She's in a Garden State of Mind

By Adrian Higgins
Thursday, September 11, 2008

As the twin towers stood burning seven years ago this morning, Margaret Roach knew she had to do two things. The first was to get in her car and head out of Manhattan, where she worked. The second was to take herself to her garden two hours away in the rolling farmland of Columbia County in the Hudson Valley.

The garden, more than 20 years in the making and the subject of a book she wrote a decade ago, had always been a weekend refuge. On Sept. 11, it became a palliative to the horror unfolding 100 miles downriver.

Gardens, she says, "are the antithesis to this out-of-control world we live in."

Mystically, as she turned into the driveway of her 1880s farmhouse that day, she was greeted by a stray cat, which said to her with his eyes: "I need you this day. Take me in."

Today, Jack lives like a king, enthroned on a soft chair in his own heated cabin just a few feet from the farmhouse.

Roach soon returned to her office on 42nd Street, and as the shock and grief of 9/11 slowly subsided, her life settled back into the frenetic world of publishing Martha Stewart Living magazine.

This former fashion editor turned garden columnist for Newsday joined Martha's empire in 1993, near the beginning, and the two clicked. Roach climbed the ladder, becoming the magazine's garden editor and then a vice president for Internet ventures and, finally, editorial director of Martha Stewart Living and other titles.

As such she had a ringside seat to the rise, fall and rise again of her friend and boss. Roach remains bowled over by Stewart's energy and curiosity and her days stuffed with broadcasts, road trips, meetings, working meals and public appearances. "I would always say to her, 'You're an omnivore.' She wants to taste everything, see everything, know everything, meet everything."

Then there was the darkness four years ago, when Stewart was convicted of obstructing justice in an investigation of a personal stock sale and served five months in a women's prison in West Virginia. As Stewart's monthly letter disappeared from the magazine, it was left to Roach to thank readers for their support while she and her colleagues soldiered on.

"It was a crazy situation, no rulebook, no map." Advertising revenues went through the floor, but readers remained loyal. "We never reinvented the brand under duress." Or, as Stewart counseled: "Stick to your knitting."

Stewart was welcomed back on the cover the following April, holding a pet chicken. All was right with the world again, except as the company rebounded and Roach helped to implement the next publishing strategy, she inwardly yearned for the house and garden she knew only on weekends. It is a tortured dance familiar to many New Yorkers with weekend places, a love of the soil and a sense of displacement.

From her kitchen table, she can look up to see antique nursery blocks that spell out "Carpe Diem," the Latin phrase meaning seize the day, and she would think, "How many more years am I going to look at that stupid thing and put my things in the car Sunday afternoon?"

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."