On Her Turf

Still, the two hit it off, and their meeting was a pivotal moment for Gee. Burroughs set about introducing her to the tightknit gardening fraternity in suburban Maryland that included Carl Hahn; Phil Normandy, curator of plants at Brookside Gardens; and contractor Brian Billey of Clarksville, among others. Hahn spent a lot of time early on helping Gee move her garden beyond perennials to woody plants. Normandy has been a paid consultant, doing fine pruning and advising Gee on buying rare shrubs and trees, and where to place them.

When he was first summoned to Gee's property, Hahn recalls arriving to see a garden with two borders facing each other "with about half a mile in between." What she needed, he told her, was a master plan.

This path led, indirectly, to Gordon Hayward, a landscape designer and author in Putney, Vt. Hayward was speaking at the American Horticultural Society in Alexandria in the fall of 1999. Chatting with him after the talk, Gee learned that he had a cottage in England's garden-rich Cotswolds that he rented out. The following spring, she and her mother and aunt, both English born, used Hayward's cottage as a base to tour such gardening shrines as Hidcote Manor and Kiftsgate Court. This was part of Gee's ever-more-manic quest for ideas.

One evening, Gee curled up in the cottage with one of Hayward's books, Designing Your Own Landscape. "I read his book and totally understood where he was coming from. When I came home, I called him up." Come on down, she said, and we'll fix the garden together.

Hayward spent two days with Gee in the summer of 2000. He says he found a problem that is common in American landscapes: People pushing their garden beds to the edges of the property and bowing to the primacy of the lawn. "The result is that we walk past our gardens rather than within them. We walk past our plants, not among them."

Looking out the back of Gee's house, he could see the need for a distant focal point. He suggested a broad arbor, a pergola that would stop the eye and direct it to the side borders. Between the house and the envisioned deck, he devised a large elliptical terrace that would give shape to the lawn and bring together all the existing and proposed elements of the garden. As Hayward sat at Gee's kitchen table drawing out this concept, the ellipse resonated with Gee -- and with her husband. "Vince came into the kitchen and saw this elliptical shape and thought it looked like a racetrack," says Hayward. "At that point we both realized that Vince was going to buy into the whole thing."

They developed other features, including a screen to the side street, achieved with a tall hedge of Green Giant arborvitae, and the trelliswork and arched gate alongside the driveway, to shield the garden from immediate view. They also grouped garden furniture at strategic spots: The furniture itself would become a focal point, but the reverse views would be carefully framed with plants.

Still, Gee was worried that the features, especially the central terrace, would appear too stiff and "uppity," says Hayward. Later, when she visited him in Vermont, she saw that a garden that looked formal on paper was actually not. "She realized it's not the lines of the garden but the way it's planted that determines its mood," he says.

Gee was determined to build the central terrace herself, but first she had to convince Campanella that they needed a new tractor. On a gambling trip to Atlantic City, they stopped off at a John Deere dealership. The tractor she wanted had a price tag of $11,500. If we do well at the tables, Campanella told the dealer, we'll be back. And they did do well, winning about that much playing craps, says Gee.

It was an auspicious start to the terrace-making, but the task soon descended into the abyss of a lot of do-it-yourself garden construction projects -- a pile of mud, a mess, sore muscles and a touch of despair.

"It was brutal," says Gee, who brought in 90 cubic yards of good soil and compost to build up the area. "I spent months, the whole next year with orange paint and string and stakes trying to lay everything out." During that time, "you looked out, and it was mud for a year, and I would work all day, and it looked worse than when I started," she says. She persevered, and in the end also enlarged the deck and reconfigured its steps to make the new axis of the garden align with the view from her kitchen dinette.

She has made other significant changes since, including replacing the crape myrtles in the central allée with a tougher variety. She lost seven of the first 12 to winter freezes.

She also scaled back the pergola, built in 2001. "It would have been three times as long. I thought it would have been a bit much," she says. Even scaled back, "it priced out at way more than [the cost of ] two cars."

Still imposing, the pergola's pillars are planted with weeping blue atlas cedars which, in time, will form a spidery blue veil for the terrace behind the structure. This flagstone patio has become a favorite place to sit at night with a glass of wine, surveying the garden and the day's work. Nearby, beds are planted with summer tropicals and annuals that fill out in the heat of summer.

No one who knows Gail Gee expects her garden ever to be finished, though it likely will change and grow more interesting. No one who drives around Fulton Estates will ever mistake hers for a soulless yard.

For the people who rallied behind her, all of them plant lovers, the garden is a sort of validation for their own beliefs and toil. And they delight, of course, in the fact that Gee is no longer spinning her wheels.

"This is her life's work," says Hayward. "Gail just needed a framework and an organization. Once she had that, she was off and running."

Adrian Higgins is the garden editor for The Post's Home section. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.