For Mary Painter, there are no limits — nor time constraints — when it comes to maintaining a sense of creativity in her garden. When she moved from Seattle to her 18th century home on Village Road East five years ago, she brought with her a sense of “slow” gardening that is uncommon on the East Coast. But she also transformed the previous owners’ garden into a serene backyard retreat using nontraditional accents to add personal flavor to the flowing displays of foliage.
The result is a garden with minimal lawn area, but with distinctive sections, inviting movement from one area to the next. That is what visitors can expect to do on Saturday, June 26, during the first annual Greening of West Windsor garden tour. Painter is one of 16 homeowners putting her backyard designs on display for those on the tour.
What has distinguished Painter’s garden from many others is her and her husband’s approach, which is to add a new section every year. “We’ve been here five years, but we do things just a little at a time,” she says. “We don’t subscribe to having the garden center to fill everything up with nice, neat rows. We concentrate on an area each season.”
Painter grew up in San Francisco. Her mother was a teacher and a bookkeeper for her father’s business. Her father owned and maintained apartment buildings. She met her husband, Mike, who grew up in Oklahoma, at work while living in San Francisco. The couple eventually moved to Seattle, where they lived for 14 years.
They moved to Washington, D.C. when her husband, a doctor involved in health policy, took a fellowship position there. After a year, they followed his work to New Jersey. The couple have a daughter who is a math teacher in Brooklyn and a son who is in sixth grade at Community Middle School.
When they arrived in West Windsor, they found a fenced-in vegetable garden and a circle garden in the center of the yard that served as an annual herb garden. Painter said she expanded on the work in the vegetable garden, moving the herbs to that area and making individual planting boxes. Now the circle garden mostly contains perennials, including roses, echinacea, and a few annuals. “That, now, is more of a show garden than an herb garden,” Painter says.
The couple also built a few patios around the garden from scratch, with the goal of cutting out the grass. “We made a big flagstone patio and a second smaller one,” she says. “We don’t like a lot of straight lines; we like things to curve around.”
She also likes unconventional accents. One of those accents is a wooden chair, painted in a bright green hue that perhaps once served as part of a larger set. Now, with its seat missing, the hole at the center of the seat serves as a container for a flower bed and is placed strategically within the garden. Near the chair, a candelabra hangs from one of the trees, surrounded by a variety of shade-loving plants, including hydrangeas, hostas, and ferns.
“In Seattle people are very into cottage gardens and English gardens, and a lot of whimsical things in their gardens,” she says. “Somebody was throwing away this brightly-painted green chair with no seat. I also found a red wagon. I brought it home and put that into a second shade garden and filled it with some ferns.”
It was in Seattle where Painter says she became interested in creating “outdoor rooms” and distinctive sections of gardens. “We had a lawn play area, we had a patio area, and we had a small, shaded seating area,” she says. “All of them were separated by hedges and trees.”
Since the climate in Seattle is different from that in New Jersey, Painter had to make some alterations. “The summer days are long; the sun is out at 4 a.m., and it sets after 9 p.m. during the solstice,” she says. “So you get a great growing season. The winters are not so harsh, so things that don’t winter over here, like adelias, winter over there.
“We did have to alter placement of plants because it’s so intensely hot here during the summer,” she says.
Painter says the couple has built upon the garden each year. One year, they installed the patio, and another year, they worked on the circle garden. Last year, they worked on the shade garden, and this year, they cut out and expanded the beds. “We have a lot of fountains in there,” Painter says. “We like the water effect — it’s very relaxing.”
Everything that the family has done in the garden has been self-taught. Describing their method as “slow gardeners,” Painter says the family enjoys the gratification of weeding a bed and looking back at what they’ve planted, knowing that they have designed it themselves. “If we did it all at once, what would we do next year?” she says. “In gardening, there is always room to make changes. We still have lots of spaces to rework every year.”
In addition to adding various elements to the garden on a yearly and seasonal basis, Painter says she spends about a half hour a day walking through the garden to pull weeds and perform routine maintenance.
The garden also features seating areas with benches and chairs throughout. “People have asked us whether we really sit in all these areas,” she says. “We actually do. At different times of the day, you have shade and sun.”
