Willow sticks, woven right in the garden, support climbing nasturtiums.
I love to craft and I love to garden. In fact, I often wish that the days could be longer or that I could manage with less sleep or spend less time on day-to-day responsibilities so that I could spend more time doing both.
I attended summer camp from the time I was five years old through college, when I worked as a counselor. There I made my first baskets, learned to pound copper discs into bowls, spatter-paint leaf designs onto stationery, lash poles, and build fires. When I began to explore more sophisticated crafts as an adult, I was amazed at how many of those early experiences had stayed with me and how familiar the materials and techniques were after so many years.
One of the reasons I spent so much time at camp (as did my two brothers) was that my mother was raising us alone. She worked long hours and saved all year so that the three of us could spend eight weeks at camp. We would grow and mature in so many new ways—and she would get a break from the stress of everyday parenting.
My mother was incredibly smart and capable and she believed that I could do just about anything to which I set my mind. Between Mom and those summers at camp, I developed a strong sense of self that has allowed me to solve problems, see the world through a creative lens, and approach most new experiences with a positive, can-do attitude.
After studying special education at college, I married Arthur (an artist and university professor) and taught for a few years. When we went looking to buy our first home in 1970, we wanted an old one and found a gem that was built in 1847. We both got a workout using all our skills—and developing new ones—as we restored, repaired, and improved that little place. What I didn’t see coming was the amount of work it would also take to restore and care for the surrounding grounds. There were some plantings in place, but nothing had been pruned or cared for in years.
Antique houses are funny when it comes to landscaping. Too casual an approach and the place just looks like an old house in need of help. Too formal and it looks pretentious. I wanted an organic, gracious feeling, a sense that the landscaping had been in place since 1847. I’m not sure that I succeeded back then to the extent that I might today, but I loved those first few beds that I rescued and tended, as I learned to tell an iris from a peony and chickweed from both. I cut my pruning teeth on a huge clump of lilacs that was more dead wood than living and found all kinds of surprises when I raked away debris.
We probably would have stayed in that house for many years, but in the late 1980s the state of Connecticut took the house under eminent domain to widen the road and we went looking for another old house that needed our love. The second house (built in 1832) was larger and a bit more elegant than the first one and, although some work had been done, we dove into a huge restoration project for the second time. Ditto for the landscaping.
While I had done all I could do to tend the gardens in the first house while I was also raising a small, rambunctious boy and teaching weaving classes locally, the scale of the second house provided many more challenges. And so it was there that I began to expand my interest in crafts to the gardens. I built decorative trellises to support old roses and made sturdy, practical supports for the vegetable garden. After a trip to Mexico, where we saw some fabulous pottery, I began cutting terra-cotta pots in half and adhering them to larger “mother” pots.
As craft became a larger and larger part of my gardening routine, I realized that the garden centers often didn’t have what I wanted or needed or, if they did, it was prohibitively priced. Unique flowerpots, baskets, and plant markers were always priced higher than I could afford so I began making my own. I started keeping detailed notes and decided then that one day I would like to share my ideas and innovations in a book.
In 2004 we decided to build a smaller, new house. Part of the reason was our desire to have more time to spend on artwork, hobbies, and interests beyond just maintaining an old house (think money pit). True enough, new houses are so much easier to live in once you get used to things being level and working most of the time. But what I didn’t see coming—again—was how much work and time it would take to establish the landscaping from bare dirt and lots of red rock.
While I initially missed the ambiance and abundance of my established gardens, I loved starting from scratch. My new garden called for different solutions and treatments than the century-old one I was used to tending, and I found a refreshing sense of freedom in planning and planting a garden that was truly, totally mine. All the red rock found its way into stone walls that became the “bones” for beds terraced on the hillside, which in turn provided me with the initial structure of my garden plan. I forged ahead with my goal of creating a beautiful garden in a space that only months before had been overgrown woodland.
While I have matured as a gardener over the years, I am not an expert. Not everything grows on command or succeeds the first time out. I plant what thrives and abandon the fussy plants that fail more than twice—like delphiniums. Nor am I a master craftsperson (if being one were my goal, I’d have less time to enjoy my garden). But I’m intensely curious, a fairly good researcher, and very patient, so if at first I don’t succeed, I try again. When I see the need for a new solution somewhere in the garden, I glean what I can from books, cruise the Internet, and question the experts at my local garden, hardware, and craft stores. I talk to friends and neighbors and then I experiment—a lot. If something doesn’t work, I salvage whatever materials I can and start over. For example, by the time I finally stumbled upon screw posts to attach rims to my hardware-cloth baskets (see this page), I had tried dozens of other, less successful and considerably more involved methods.
I have been guilty (on several occasions) of planting a specific plant just to climb the trellis or fence I wanted to build and sometimes the craft is more important to me than the garden itself. Not to say that I am not thrilled when my roses perfume the garden every June, but they were planted because I saw a perfect spot to build an arbor and then the arbor begged to be covered in climbing roses (see this page).
At the same time, I’ve found myself digging deeply into my bag of craft tricks when the plants or the landscape dictate a specific need, like supporting (see this page) or naming (see this page) a growing collection of perennials or containing two hundred feet of garden hose so it looks neat but is easily accessible (see this page).
Handmade for the Garden is a culmination of my last ten years of work—and play—in my garden. The project instructions are written in the most straightforward way I could imagine. I’ve chosen simple, low-tech methods and employed more than a few shortcuts to create beautiful and functional projects that most people should be able to complete with relative ease, reasonable expense, and minimal frustration. When possible, I recommend that you repurpose and recycle everyday objects just as I do.
I hope this book will help you to create what you want and need for your own garden. For example, once you’ve made a rustic trellis or two following my instructions (see this page), you really won’t need me to show you every possible variation and you will be able to make a trellis that suits you best. And once you’ve made a couple of hypertufa pots (see this page), I’m sure you won’t even need to look at my instructions. If any of these projects pique your interest in a specific craft area and make you want to dig deeper, you can find more information on the Internet and in my book list on this page.
My gardens have provided me with enormous satisfaction over the years. Nothing compares to a swath of pink peonies in bloom (especially when they are being supported by a beautiful stake I made myself) or a bounty of vegetables, nurtured from seeds I planted in my own newspaper pots (see this page) and collected in my hardware-cloth baskets (see this page). But I have to admit that I derive nearly as much pleasure from seeing the “bones” of the garden landscape in winter. This is when the gardens’ structure and plan take center stage, rather than the flowers and vines, when I can really see what I have done and get an inside look at what the garden still needs.
Even now, as this book is finished and heading to the printer, I continue to find new materials that intrigue me and see places in the garden where I can add new details. Every garden is an evolving work in progress and I suspect that I will never tire of the challenges or surprises that come with that. I have a blog (www.guagliumi.com/blog) where I will continue to share my gardening stories and photos and I invite you to visit me there and share your own.
My mother wasn’t a serious gardener, but she did have one bed of old-fashioned purple irises that she fussed over when she had the time. I now enjoy the “grandchildren” of those irises in my own garden (having moved them from home to home). As I gaze at their blooms each spring, I feel so grateful that she gave me such strong roots. And as I gaze at these pages, I thank her again for the confidence she instilled me. I hope Handmade for the Garden will bring you confidence—as well as joy, beauty, and bounty in your garden.
