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photographs by Christine Arpe Gang
It took her several years, but Barbara Rea turned what was little but a grassy lawn on her half-acre property into a series of lovely gardens.
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photographs by Christine Arpe Gang
It took her several years, but Barbara Rea turned what was little but a grassy lawn on her half-acre property into a series of lovely gardens.
3 of 4
photographs by Christine Arpe Gang
It took her several years, but Barbara Rea turned what was little but a grassy lawn on her half-acre property into a series of lovely gardens.
4 of 4
photographs by Christine Arpe Gang
It took her several years, but Barbara Rea turned what was little but a grassy lawn on her half-acre property into a series of lovely gardens.
Is there a difference between a “garden” and simply a yard with a lot of pretty plants?
If you ask Memphis horticulturist Suzy Askew, she would quote one of her heroines in landscape architecture, Ellen Biddle Shipman, who said a true garden has three essential elements: It must be designed, it is green with plants, and it is enclosed or private.
Most of us would probably have slightly more relaxed ideas of what constitutes a garden than Shipman, who was designing significant public and private gardens in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Barbara Rea modestly refers to her East Memphis property as a yard with various planted areas. But after visiting it recently, I would say it definitely meets the true description of a garden despite having only one of Shipman’s criteria nailed: Many different plants are thriving in it. Enclosed in some places, it is mostly open with plants clustered in wide borders along the driveway and walkways. It is not designed with pencil and paper but with her innate talent for placing plants where they show off their best attributes coupled with an appreciation for the improvements made by Mother Nature.
Some of this talent comes from working in her grandmother’s garden as a child, but Rea also continues to learn through her memberships in the Memphis Horticultural Society, the Mid-South Hosta Society, and the Mid-South Hydrangea Society. She is also part of the Memphis Area Master Gardeners, a group of gung-ho plant lovers who must pass a 14-week course offered by the University of Tennessee Extension Service and continue to donate 40 or more volunteer hours per year in garden-related activities.
Rea’s outdoor modus operandi is more akin to the methods of Allan Armitage, professor emeritus of horticulture at the University of Georgia and author of numerous books on gardening. He creates new gardens by starting with a path. Then he begins “designing” them by placing suitable plants on each side of the path. Even we design-challenged gardeners can remember his basic guideline: short plants in front and taller ones in back.
When Rea moved to her property 12 years ago, it was basically a big grassy lawn with numerous tall trees and a few azaleas. She began by making a path under some of those trees using leaves put through her trusty Honda mulching mower. Footsteps and rainfall tamp those leaves down into a soft covering that will suppress weeds and, as the leaves decompose, enrich the soil just like leaves do in naturally wooded areas. “I try to just let the forest do its thing,” Rea says.
Earlier this spring, I saw lots of evidence of happy shade-loving plants freely reproducing here and there throughout the woodsy space. Excess trilliums, yellow woodpoppies, hellebores, and some terrifically prolific Italian arum are gladly shared with fellow gardeners willing to dig them up.
When she bought the half-acre property, Rea knew she could not afford to turn it into a garden if she bought all of the plants at retail nurseries and big-box stores. In advance of her move, she dug up plants from her previous garden and stepped up her awareness for freebies like unwanted but healthy plants tossed to the curb with root balls still intact, as well as shared plants from fellow gardeners. That’s how she accumulated dozens of hostas, seven bright orange azaleas so big she had to haul them one-by-one in a wheelbarrow, and a Florida anise shrub, among others. Thanks to tips from contractors she met at work as an engineering specialist at Memphis Light, Gas and Water, she was also able to “rescue” plants growing around buildings scheduled for demolition.
“They knew I was into gardening and willing to dig up plants,” says Rea, who also hauled bricks and rocks to lay for walkways and stack around flower beds by herself and little by little. It took numerous trips to a big retail store to get a cubic yard (27 cubic feet) of crushed limestone for a path by filling buckets holding a cubic foot of material until all of it was in her yard. She moved a pile of heavy pavers in the same brick-by-brick way.
Her eyes are always alert to curbside discards and she often makes impromptu turn-arounds to retrieve them. One recent find, a baker’s rack placed at the curb, now holds decorative and useful items on her covered side porch.
Rea actually rescued her house from a wrecking ball as well. The charming 1,200-square-foot house built in 1935 was once home to a family that operated a dairy farm on the property. Most of the farm property was sold for residential development years before Rea bought the remaining half-acre and house in 2016 when it was being marketed as a tear-down. Rea, who was attracted to its many windows and roughly plastered walls, turned it into a cozy cottage decorated with heirlooms, found items, and bargain pieces by, once again, using her knack to find just the perfect place for all of them.
