PAGE DICKEY, 70, and her husband, Bosco Schell, 76, were soaking up the sun on their terrace here one afternoon a few weeks ago — floppy hats in place against the rays — explaining how they were simplifying their garden. Sort of.
“The first step is to replace perennials with shrubs and ground covers,” Ms. Dickey said, sipping her coffee after a hearty lunch of her homemade minestrone, whose onions, leeks, garlic and chard came straight from the garden. “We need an overall plan: more green architecture and less plants.”
Mr. Schell, a retired book editor, grew up in Hungary, where his family had a walled kitchen garden. He had peeled the Empires and Mutsus gathered from the orchard here for the fresh applesauce we had eaten, dribbled with cream.
“We talk about simplifying, but the whole joy of gardening is being creative,” he said. “And creativity usually means adding. You go to a nursery and you say, ‘Oh! That’s the perfect plant for us!’ ” (Like the little potted strawberry bush, named Venus, that they fell in love with at a plant sale, and then wandered around with for days, seeking a place for it.)
“Instead of simplifying, we’re complicating,” he added with a chuckle. Mr. Schell, who fled Budapest at 11, when the Germans invaded, can’t bear to throw away any plant; he makes more from seeds and cuttings, to give away or donate to plant sales at the local library.
As Ms. Dickey writes in “Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden,” to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February, “A husband is all very well, but a husband in the garden is a mixed blessing.”
The two married 10 years ago, he a widower, she divorced, with 13 grandchildren between them. Now they have 3 dogs, 20 chickens, 4 runner ducks and 2 Royal Palm turkeys. And thousands of plants, from overgrown shrubs and trees and hedges to perennials constantly screaming to be staked or deadheaded or divided, or self-seeding all over the garden.
Mr. Schell is the plantsman, the collector, the one-of-everything type. She is the designer with the painter’s eye, who started building this garden 30 years ago, with her former, nongardening husband, when they moved to this three-acre remnant of a 19th-century farm with their four children. (She told that story in “Duck Hill Journal: A Year in a Country Garden,” published in 1991 by Houghton Mifflin.) It had a few old lilacs and dogwoods around the house, a woodland edged with sugar maples and a pasture overlooking the blue hills of the Hudson Valley.
Using the doors of the old clapboard house as site lines, Ms. Dickey, who is steeped in European as well as American gardens, created a series of terraces and hedged garden rooms, one opening to another, all on axis to the house.
She loved flowers then — peonies, roses, irises, lady’s mantle, bee balm, foxgloves, catmint — a multitude of perennials billowing over the crisp lines of geometric beds and trimmed hedges of privet, boxwood, euonymus, dwarf lilac, cornelian cherry, gray-twigged dogwood and hemlock, which is lightly sheared once a year.
Back then, she also had endless energy, for riding horses with her two daughters, tending her little flock of rare poultry from the Murray McMurray catalog, giving garden talks around the country, writing books (six, not including her latest) and rushing out to weed (her favorite thing) and divide and prune and plant more, whenever she could. Always accompanied, of course, by her dogs.
“I can’t imagine not having dogs — they’re such good companions,” Ms. Dickey said later that afternoon, as Posey, her long-legged lurcher (a mix of Scottish deerhound and greyhound) loped ahead of us down a path. Noodle, her miniature dachshund, and Roux, her Norfolk terrier, trundled along behind.
I had come up from my own overgrown garden in Maryland, where the shaggy privet is 12 feet high and the climbing hydrangea never stops climbing, seeking some inspiration on scaling back.
It’s one of the themes of “Embroidered Ground,” and an important one for boomers, who still have the passion for gardening, but not the backs for it.
“I have a fraction of the vigor I once had, with bones that now creak and muscles that scream in protest,” she writes.
But plants, of course, do not adjust to one’s diminishing energy and arthritic knees.
And she had married a man who could add but not subtract. Who would sneak red-striped yellow tulips into her careful combinations of mauves and purples and creams.
“It was not my vision, my plan,” she writes. But “Bosco and I are slowly, at times painfully, learning the art of compromise.”
Besides, he loves to prune, so what’s not to like?
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