Cottage Garden

Good gardeners draw the fine line between flower beds and the rest of the garden in the most ingenious ways. Rocks, conch shells, glazed or terra-cotta tiles, low boxwood hedges, stout planks and soldierly bricks do more than enforce the decisions you've made about shape and location of flower beds. They decorate the garden, adding form, color and texture to the composition for spring. Well-defined edges may stop a few weeds from sneaking into the flower beds, but that is not their main role.

You should feel as much at home in your garden as you do in your own kitchen or living room, says landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, coauthor of Outside the Not So Big House. But it's a little tricky: The comfortable limits that define rooms indoors - walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows - seem to melt away when you walk into the garden. "People are terrified," she says. "It's sort of boundless. " To help her clients make smooth transitions between indoors and out, Messervy talks about "the landscape of home," using design principles that add up to make every garden, even the tiniest space, a personal experience.

She has gardener's hands, strong not delicate. Nails unpolished, but well- groomed; working nails. Her figure is lithe but strong, and her hairdo stylish but simple, the coif of a busy person. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall - renowned English cottage gardener, designer, broadcaster and author now on a lecture circuit throughout the United States - is just that. Her first stop was the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Tuesday, where she talked to 200 "herbies" - members and guests of the Philadelphia Unit of the Herb Society of America - about the tricks of creating a cottage garden.

There is something about a hedge that makes some people want to take out the clippers. And when they are done lopping, what once was a shrub is a peacock or a swan. In the case of Harvey Ladew, a cosmopolite who wielded his shears in Monkton, Md., for nearly 50 years, what emerged included two hunters on horseback, a pack of racing beagles and a harried fox, all made of living yew. That scene is the most famous of the fanciful topiaries Ladew made at Pleasant Valley Farm, the charming and eccentric 230-acre estate he purchased in 1929 to further his passion for fox hunting.

Imagine a cottage garden through a kitchen window, with slate stone pathways around beds of daylilies, hydrangeas and purple panicles sprouting from butterfly bushes. This is Claudia Markham's room with a view. Now, imagine a concrete swimming pool there instead, with a slide and blow-up rafts bobbing in highly chlorined water. This is Markham's worst nightmare. The 63-year-old horticulture enthusiast has refused at least three possible buyers for her $330,000 home because each asked: Where would the pool go?

Flower shows are the garden world's three-ring circuses. Fearless professionals juggle plants and anything else they can think of to prove that gardening can be whatever anyone wants it to be. Every year, hundreds of thousands of gardening enthusiasts jam the aisles at flower shows across the continent. Vast exhibition spaces are transformed into impossible horticultural juxtapositions: instant gardens in which every imaginable flower blooms at once, the grass never needs mowing, the garden furniture is always freshly painted, and it is perpetually spring - but without the mud. "All of this has nothing to do with horticulture," says Michael Petrie, whose designs for the annual exhibit of J. Franklin Styer Nurseries have won Best in Show, the top award at the Philadelphia Flower Show, which is visited by nearly 300,000 people in the course of one week every winter.

The impulse to garden goes way, way back. First we hunted, then we gathered, then we got smart and gardened. What a moment of genius! - to recognize that a seed would, in time and under the right conditions, become a plant of the same type. Fields to sow, tend and harvest led to the building of villages and towns. To the social contract. To civilization as we know it. Some say the wheel is our most important invention. I'm not so sure. I'd vote for gardens. The colonists who came to America stepped off their ships to conquer the wilderness.

The theme for a Philadelphia Flower Show celebrating France, Ed Lindemann knew, had to capture the essence of what that multifaceted country means to Americans. A year into the planning, the right words still hadn't come to Lindemann, whose job it is to make this flower show happen. That is, until the day he was sitting in an office in Paris, waiting to meet with a potential exhibitor, well-known rose breeder Henri Delbard. He picked up a catalog to pass the time, and his eyes fell on the Delbard slogan emblazoned on the cover: La passion du jardin.

In a woman it would be called style - that indefinable something that makes her stand out from the crowd. In a backyard, it's the spark that makes a garden more than just a collection of plants. Call it flair. Like style, most of us know it when we see it. But what gives a garden flair? "I think gardens with flair are individual expressions more than anything else - the expression of an individual heart," says Chris Woods, director of Chanticleer, the renowned pleasure garden in Wayne.

England. For gardeners, it's Mecca. They know how to grow things in this mild, damp land where cottagers cram postage-stamp plots with exuberant blooms and dukes fiddle with their parklands - adding follies and knot gardens when they can find the cash. My husband and I pilgrimage to English gardens when we can find the cash, exploring a different part of the countryside each time. We get amazing pleasure from these low-key jaunts. We come for the sensual pleasures of nature tamed by art; to smell, taste, touch and savor.

