If you go on the garden tour circuit this time of year, you’ve seen boxwood pruned to British standards, birdhouses on turned posts with Roman columns flanking tiny avian doorways and picket fences whose white paint gleams in the sunlight.
The North Cove neighborhood of Old Saybrook is a perfect setting for such a scene; it’s obvious the landscapers roll through these exclusive streets regularly and that the residents care a great deal about how their properties look.
Kathy Connolly’s site is in a particularly prime spot with its to-die-for view across North Cove and almost two acres filled with a variety of shrubs, trees and plants.
No wonder the Historical Society asked her if she’d be on its Art of the Garden tour today.
What the organizers perhaps didn’t realize is the most prolific plant grown in Kathy’s garden is the potato (she grows five varieties), and the tasks she spends most of her time on are soil building, rock collecting, compost turning and red worm reproduction.
This is a garden not like the others.
When the Connollys, who have two elementary school kids, moved from Norwalk to Saybrook six years ago, she was already committed to organic practices. Her late grandmother back in Pittsburgh, where she grew up, was an early adherent to no pesticide/herbicide gardening, and it rubbed off, said Connolly, 48.
But it was here, in this tony neighborhood of orderly hedges, that Connolly came to terms with what it fully means to be an organic gardener. She is now a certified organic gardener — something she takes very seriously. “You don’t cut corners,” she said as she leaned over to pull up a clump of weeds.
If the Colorado potato beetle, which anyone who grows potatoes can tell you travels widely beyond its home state, stops at her house, Connolly squishes the bugs by hand one by one.
But because she has made her land so welcome to beneficial insects and built her soil so richly with worm castings and disintegrated kitchen scraps, there has been nary a nasty potato beetle sighting this year.
It is a welcome sight on a garden tour to see vegetables growing in more than a decorative potager. What’s particularly fascinating about Connolly’s efforts is the way the vegetables and fruits mix in with the flowers and shrubs. It’s artful but not in that contrived way where every lettuce leaf not the right shade and shape is plucked out and nothing is left to go to seed lest it look untidy.
You can’t help but admire the way Connolly has built up beds on her sandy, thin soil, outlining them with rocks she’s gathered from everywhere (“I’m a rock nut,” she said). Look closely, and you’ll find that the bed is filled not just with perennials but also with strawberries.
When she builds a plant bed — and there are many — they are irregularly shaped and raised, with the surface carefully sloped toward the sun to capture as many rays as possible. “The sun exposure — insolation — to the soil is very important,” said Connolly, who favors native and drought-tolerant plants and mulches with shredded leaves.
Her composting methods are tucked all around the place, along with cold frames. But nonetheless, there is order. And there are big, fat healthy lupines, campanulas and leeks and peppers, parsley, arugula and aster and rudbeckia waiting their time.
The house is set back, but the lawn — “I don’t care for grass much,” Connolly said — takes up little of the front yard. Instead, a field borders the road, and beds fill much of the rest; a toy rowboat turned on its side is nestled near the front door, filled with shells and beach rocks.
Last summer, Connolly composed a poem in her gardening journal that said she “permitted myself some full-time gardening/Without asking for any pardoning.”
In another, she wrote: “Now my spirit’s humming/Caring for these plants./I hear my different drummer drumming,/ I’m a suburban backyard Rembrandt.”
Old Saybrook’s Art in the Garden Tour is 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today. Besides Connolly’s garden, the tour includes an 18th-century home and seven other fine gardens. Tickets, at $23, are available at 9 a.m. on the town green on Main Street.
