Apparently thriving, except for typical aches and pains, in this eightieth year of my life, I am not in this blog focused on gardens and the natural world of flora alluding to my own age but, rather, that of Uptop, the oldest parts of which are now nearing its 32^nd birthday. Uptop has come of age, not all at once but definitively so, now in all its parts. Unaware as I was of this impending era in the garden, I am somewhat baffled that I did not really see it coming. So, in retrospect, what were the signs? 

Perhaps first was my yearly return to Uptop in September after an August spent at its polar opposite: the north woods of Michigan spent in a 100-year old cottage in a 150-year old family camp (in the Adirondack sense) on the shores of a crystal-clear lake under virgin 200-ft white pines. A forest is mostly untended even as a garden is highly tended (but see an earlier blog entry from the summer of 2024). To be truthful, a break from the obsessive behavior I exhibit annually since mid-March is welcomed. However, the return to Uptop is always a jolt. Mightily attended as it is in my absence by wonderful Jenny Weber, my “head gardener,” who has dutifully fought the August drought and scorching heat which have come to characterize coastline Connecticut over the last decade, I do not ask her to tend to the nuances of my personal whims which have made the garden anything but generic. When I return, everything seems slightly out of scale, perhaps only observed by me.Simply too much growth, especially the woody plants of shrubs and small trees that have grown lanky, overpowering neighboring perennials. This out of scalequality, I believe, is a first sign of maturity.

Another sign: catalogs arrive in January, trips to nurseries begin in the Spring… Yet, I buy fewer and fewer things: 2025 is the first year in 40 that I ordered not one thing from a catalog and purchased only a few items from nurseries. And with those few purchases I now spend thirty minutes or more wandering the garden with plant in hand trying to find an appropriate home. No room! Never a tree…seldom a shrub… my purchases are now relegated to tiny woodland rarities, often spring ephemerals (always room for those, along with alpine additions to the 20 trough gardens I have created over the years). A sign of a mature garden: no more room.

A corollary to the first sign: unlike in the early days of Uptop which saw planting, planting, and more planting to create the collection which I now tend, I am currently consumed with hacking, hacking, and more hacking – not in the sense of a feature of today’s digital world, but rather, severe pruning. I do this to keep things “in scale,” the architect in me; see above. Some plantings fare better than others which, indeed, do not recover nicely and, well…looked hacked. But with a smile, I often think of my late garden mentor, the uber plantsman Nick Nickou, and how he fooled the many other uber plantsmen and plantswomen who regularly visited his unique, 3-acre collection only a mile from Uptop, by regularly – and cunningly – snipping possible new leaders from his Ginko biloba, effectively dwarfing this little darling well before hybridizers had created actual dwarfs. Once adequately fooled, he would with a chuckle, fess up.

Another sign: I might have understood this phenomenon if I were a closer observer of nature, but the actions within the garden have clearly demonstrated to my still-learning eye (and brain) that happy plantings (ie, those in the right soil, access to light, etc) will form colonies, sometimes overtaking their less happy (and, possibly, less aggressive) neighbors. Visually, this creates a garden not of recently inserted “dots” but rather a more natural-looking garden, a garden of colonies, the unmistakable sign of a mature garden. Gertrude Jekyll so admired this in nature, she designed her famous borders with “drifts” of similar species. I am speaking of something a bit different: that is, a natural – not planted from the get-go as a design – occurrence which create colonies. In my garden, and to my delight, this has occurred with Asarum European, Asarum canadense, Epimedium, even the often despised (but not by me) Ajuga and most of the mosses. I must draw the line with Rudbeckia fulgida and Joe-Pye-weed (Eutrochium purpureum each of which might colonize the entire acre of Uptop if I just let it.

Of course, there are many delights of a mature garden, and I feel lucky to have lived long enough (many gardeners are not so lucky) to enjoy the fruits of my earlier labor and to now walk among the mature plantings that could only be imagined as I acquired them years ago. The serpentine tapestry hedge is a unique standout, but so are the two woodland gardens, as well as the so-called ericaceous southern border which I have successfiully augmented with episodes of Fargesia nidida (a wonderful clumping evergreen screen), creating a near-perfect visual block to my obnoxious neighbor. Ahh, the delights of a mature garden….

A final delight might be the awareness that the garden looks rather finished. But oh…that seems terrifying, too. Yet at 80, I should seem neither terrified nor wishing I were just starting a whole new garden (as I have read some gardeners seem happy to do, such as Page Dickey abandoning Duck Hill only to create a new and different garden in her mature years, as beautifully documented in Uprooted). I amuse myself by still finding small areas of the garden to fuss with, moving a few things around (actually, continually….). For instance, I recently created a minute circular “meadow” of about 75 square feet, bursting with several hundred spring bulbs and a few summer perennials. Also, two years ago, I removed a rotting cedar pergola, creating a gravel garden (thank you, Beth Chatto) in place of its former shade, now a 150 square-foot home to tiny sun-and-dry loving perennials.

However, I was caught by surprise when three women from the New Haven Garden Club visited the garden and inquired if I would be willing to have Uptop nominated to become part of the Smithsonian archives of important national gardens. As of this writing, we are only in the documentation phase of a lengthy process, so I do not know if the nomination will be successful, but only the thought of it makes this gardener feel fulfilled that others see what I have seen – sometimes only in my imagination – all along.