

In the spring of 1997, Gee telephoned out of the blue. She had read that the garden was open by appointment. "No," said Burroughs. "It's not open. I've got a magazine coming, and I can't talk to you." She told her to check back in July, a sure way of getting rid of any garden voyeur. Washington gardens and gardeners wilt in July. That summer, says Burroughs, "lo and behold, I get this phone call, and it's Gail."

Burroughs agreed to see her. It would be hard to imagine two more different characters. Burroughs is colorful and animated; she gardens in bright shades of lipstick and talks to her plants, unabashedly. Gee is contained and laconic, and could be mistaken for a librarian.