The Gardens at Broccoli Hall

The very beginning...

In the winter of 1985, I saw a little Cape Cod house clinging to a bulldozed slope - and fell in love. Logically it didn't make sense. The fifty-year-old house was a disaster. The paint was scaling, the mechanicals were hopeless, and what I saw as a romantic Wind-in-the-Willows, Through-the-Looking-Glass retreat, was in fact, a rough fixer-upper, rooted in hard pan, standing up to it's window wells in freezing rainwater. No problem.

I squinted at the sun and saw that it would travel from the eastern hill behind the house, along the southern border of the little acre-and-a-half plot before setting in a long, glowing sigh across the valley to the west. I could have roses. I imagined that the spring in the foreground could become a pond, that the giant spruce trees would add elegance and winter color, that after trucking in a few million yards of topsoil, I could realize my dream garden. I ran quickly through the house with my eyes closed, signed the contract and named my little estate Broccoli Hall.

In the beginning, I worked with reknowned horticulturalist, Tim Steinhoff, who helped me understand garden structure and interpreted my colorful ideas into actual plants. Thirty-one years have passed, and in that time I've had failures and unexpected successes, learned that "perennial" doesn't mean "eternal" and that good structure makes the garden satisfying in all seasons. Most of all, I've learned to love what grows best in my garden.