Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: ‘I just let them grow’: Inside one of the six gardens on this year’s Northampton Garden Tour
John Smith likes it when people stop outside his house, a lovely Carpenter Gothic on a quiet street in Florence, to peek at his garden through the fence. “I tell them, ‘Come on in and have a look around,’” he said. On June 14, Smith will invite the public to come in and look around his eye-catching garden. It’s one of six local home gardens on this year’s Northampton Garden Tour.
It’s not hard to see why Smith’s garden draws the attention of passersby. It’s more than a beautiful flower garden. Smith’s colorful stained-glass sculptures punctuate the lush perennial beds like exclamation marks. Colorful toadstools made of molded concrete pop up here and there. A Goshen stone path weaves through the garden passing under arbors covered with a variety of climbers, including wisteria, hydrangea and even a trained forsythia. A great blue heron made of metal wades by a wooden bridge that spans a stream of green and blue sea glass. Here and there are whimsical wooden figures built of bird houses and pieces of wood and decorated with bugs made from twisted metal forks. “That’s George,” says Smith, pointing to a wooden figure sitting on a bench in front of the house. A female figure — denoted by her high heels — sits out back. “That’s my girlfriend,” said Smith, smiling.
Smith, who was born and raised in Burton-on-Trent, in the center of England, said he got the gardening bug from his father, who had a collection of 1,500 roses. Because his father had a bad back, he enlisted his son’s help in pruning the rose bushes. “We’d have a mountain of pruning by the time we were done,” he recalled. “My dad always said, ‘You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.’” Smith is thrilled to have one rosebush that came from his father’s garden in England. “It grows to seven feet tall, with pink flowers and a beautiful fragrance,” he said. “My father sent me several slips, but this is the only one that survived. I’m scared to death to do anything to it!”
Smith came to Massachusetts as a young man to visit his aunt, a war bride, who lived in Easthampton. He soon met the woman who would become his wife and they decided to settle here. Smith started creating the garden 50 years ago when he and his wife moved into the house on Lilly St. in Florence where Smith still lives. There was no landscaping around the house except for a few bushes. “We didn’t have much money, so we’d go all over the place looking for cheap bushes, and people gave us things,” he said. “So we just planted bushes here and there and filled in around them. There was no rhyme or reason to it.”
Smith’s perennial beds are composed mostly of hostas of all different shapes, sizes and colors. He said he’s not sure how he first got interested in hostas, but he now has around 300 of them. “My first hosta,” he said, “was just a plain old green thing, nothing special,” that he planted by a corner of the house. He has split it repeatedly over the years, planting divisions around the edges of his garden and giving them away to family and neighbors. “You can’t kill that thing,” he said.
Smith is a talented gardener with an artistic eye, but he’s not at all fussy, which might be the secret to his unalloyed joy in creating and curating his garden. He can name many of his hostas, from the gigantic Sum and Substance to the tiny Mouse Ears, but not all of them. He refers to a tall perennial with yellow petals and large yellow center cone as the “Mexican hat plant.” He welcomes volunteer milkweeds. In some places there are two different plants growing happily intertwined, a variegated hosta combined with a solid green one, or a sedum growing up through a hosta. “I just let them grow,” he said.
The garden has evolved in interesting ways. There used to be a fishpond in the backyard where the sea glass stream now runs. But one morning Smith looked out to see five bears frolicking in the pond and eating the fish. “I thought, ‘I can’t have that!’ and I drained the pond.” The seaglass came later, when his younger daughter got married. “She wanted to have huge vases filled with seaglass and hydrangeas above that,” he said. Ever resourceful, he scrounged everywhere to collect blue and clear glass bottles. He broke them into pieces and threw them into a cement mixer. “Each batch took about five hours, he recalled. “It was so noisy I had to do it in the shed to muffle the sound.”
Smith retired four years ago from his job as the director of maintenance at a rehabilitation facility. Referring to his retirement, he said, “This is the best job I ever had. The days fly by unbelievably fast.” He said that when he’s not busy working in the garden, he spends his time observing the garden and getting new ideas. When he sees an empty spot, he thinks about what he might plant there. “I always think I can put something else in,” he said, “but then it all fills in, so I have to be careful.”
Of all his hostas, Smith said that the yellow ones are among his favorites. “But,” he added, “they’re all my favorites!”
The 31st Annual Friends of Forbes Library Northampton Garden Tour will take place Sat. June 14, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. The tour raises funds to support Northampton’s historic Forbes Library. Each garden has plant descriptions and volunteer guides to answer questions. The tour will also feature live music and a plein-air painter. Bicyclists are welcome on the 12-mile scenic route between the six gardens. Tickets provide garden locations and parking guidance.
Tour tickets are $20 if bought in advance and $25 on the day of the event. Tickets are available through June 13 at Bay State Perennial Farm in Whately, Cooper’s Corner in Florence, State Street Fruit Store in Northampton, Gardener’s Supply Co. in Hadley, Sugarloaf Gardens in Sunderland, and at Forbes Library. Tickets may be purchased online (www.forbeslibrary.org/friends) through June 11 and picked up at Forbes Library the week of the tour. Day of tour tickets are $25 and only sold at Forbes Library from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on June 14.
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer whose new book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” has recently been published by White River Press.
Daily Hampshire Gazette
