Tag Archives: Garden Design

My Late Winter Garden

The Garden Artist Posted on by

I am a gardener.

As a botanical artist, I use my garden as the inspiration for my work. I also use it as a fitness gym to keep me healthy, strong and flexible. The other side benefit that no gardener ever mentions is that the more gardening you do the more ice-cream you can eat without gaining weight. Isn’t that enough reason to take up gardening?

Hamemelis x intermedia ‘Arnold Promise’ lighting up my late winter garden.My witch hazel, otherwise known as Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold Promise’, begins blooming in February in my neck of the woods. I’m located in zone 6, on Long Island, NY in the United States which is latitude 40.900N and longitude -73.343W. The elevation is listed as 59 feet but I’m at the top of a series of hills so I’m a bit higher up from the town harbor. This means that I get a little bit more snow than other parts of my town and it lasts longer.

This photo was taken on March 1, 2008 and it shows the view from my kitchen window. Looking slightly left, through the V shaped branches of my Paperbark maple, you can see the witch hazel in bloom. I planted that shrub in August of 1999 and it lights up the garden for close to two months beginning in February.

Celebratory strings of confetti herald the coming of spring on my witch hazel.

I positioned it as a focal point to pull my eye out to the woodland walks. I wanted to see the cheerful yellow color from warmth of my kitchen without having to brave the elements on a cold late winter day. It is such a welcome harbinger of spring that it often seduces me to brave the cold to see what else might possibly be in bloom so early in the year.

Ribbons of paper thin confetti dangle from the branches as if in anticipation of celebrating the spring season.

Searching for the Dream Seems Easy. It’s Not.

The Garden Artist Posted on by

On January 5, 2008 I was featured in an article in Newsday titled “Dream Chasers.” The subject was the choices and sacrifices some people make when deciding to step off the corporate treadmill in order to pursue more emotionally or spiritually rewarding careers without regard to financial restraints.

The author of the article, Arlene Gross, wrote about the choices, decisions and sacrifices of five different individuals. The various paths we chose to explore in our second careers are as different as our paths in our initial and primary wage earning pursuits.

Noel Rubinton, the editor of the Act Two section of Newsday, however, hit on a different issue when he encouraged people to use the New Year as an opportunity to explore yourself even if you couldn’t at this time make the giant leap of a whole new career.

Noel wrote that, “A line that really resonated in our cover story came from Mary Ahern… finding that switch took work. ‘The hard part at first was trying to find inside myself what that dream actually was. You spend so much time marching forward and doing what you do, you lose the essence of yourself’.”

When my husband Dave gave me as a wedding gift, which coincided with my 50th birthday, the opportunity to re-invent myself you would think I would have immediately jumped into my studio. Instead I whined and anguished for a months over what I wanted to do with this great new vista open to me.

I was so overwhelmed with the immense possibilities I now had available to me that I suffered each day trying to make the right decision with this precious gift. I spent so much time trying to fathom what makes me tick, what intellectually interests me, what direction would support my value system, what new career would be feasible and sustainable for the next 30 or so years, what would not impinge on the home life that we had just found together and cherished so much.

I talked about it endlessly. I beat it to death. I’m sure there were times that Dave wished he hadn’t made the offer since I was so annoying in my pursuit of the “what if’s”. Massage therapist? Lawyer? Chiropractor? Quite frankly, I never even considered Artist.

I knew one thing for sure. I was tired of computers and wanted to become a Luddite. And then one Saturday morning, sitting on our deck having coffee surrounded by the gardens I designed and have worked on for decades, Dave suggested that since we loved the gardens so much and they gave such joy to people, why not design gardens for others.

BANG!

2002-05 Mary planting her tropical garden Ten days later I was enrolled as a full-time student in the Ornamental Horticulture Program at Farmingdale. I knew I wanted to be a landscape designer and this was the best beginning. Two years later I graduated with my degree and a new career.