Poof! A streetside strip of urban ground morphs into a series of garden rooms straight out of an old-fashioned fairy tale
Visions of climbing roses, delphiniums, hollyhocks, and catmint danced in Heather Falcone’s head as she stood outside her family’s new home on a bustling corner in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Queen Anne Home
But when she opened her eyes, reality stared back: a pitiful swath of 98-pound-weakling rhododendrons and azaleas unable to match the muscle of a Queen Anne home that could pass for a stone castle. Just scraggly shrubs and mulch. Lots and lots and lots of mulch.
“I hate mulch,” Heather scowls. “And there I was with a yard of feet-deep mulch.”
Certainly, it had to go. The purge, though, brought a new problem. “I was kind of overwhelmed,” says Heather, a Brooklyn boutique owner with the dirt from just one, much smaller, garden project under her fingernails. “I had created a little English garden at our previous home, but this was a lot bigger task. I was sitting there with a bare yard and my husband, Steve, ribbing me: ‘I love what you’ve done with it, Heather.’ ”
Garden Before
Heather’s search was on for the right landscape design partner. It turned out to be harder than swiping to true love on Tinder. “I wasn’t inspired by a lot of landscapers,” Heather says. “I like a classic look with tons of flowers, not a modern garden with low-maintenance grasses and such.”
Then she stumbled on Jim Douthit’s portfolio, an artist’s palette of color. “We were on the same wavelength right away,” Heather says of Douthit, principal of the Wayland, Massachusetts, design firm A Blade of Grass. “He has a great eye, plus the experience and practicality I needed to take the collage of a million pictures I had collected and help me turn them into the garden rooms I wanted.”
After: Beautiful Entrance
The garden rooms concept resonated with Douthit, who saw it as the key to beefing up the presence of the narrow U-shape yard. “I envisioned a series of rooms, each opening onto the next to create a kind of journey,” he says.
Walk through an iron gate (a Brimfield Flea Market find) to the Checkerboard Garden, where patterned pavers lead past a circular flower bed.
Checkerboard Garden
At the center of the Checkerboard Garden is a statue encircled by boxwoods.
Porte Cochere
To begin the redesign, Douthit replaced the old driveway with a natural-stone and polyurethane aggregate that resembles pea gravel but is more stable. He outlined the drive and lawns with bluestone and brownstone pavers that mesh with the stone house.
Next came trees—arborvitae and buckthorn—that give the corner lot a secluded feel. Then came the garden structures and finally perennials, which were a treat for Douthit to include. “Heather is really a dream client for me, someone who is truly interested in tending a garden and not afraid of high-maintenance plantings,” he says. “I felt like I could really design the space exactly the way I wanted it to look without any limitations. My style tends toward very lush, layered plantings, which isn’t for everyone.”
Transitional Garden
Perennial beds filled with delphiniums, hollyhocks, and viburnum line the charming pass-through that connects the entry garden to backyard areas, including a bluestone patio. Lines of stone pavers give the space a formal air.
Backyard Before
The transformation from bare lot to blooms took three years. “Gardening is not for impatient people,” Heather says. “But that’s one thing I love about it. It takes time, but every year things change, and it gets better. A garden surprises you.”
After: Beauty and Order
Square perennial and vegetable beds demarked with potted boxwood topiaries snuggle up to a bluestone patio in the backyard.
Billowing catmint also plays a spectacular role in boisterous, carefree borders. “It grows like crazy, smells great, and really draws in the bees,” Heather says. “It flops a little, but I tie it up, then give it a hard prune in June. By September it looks really good again.”
