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Photography by J.J. Lane
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Garden
Kathy Richey is absolutely ruthless. Not that you'd know it by her kind voice and welcoming demeanor. Nor does her charming white house with royal blue trim, set on a picturesque Webster lane not much wider than a driveway, give any hint. There's certainly no clue from the spectacular garden that frames the house and dwarfs the lawn; a garden of this size and caliber can only be the result of a nurturing and passionate soul.
But ruthless she is, as she'll freely admit, since it's one of the secrets to her garden's success. The passion is there, too, of course; it's what keeps her outside every spare minute, weeding and tending and experimenting. But after 13 years of digging in the dirt, Kathy has learned to view being ruthless as passion's judicious older sibling, an eagle-eyed counterbalance for maintaining cohesiveness and order.
"You have to be," she says. "Otherwise it can look terribly weedy. I can't stand an untidy garden, so I'm constantly trimming back or yanking something out, removing stuff as it gets too big. It can be painful, but if you let them, the plants will rule."
It's a lesson gleaned from experience. Like most amazing landscapes, the Richey garden, and Kathy's skill at tending it, evolved slowly over time—a long slow march from the ho-hum greenery that once surrounded the house to today's showstopping display. These days, long beds overflowing with color and texture snake up both sides of the front lawn; a chain of fragrant nicotiana and acanthus leads the way toward the back yard, where tulip and dogwood trees shade a large, leafy woodland garden complete with a gazebo that beckons from the far corner. A center-set brick patio edged by a strip of brilliant green lawn rests the eye before you move on to the riot of color in a sun-soaked border on the yard's east side.
But when Kathy and her husband Victor first turned their attention to the exterior 13 years ago, after spending a year retooling the house's interior to their liking, the yard featured only some scrawny volunteers, a few window boxes and the mature tulip tree in back. Neither of the Richeys had any gardening experience, so they began by simply removing elements they didn't like, taking out what Kathy describes as "spindly trees of not much merit" and laying a thick carpet of mulch to improve the soil and kill off the scraggly growth under the tulip tree. After allowing the mulch a season to do its work, they put in the woodland garden. With Kentucky farmers for grandparents, Victor was naturally charged with improving the soil; Kathy came in next to plant a lush mix of hostas, Solomon's seal, turtleheads and hardy begonias. She's quick to credit Victor's upfront soil preparation for her success, saying that his thorough tilling of a mix of manure and Turface into the beds so improved the soil that "anything I put in pretty much works."
The gardening bug took hold and they moved on to other areas, gradually creating new beds over time. An ugly sidewalk that led nowhere became the front bed, anchored by stately hydrangeas and perennials designed to provide wave after wave of seasonal color, with annuals dotted about to fill in the gaps. Today the varieties are too numerous to list, though peonies and foxgloves star in spring; coneflowers and verbena in mid-summer; asters and lespedeza in fall. Dogwood trees were added to the woodland garden to extend the shade and make room for more plants. The sunny backyard patch went in last, filled with the vibrant colors of tall, nodding poppies, larkspurs and cleomes. As her interest grew, Kathy continued to fill in existing spaces with new plants, found in nurseries and catalogs or received from friends and neighbors: more lilies in the sunny patch, pulmonaria and Lenten rose in the shade garden, airy houseplants in the rear window boxes.
Along the way, Kathy cultivated her strategy for success, learning through trial and error what worked and what didn't, which textures she favored and which she didn't, which gardening rules to follow and which to break. She learned to relocate, experiment, reseed her favorites.
"In the beginning I was very meticulous, thinking hard about where to put things," she says. "Over the years, you gain confidence; now I don't worry. I just put things in where there's a space or move things that are underperforming. It doesn't matter what you're supposed to do; it really only matters what you like."
These days, she's at ease with her own system, moving things around as needed, trying new species and feeding her latest obsession—pots—now dotted throughout the yard, patio and porch.
("My husband says I have issues," she says. "I can hardly control my appetite.") The result is a landscape of enviable abundance that conveys the higgledy-piggledy charm of a cottage garden tempered by Kathy's merciless eye and grounded by the repetition more commonly found in formal designs.
"I like to have color going all the time," she says, explaining the sheer volume of plants. "They all make a contribution and have their showy periods. And as you garden, you learn to appreciate the subtleties; now I appreciate textures and foliage much more. Although, if they underperform, they're gone."
