BY LYN DESMARAIS
SUDBURY—On the hillsides of the ancient Taconic Mountains are farms that carved fields out of the forests and rocky slopes. One such property, on a gravel road, reflects its owners’ abiding love of history and stewardship. This visitor felt escorted back to a 19th-century farm by centuries-old maple trees. A lovely cape house sits on a rise, with weathered outbuildings. Nancy Rowe’s cottage gardens combine herbs, vegetables, and flowers together in a gorgeous display of color, textures, and edibles. Here their motto of ‘If we like it we keep it, if we don’t we pull it out’ has resulted in large gorgeous sunlit ‘garden rooms’ with distant mountain views.
“You’ve got to be flexible as a gardener,” says Nancy. She studied art and interior design and worked renovating houses. But she wanted to do more outdoor design work. She took her skills and applied them to the landscapes of Vermont. She became a master gardener.
Nancy moved to Brandon around 1977, and lived on Pearl Street. She became fascinated with medicinal herbs and their history. In the mid-1980s, she started a company called Country Herbs and Flowers with a friend who had a greenhouse. Nancy had the barn. At that time, they decided to create herb gardens where they could showcase the herbs during all the seasons so you could see how what you were buying would look in every season. Now it’s done routinely but then it was something new and different. Many customers were surprised that common perennial flowers they knew were actually medicinal herbs used by humans for centuries. Over the years, Country Herbs and Flowers expanded to include gardeners clothing aka Gardener’s Gear and gardening items made by family members, such as husband Larry’s limestone birdbaths and planters.
“At that time there wasn’t clothing specifically for gardeners,” said Nancy. “So, I would go out and buy comfortable clothes I thought would work in a garden then sell them in my shop along with our herbs.”
Nancy loves the design aspect of gardening and the history and lore of plants. Her biggest challenge, in her lifelong career, has been when she gets a terrific design and all the plants in place, and they create that spectacular garden she had imagined. Then circumstances completely out of one’s control happen: a windstorm, no snow cover, marauding cows, critters, invasive species, or even the plants you planted don’t thrive where you planted them.
Garden tip from Nancy: “I try to use plants that are hardy to our zone and which will grow happily and thrive so that I can move divisions of the plants around to different garden beds on the property. This system makes for beautiful gardens that have a commonality but also an individuality as you can vary the balance of plant variety in each bed. Then I add perhaps 2 or 3 new focal species to the garden to make it stand out. Experiment, experiment, experiment!!! So much fun!!”
Twenty-two years ago, Nancy and Larry moved from Brandon village to his grandparents’ property in Sudbury. Nancy has an impressive day lily collection interspersed with Annabelle hydrangea, poppies, aster family flowers, globe thistles, and creepers like thyme. Nancy favors muted colors in her gardens. She likes to repeat either colors or exact varieties to carry your eye through and along her gardens rather than stopping your eye. Her goal in her gardens’ designs is to be comforting, relaxing, and welcoming. Her gardens are the quintessential cottage gardens that fit perfectly into their farm and are as timeless as the mountains, sugar maples, weathered gray outbuildings, and the white cape homes of Vermont.
