By MICKEY RATHBUN
When Peggy Hughes opens her garden to the public for the 23rd annual Friends of Forbes Library Garden Tour Saturday, visitors will find much to enjoy besides her renowned collection of English roses. Hughes is herself a hardy perennial, having spent much of her long, storied life farming and gardening on an island in northern Maine, painting and traveling. Her sturdy, adventurous spirit is evident throughout her garden.
Hughes and her husband, John, bought their Northampton property in the mid-1990s, when they were in their 70s. They had been living year round on Deer Isle, Maine, with several beloved Irish wolfhounds, in a house that had been their summer home for many years.
Hughes explained that her husband was in poor health and they decided, together with his sister, Nancy, who also lived on Deer Isle, to move to a more temperate climate. For hearty New Englanders like them, that meant western Massachusetts.
Hughes said they were considering a property in Pelham when their real estate agent mentioned that land in Northampton had just come on the market.
“At that point, it was seven acres of mature oak and pine forest with two wells, a driveway and utility lines installed,” she recalled. “We signed on it in 20 minutes.”
Then, bit by bit, they carved space out of the hill. That might have been a daunting proposition to some people their age, but Hughes appears to have been unfazed by the challenge.
“I’ve always been a farmer,” she said, explaining that she ran a dairy farm on Deer Isle and sold unpasteurized milk to the local community. “We had a small herd of Jersey and Guernsey cows. Cream halfway down the bottle,” she said, smiling. “I liked to think that these people were growing up on my milk. And I loved the cows.”
In Northampton, the Hugheses built two houses in a clearing overlooking a chain of ponds that’s home to beavers and other wildlife, one for John and Peggy, one for Nancy. John Hughes died soon after they moved.
Hughes’ two Cairn terriers, Fiona and Brio, accompanied Hughes on a recent stroll through the gardens. She is devoted to them, she says, even though they like to dig holes in the garden.
“I don’t know what they’re hoping to find,” she said. “I tell the veterinarian not to clip their toenails. They need them to dig.”
Hughes’ gardens stretch out in all directions from the house.
“We added a new garden every year,” she said. One of her favorites is an intimate, shaded terrace with a small frog pond, a stone bench and a couple of Adirondack chairs amid patches of maidenhair fern. Hughes hired John Sendelbach, a stoneworker and artist who now lives in Shelburne Falls, to lay the stone in his hallmark spiral pattern.
The dogs are enchanted by the frogs that inhabit the pool, she said. One day, she discovered a mother bear in the pool. “She fit perfectly,” Hughes said.
Although Hughes is widely known in gardening circles for her spectacular rose garden, roses are a relatively new passion for her. She explained that after moving to Northampton, she became friends with a British woman whose driver’s license had been confiscated after she overstayed her visa.
“I drove her around to different places,” Hughes said. “She was an authority on roses. She taught me the difference between floribunda and tea roses. I learned a lot from her.”
Hughes explained that when she moved from Maine to Massachusetts, she realized it was possible to grow roses, and decided to try some. Her first attempt was a success and she has been at it ever since. “But I’m not a rosarian,” she insisted. “I’m a very ordinary gardener.”
Hughes said she learned the secrets of growing roses in New England from a book called “Tender Roses for Tough Climates” by David Green, a Canadian gardener who revolutionized rose cultivation for northern climates.
“You have to plant them much deeper than the instructions tell you,” she said. “Two feet deeper. In the spring, the top will look bad, but it will grow up from below.” She lovingly counts eight new buds on a ‘Graham Thomas’ rosebush. “A few weeks ago it looked completely dead.”
Another of her secrets is neem oil, an insecticide, pressed from the seeds of the neem tree, an evergreen that originated on the Indian subcontinent. She said she has never had a problem with Japanese beetles. “If I see one, I just squeeze it with my fingers.”
Hughes gets almost all her roses from David Austin, a well-known breeder of English roses.
“I have always loved English things. It’s because of my English grandmother,” she said. She keeps the sumptuous catalog “David Austin’s Handbook of Roses” on the front seat of her car.
A dedicated artist, she said she designs her gardens for color. She has two main rose beds, one for cool bluish pinks, such as ‘Cordelia’ and ‘St. Cecelia,’ and one for warm shades of yellow, salmon and peach, including ‘Abraham Darby’ and ‘Comte de Chambord.’ She has 37 different varieties in all.
Each bed is filled with annuals in complementary colors. She says she’s particularly fond of the nasturtiums that grow in her “warm” garden. “It’s a riot of orange and yellow all summer.”
Hughes says she’s not afraid to try new things. For example, she no longer prunes her roses in the traditional way. Instead, she has adopted a technique from Sissinghurst Garden in England that involves bending tall runners down and anchoring them to the ground, where they quickly send up sprouts. This results in denser, bigger bushes.
Hughes’ garden spaces have changed over the years. For example, what began as an herb garden close to the house became a shade garden once the trees grew up around it. And her “potager,” or kitchen garden, 50 yards or so from the house, now is home to gooseberries, new this year, currants and raspberries. “It was too far to go to get a snip of something for the soup,” she said.
From her abundant currant crop, she makes a special jam that originated in France called “Bar-le-Duc.” She explained that traditionally in France, groups of women painstakingly de-seed each currant with a hollow goose quill. “But I leave the seeds in,” she said.
Hughes learned principles of organic gardening from her Deer Isle neighbors Eliot Coleman and Scott and Helen Nearing, eminent pioneers of organic farming.
Coleman, for example, taught her the art of composting: Hughes’ low compost piles are surrounded by cut branches in a square formation, with the branches stacked Lincoln-Log style as the pile grows, allowing air circulation. And, she says, she doesn’t use compost enhancers to speed the process.
“If you have enough space to let it sit, it will do its thing,” she said. “Eliot told me that if you have a cubic meter of material, you can make compost on the North Pole. That really stuck with me.”
Hughes uses an eco-friendly irrigation system from Lee Valley Tools.
“The hoses are very flexible, so you can place them just where you want them,” she said. “And they’re indestructible, so you don’t have to take them up in winter. It’s a very slow seep, so it uses a minimum of water. The plants love it.”
The garden isn’t the only thing on view at Hughes’s home. She has been painting since she was 10 years old.
“I had rheumatic fever and was told that I couldn’t stand up. So my parents gave me painting lessons to keep their poor little sick girl busy, she explained.” She majored in art in college and has studied painting all her life. She said she especially likes to paint when she travels and has taken painting trips to France for the past eight years.
Hughes has recently taken up the art of repairing ceramics, and works with a Russian craftsman in New York who used to make jewelry for the opera in Vienna.
“You must have a broken teapot you’d like to have fixed,” she said, gesturing to a closet full of broken cups, plates, and bowls that she’s working on.
Some of Hughes’ paintings will be on sale in her studio during the garden tour. All proceeds will benefit Forbes Library.
Mickey Rathbun can be reached at foxglover8@gmail.com.
The Friends of Forbes Library Garden Tour will take place Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine. Tickets purchased in advance cost $15, and are available at Forbes Library and State Street Fruit Store, both in Northampton, Cooper’s Corner in Florence, Hadley Garden Center, North Country Landscapes & Garden Center in Westhampton and Bay State Perennial Farm in Whately. Tickets on the day of the tour will cost $20, and will be sold at the library only. For information, visit forbeslibrary.org.
