On Her Turf

By Adrian Higgins
Sunday, April 23, 2006

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.

"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.

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.