cishaderPERRY GUILLOT, a landscape architect and a longtime friend, stood in the middle of my Midtown Manhattan garden a few months ago and looked around skeptically.
CITY OASIS Pennsylvania bluestone and shade-loving greenery have replaced the author’s faux brick flooring and sad plants.
“That has to go,” he said, pointing to a weathered, half-barrel wooden planter that held an ailing forsythia. “And that,” he added, gesturing in the direction of an electric blue fiberglass planter that contained the desiccated remains of a potato vine. “And those,” indicating a stack of cracked terra-cotta pots. “And that,” a pathway of discolored gravel leading to a wooden fence in need of repair. “And this,” he said, looking down at the poured-concrete, faux-brick flooring where we stood. “In fact,” he said, looking at me with a shake of his head, “the best friend to this garden is an empty Dumpster.”
When I bought my apartment about a year and a half ago, I was seduced not by its size — 660 square feet, about half that of my former rental — but by its outdoor space, this garden of roughly 10 by 40 feet. I imagined mornings spent drinking coffee under the towering tree I had inherited, evenings having cocktails with friends, weekends puttering around in the plant beds, developing a green thumb.
The first two dreams proved to be no problem. The last appeared to be hopeless. Within weeks of the arrival of my first spring, I realized I had no talent — and, to be honest, no real interest — in hands-on gardening. I collected plenty of gardening books, but I treated them the way I do cookbooks: something to flip through idly before calling for takeout.
It’s not that I didn’t at least try to develop my gardening skills.
I planted tomatoes.
I put in a small herb garden.
I bought potted plants from the corner nursery and put them in the terra-cotta pots the previous owner had left me.
Never grew. Withered away. Dead, within two weeks.
So this year, as a second spring approached, I realized I had to do something to salvage this space.
I needed someone to create a garden for a nongardener: someone to maximize its strengths, while minimizing the hands-on effort that would be needed to maintain it. (“Maximum impact, minimal upkeep” soon became my mantra.) I didn’t want to spend a fortune — under $15,000 for the total job if possible, even better if closer to $10,000. In early March, I started asking around, calling garden centers, searching the Internet and asking friends for recommendations of a good landscape designer willing to take on a modest job. I eventually made appointments with four.
And that’s when I turned to my friend Perry, the author of “Privet Lives: An Imaginary Tale of Southampton’s Iconic Shrub” and someone whose work had been featured in a number of gardening publications, to serve as an informal adviser. On that first evening, as he surveyed the wasteland, he wasn’t entirely discouraging. “This is a good space you have,” he said. “Not a lot of direct sunlight, but good light. And it’s open. You can do a lot with this.”
The first thing to do, he said, was edit. There was too much going on, too many different plants vying for attention. He said: “Right now the eye stops and starts. Stops and starts. There is no focal point.”
He approved of one plant that was thriving despite my lack of attention — an Aucuba japonica, he told me — and said that I should consider adding more of them, without getting too fussy with the rest of the space. “Go for a clean floor, green walls — maybe an English ivy border — and a few sculpting bushes.”
The faux brick flooring definitely had to go — he suggested gravel in its place — but he predicted that most designers would suggest putting in bluestone, adding, “They always do.”
He then offered a simple piece of advice. When it came to interviewing potential designers, he said, don’t bring up a specific budget right away; just let them talk: “Tell them that you see this as an empty box — that you are wedded to nothing here — and see what they come up with. See how they interpret that empty box.”
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