Gardening: I’m right where I want to be

By LYN DESMARAIS

BRANDON—”Who is the master of our gardens? Plants, weeds, weather or us?” asks Judy Reilly when I arrive. I’m not sure how I’d answer that question. Judy Reilly’s art and gardens echo each other. They are full of warm colors, interesting objects—warmly human and both structured and then relaxed inside the structure. Judy grew up on a farm in New York State. Her mother had an off-farm job so Judy’s job was to tend and harvest the garden and cook meals from that day’s harvest for the rest of the family: six people, three meals a day. Judy says she loved it and felt so grateful to have a job she absolutely loved.  

She met her husband, George, and they moved with his job from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to Connecticut and now Vermont, where she lives, gardens, and creates fabric art. They bought their house 19 years ago in Brandon. Judy has had gardens everywhere she lived. “It takes time to establish a good garden plot,” she says. Judy has done just that. She has hosta beds, daylily beds, raspberry beds, and a lovely shade bank garden.  About midway through our garden tour Judy answers the question she first posed to me. 

“Remember that you are the master of your garden so even if it’s beautiful but it’s in the wrong place, pull it out.”  Judy then added “but if it’s beautiful, in the wrong place, but thriving, it’s where it wants to be.”

“Bette Moffat once gave me some comforting advice,” Reilly said. “I asked her what I should do with my steep bank with many different plants all haphazardly mixed together and she said ‘let it be what it wants to be.’ I took it to heart. Now I only take out the aggressive weeds or the saplings, and let it be.  I love the beauty of its wildness.”

Judy’s sun garden is a magnet for pollinators and vegetables.  Each garden is contained, weeded, and well ordered. On the design side, Judy says she throws everything to the wind. I see structure everywhere in where the gardens are laid out, border gardens, dividing gardens, and bank gardens—each of her gardens has structure. Within the gardens Judy does allow plants to spread out and self-seed so many of them move around. The sun garden is a lovely mixture of herb, berry, vegetable, and flowers and includes an apple tree. She calls it her “edible landscape.”

Hostas lead to the front door. Like many gardens, due to mature trees, gardens can be full-shade and mainly sun while being only feet apart. Having so many herbs and pollinator plants ensures that all food producing plants will be pollinated. As a deer deterrent, Judy liberally uses the pungent scents of herbs and edible flowers. The herbs can be used fresh and dried, and they all give a strong visual interest when the vegetable garden is harvested and leaves empty spaces in the garden. Becoming a Master gardener has its pluses, Judy says, in that it reinforced her foundation in gardening, like partnering plants such as potatoes and green beans to keep the potato bugs at bay and rotating crops even in small gardens. It also taught her what questions to ask and whom to ask. What she loves most about gardening is simply following along as plants progress. Patience is the secret to gardening!     

“I’m a caretaker. I love to nourish and watch things grow. Gardening is magical. Take the seed for instance, it has everything inside it (other than water and soil), that it needs to become what it is going to be.”  The really happy part is having super fresh food to eat.

Judy’s top gardening tips:

Wrap your blueberries in netting in the winter as well as summer to deter rabbits from eating them. Dress the blueberries with pine needles in the fall and ammonia sulfate in May to keep the soil acidity high. 

The best time to weed gardens is after a heavy rainstorm and if you are patient and let them grow a bit, for when the weeds are taller, they’ll  come up more easily. If you love a sense of wildness, learn more about weeds and their uses and which are edible like portulaca (purslane). Use your grass clippings as mulch. They are an excellent source of omega 3s. If you have any hungry deer about, plant strong-smelling herbs and flowers all around your garden. Plants with pungent scent deter deer.

And finally, be kind to yourself. Gardening is all about balance. It will never be perfect, so sometimes, “Let it be what it wants to be”.