She's in a Garden State of Mind

And so, at age 54, she has spent the past year transitioning out of the New York publishing world and into the blogosphere. Today, she works on her blog, A Way to Garden ( http://awaytogarden.com), from the small upstairs office in her jewellike farmhouse, renovated for the move. She writes without the fancy office and assistant, the handsome salary, the IT support or the other aspects of corporate infrastructure that keep people out of their gardens. But she is, for the first time, in her garden daily. She no longer has to sit in her 24th-floor office, looking out to the Empire State Building, and regret that she has not picked the pole beans to keep them bearing.

Her writing is disturbed not by the constant sirens of midtown Manhattan or the blaring of taxi horns but by a colony of singing amphibians that includes three fearless bullfrogs the size of dressed Cornish hens that sit by a pond and two little frogs that perch on a water-filled pot around the corner. One lets me stroke its chin as it sits on the lip of the pot. Roach calls them her "frog boys."

A Way to Garden gets its name from her book of the same title, published by Clarkson Potter in 1998. The book has stayed a favorite of mine over the years because as she charts the course of a season in her garden and surrounding orchard and meadow, her practical advice is coupled with tender musings on why we garden.

After 15 years working in the idea mill of Martha Stewart Living, Roach has cultivated this sensibility in her blog as something she playfully calls "woo-woo." Pressed to define it, she laughs, then ponders and says, "It's the other side of the garden equation: the emotional, spiritual, meditative, tender parts."

For people who have sadness in their lives or are stressed out, the process of gardening, she says, is "healing, relaxing and fulfilling."

Typically, she tends to her Web site for an hour or two and then climbs on an orange tractor to mow the grass or turns compost or starts to pull the tomato vines. In her book, she sliced the year not into months or seasons but two-month periods that track the stages of life. She titles January and February "Conception," March and April "Birth," May and June "Youth," and so on. We are now in that period she calls "Senescence," which sounds grim until you catch November and December: "Death and Afterlife." But it is actually a clearer way to see the cycles of the garden, and it's a valuable tool to teach people that gardens don't just exist for the floral carnival of spring.

The hillside landscape features stately, gnarled old apple trees, and Roach has added a number of choice specimens of shade trees and conifers that have the presence of age. These include an imposing Japanese umbrella pine by one of the two frog ponds and distant golden dawn redwoods and a copper beech. The beech tree was planted 17 years ago with the help of a neighbor and is beginning to look imposing.

The trees are positioned to frame a view from the house or to stop the eye at a far-off point. In garden areas around the house, the scale is reduced with ground covers, perennials, ornamental shrubs and plants in containers. Lots of containers.

Winter is long in this Zone 5 garden, and many of the plantings have been chosen for the ornament of their berries and stems. In addition to brightly twigged dogwoods and willow, she has 10 crab apples, 30 different viburnums and 60 deciduous hollies, illuminated by winter fruit. "The birds get into it, but that's the point," she said.

She is there to groom plants, to cut flowers, to discover delights in a garden that she had missed before. "In 22 years, I had never lived in my own garden. There are so many plants I hadn't seen because they were ephemeral. It was wrong, it was all out of balance."