By Will Rowlands
Page Dickey’s former garden – Duck Hill in North Salem, New York – is well-known to garden buffs. It’s been featured in numerous publications and Dickey has written two books about it.
Things changed when Dickey and her husband, Francis Schell, started considering a move. She was thinking of another quirky farmhouse, an apple orchard and maybe a real meadow. Who can blame her? I’d like a meadow and an orchard of Northern Spies.
Dickey’s reasons for leaving are familiar to many of us: they were getting older, the cost of living was high and the three acres of intensive plantings were a challenge … and there was the constant pressure of keeping up a famous garden.
The couple’s life experiences in Massachusetts and New Hampshire led them back to New England. Interestingly, Dickey says Duck Hill was located on land that was once part of Connecticut.
Ultimately they ended up in Falls Village in the chilly and calcareous northwest corner of Connecticut. They call it Church House. She was originally attracted by the area’s pastoral beauty.
What intrigued me, however, wasn’t so much the change in scenery but the change in Dickey’s thinking.
“Before coming to Church House, I never thought much about habitats and ecosystems and biodiversity,” she says “I have a new hunger to learn. About wildflowers, about calcareous habitats, about ecosystems, about birds and pollinators.”
That’s the journey that interests me and it’s one we should all be undertaking.
UPROOTED – A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again
Hardcover $27.95. 244 pages, 9.1″ x 6.4″
ISBN 978-1-60469-957-9
Timber Press – timberpress.com