The family believes in using as few chemically altered products in the garden as possible, although they are not entirely “green.” However, the vegetable garden — with basil, tomatoes, corn, lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, peas, broccoli, strawberries, and herbs — is. “I rotate the crops in the vegetable garden, except for the corn because I plan the three sisters method with corn, squash, and beans,” she says, explaining that they help each other grow. “What one plant takes, the other puts back.” Avoiding chemicals where possible means that fewer products will go into the ground water.
“I like the fact that they’re trying to get rid of as much lawn as possible,” says Debra Wolosky, a GroWW organizer. “It’s an utterly charming property. There is a lot of intelligence and planning that went into the distinctive gardens they created and continue to create.
“She makes really good use of her shade and her sun, and she’s just making the most out of the property,” adds Wolosky.
The Painter family garden is just one example of the varieties of gardening styles that residents who take the tour can experience.
The tour, which will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., will showcase private gardens as well as some of the township’s public open spaces. The garden tour is designed to highlight sustainable practices as part of gardening, and organizers are hoping that visitors can gather information about native plants, organic gardening, composting, rain barrels, and container gardening among others.
Ram Chandran Gopalakrisnan’s garden on New Village Road is another stop on the tour. He got the idea for his garden — which uses common five-gallon buckets, storage containers, and empty plastic two-liter bottles to create container gardens that water themselves from the ground up — when he was living in an apartment with limited outdoor space.
Last year, Gopalakrisnan harvested 28 pounds of sweet cherry tomatoes from just three plants and more than two pounds of basil from a single bucket container. As part of the tour, he will demonstrate how to build a container using two buckets, one lid, a plastic drinking cup, a garbage bag, potting mix, and organic fertilizer.
Also on Village Road East is the garden belonging to the Szewczyk family. Owners Renata Adamska and Witek Szewczyk decided to demolish a dilapidated barn/garage in the middle of their backyard and replace it with a new structure with solar panels on the roof. In undertaking the project, the couple opened up the yard.
With the help of landscape designer Ronnie Hock, they transformed the garden over the past year and created an environmentally-friendly place for both children and adults. This included installing a 1,600-gallon underground water tank to store rain water from the barn gutters, which will be linked to an irrigation system for the lawn. The organic vegetable garden is already in place, where the couple grow tomatoes and cucumbers.
“It’s entirely self-guided,” says Wolosky of the tour. “You can go to whichever sites you want to at any time between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., with the exception of the guided hikes.” She adds that the organizers “certainly do want to showcase sustainable practices.”
The tour features sites on Melville Road, Landing Lane, Lancashire Drive, Scott Avenue, Lillie Street, Alexander Road, Clarksville Road, Village Road West, Village Road, Village Road East, South Mill Road, Kingsley Court, Lakeshore Drive, Cardiff Court, and Glacier Drive.
Along the way, however, visitors can also take tours of public spaces. Those sites include the Millstone River Preserve, Van Nest Park, Rogers Preserve, Ron Rogers Arboretum, West Windsor Community Park, West Windsor Community Garden and Senior Center, Trolley Line Trail, Conover Road Athletic Complex, Mercer County Park, the Appelget and Grover farms, Schenck Farmstead, and Zaitz Woods Nature Preserve.
Docents from the Boy Scouts will be at the Millstone River, Zaitz, and Rogers preserves as well as the Ron Rogers Arboretum. Led by Tony Vinci, the scouts will be distributing handouts to help people identify common trees in West Windsor.
There will be 45-minute guided nature hikes at the Millstone River and Zaitz preserves and Ron Rogers Arboretum. The Millstone River Preserve hike begins at 10 a.m. and will be led by David Siegel. The Ron Rogers Arboretum hike will begin at 11:30 a.m. and will be led by Ron Slinn. Andrew Kulley will lead the hike at the Zaitz Preserve at 1 p.m.
Tour maps will be available at the West Windsor Farmer’s Market and at the West Windsor Library. Maps and more information are also available at www.greeningwestwindsor.com. For questions, E-mail growwgardentour@gmail.com.
Garden Tour, Greening of West Windsor, Visit flower, vegetable, and container gardens throughout the town. Saturday, June 26, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 609-989-5662 or www.greeningwestwindsor.com.