You should feel as much at home in your garden as you do in your own kitchen or living room, says landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, coauthor of Outside the Not So Big House. But it's a little tricky: The comfortable limits that define rooms indoors - walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows - seem to melt away when you walk into the garden. "People are terrified," she says. "It's sort of boundless. " To help her clients make smooth transitions between indoors and out, Messervy talks about "the landscape of home," using design principles that add up to make every garden, even the tiniest space, a personal experience.

In a woman it would be called style - that indefinable something that makes her stand out from the crowd. In a backyard, it's the spark that makes a garden more than just a collection of plants. Call it flair. Like style, most of us know it when we see it. But what gives a garden flair? "I think gardens with flair are individual expressions more than anything else - the expression of an individual heart," says Chris Woods, director of Chanticleer, the renowned pleasure garden in Wayne.

There is something about a hedge that makes some people want to take out the clippers. And when they are done lopping, what once was a shrub is a peacock or a swan. In the case of Harvey Ladew, a cosmopolite who wielded his shears in Monkton, Md., for nearly 50 years, what emerged included two hunters on horseback, a pack of racing beagles and a harried fox, all made of living yew. That scene is the most famous of the fanciful topiaries Ladew made at Pleasant Valley Farm, the charming and eccentric 230-acre estate he purchased in 1929 to further his passion for fox hunting.

Imagine a cottage garden through a kitchen window, with slate stone pathways around beds of daylilies, hydrangeas and purple panicles sprouting from butterfly bushes. This is Claudia Markham's room with a view. Now, imagine a concrete swimming pool there instead, with a slide and blow-up rafts bobbing in highly chlorined water. This is Markham's worst nightmare. The 63-year-old horticulture enthusiast has refused at least three possible buyers for her $330,000 home because each asked: Where would the pool go?

England. For gardeners, it's Mecca. They know how to grow things in this mild, damp land where cottagers cram postage-stamp plots with exuberant blooms and dukes fiddle with their parklands - adding follies and knot gardens when they can find the cash. My husband and I pilgrimage to English gardens when we can find the cash, exploring a different part of the countryside each time. We get amazing pleasure from these low-key jaunts. We come for the sensual pleasures of nature tamed by art; to smell, taste, touch and savor.

The theme for a Philadelphia Flower Show celebrating France, Ed Lindemann knew, had to capture the essence of what that multifaceted country means to Americans. A year into the planning, the right words still hadn't come to Lindemann, whose job it is to make this flower show happen. That is, until the day he was sitting in an office in Paris, waiting to meet with a potential exhibitor, well-known rose breeder Henri Delbard. He picked up a catalog to pass the time, and his eyes fell on the Delbard slogan emblazoned on the cover: La passion du jardin.

Flower shows are the garden world's three-ring circuses. Fearless professionals juggle plants and anything else they can think of to prove that gardening can be whatever anyone wants it to be. Every year, hundreds of thousands of gardening enthusiasts jam the aisles at flower shows across the continent. Vast exhibition spaces are transformed into impossible horticultural juxtapositions: instant gardens in which every imaginable flower blooms at once, the grass never needs mowing, the garden furniture is always freshly painted, and it is perpetually spring - but without the mud. "All of this has nothing to do with horticulture," says Michael Petrie, whose designs for the annual exhibit of J. Franklin Styer Nurseries have won Best in Show, the top award at the Philadelphia Flower Show, which is visited by nearly 300,000 people in the course of one week every winter.

Good gardeners draw the fine line between flower beds and the rest of the garden in the most ingenious ways. Rocks, conch shells, glazed or terra-cotta tiles, low boxwood hedges, stout planks and soldierly bricks do more than enforce the decisions you've made about shape and location of flower beds. They decorate the garden, adding form, color and texture to the composition for spring. Well-defined edges may stop a few weeds from sneaking into the flower beds, but that is not their main role.

She has gardener's hands, strong not delicate. Nails unpolished, but well- groomed; working nails. Her figure is lithe but strong, and her hairdo stylish but simple, the coif of a busy person. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall - renowned English cottage gardener, designer, broadcaster and author now on a lecture circuit throughout the United States - is just that. Her first stop was the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Tuesday, where she talked to 200 "herbies" - members and guests of the Philadelphia Unit of the Herb Society of America - about the tricks of creating a cottage garden.

The impulse to garden goes way, way back. First we hunted, then we gathered, then we got smart and gardened. What a moment of genius! - to recognize that a seed would, in time and under the right conditions, become a plant of the same type. Fields to sow, tend and harvest led to the building of villages and towns. To the social contract. To civilization as we know it. Some say the wheel is our most important invention. I'm not so sure. I'd vote for gardens. The colonists who came to America stepped off their ships to conquer the wilderness.