Garden designer and author Bill Noble says gardening is about feeling connected and getting familiar with your chosen piece of earth.
Noble staked out his "piece of earth" in Norwich, Vermont, on a former dairy farm. His recent book is titled "Spirit of Place: The Making of a New England Garden."
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Bill, how much pleasure do you get everyday from looking out at your gardens?
Bill Noble, author and garden designer: I get a lot of pleasure from looking from one vantage point —from the deck behind the house and the porch — because I can take in not only the garden, but the fields and the woods and the sky and the mountains and beyond.
This time of year, I will go out at 4 o'clock in the morning when the air is still and there's just the tinge of light on the horizon, and then listen to the birds song come up, as well as looking at the garden. So it's a really full sensory experience for me.
In your book, you write about creating a garden that feels genuinely rooted in its place. I imagine that's not easy to just create. Can you explain how you balance and build upon the relationship between the physical structure like a house and the existing landscape?
Well, I was really fortunate here in that I was given a very comfortable, modest house that was well sited when it was built in the 19th century. So it is protected in the back from the winter winds. We get beautiful sunlight in the winter and its tall ceilings in the house are cool in the summer. So we were really lucky in that we found this wonderful house built on over a century and a half, with barns and farm buildings and cared for all that time.
So I had something that had sort of stood the test of time. Because, you know, Vermont is full of abandoned houses and farms, but this one had remained for all those decades.
I think the greatest challenge was that it was a farm and there were a couple of shade trees around, but it was mostly tumbledown farm buildings and no shade. One of the challenges early on was to make the most of what remained of that spatial organization, and think through how I would be able to develop it in a way that I could maintain myself with the assistance of one other person, Susan Howard.
One thing that you didn't do is one, truck away all that rubble from the tumbledown dairy barn or, two, just backfill it and make it flat.
We trucked away some rubble, that's for sure, and we did rebuild some portion of stone walls. But I think it was maybe my interest in garden history and maybe visiting some Italian gardens that I really wanted to make a garden out of the remains of what had been here.
And those remains included beautiful granite stone foundation walls with lichen-covered capstones. So those were really to be featured. And then the broken parts, I figured, I would fill in with plants in a way that had been done in places like Ninfa and other beautiful, ruined gardens.
Can you tell us what that stands for?
It’s a garden in Italy, south of Rome, made in the ruins of a medieval stone village.
Can you talk a little bit about the seasons in the garden? Because it isn't just when the plants are flowering that that the homeowner is going to be looking upon those same plants.
Early on in my career as a gardener, I was working in the Garden of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire. And the great landscape designer, Ellen Biddle Shipman, reworked that garden when it became a museum open to the public. And she consciously created a garden that would have seasons of interest from Memorial Day to Columbus Day — when the site was opened to the public.
So I learned early on that although we can have glorious June gardens in northern New England, that I was much more interested in having a garden that could draw me out into it from spring through fall.
And if anything, in this garden here, I have favored August and September for the amount of bloom and flowering that is available to butterflies and other insects. So although I don't spend much time in the garden in the winter, there's a lot that can be done with the shapes of woody plants, the colors of stems and the way spaces are organized and plants hold their snow. So I'm really interested in the beauty of June, but I like to extend the interest in the garden as much as I can throughout the year.
Bill, you've got this glossy book and it is just chock-full of gorgeous color photographs throughout. Can you tell me about those photographs? Are those yours?
Many of them were taken at 5:15 in the morning, 8:30 in the morning, and then some in the evening. And we're speaking on a day that's sort of rather cool and overcast. And I'm about to grab my camera, the Nikon D810 that I purchased specifically to photograph the garden for the book. And right now we've got roses and clematis in bloom, some of the last of the alliums, and some really beautifully saturated colors that I can't wait to try and capture.
