Gardens: A new book by Page Dickey talks about scaling back

Page Dickey, 70, and her husband, Bosco Schell, 76, were soaking up the sun on their terrace in North Salem, New York, and explaining how they were simplifying their garden. Sort of.

"The first step is to replace perennials with shrubs and ground covers," Dickey says, sipping her coffee after a hearty lunch of homemade minestrone, the onions, leeks, garlic and chard for which came straight from the garden.

"We need an overall plan: more green architecture and fewer plants."

Schell, a retired editor, grew up in Hungary, where his family had a walled kitchen garden. He had peeled the empires and mutsus gathered from the orchard here for the fresh apple sauce we had eaten, dribbled with cream.

"We talk about simplifying, but the whole joy of gardening is being creative," he says.

"And creativity usually means adding. You go to a nursery and you say, 'Oh! That's the perfect plant for us!"' (Like little potted strawberry bush, named Venus, whom they fell for at a plant sale, then wandered around with for days, seeking a place for her.)

"Instead of simplifying, we're complicating," he chuckles. Schell, who fled Budapest at the age of 11 when the Germans invaded, can't bear to throw away any plant; he makes more from seeds and cuttings, to give away or donate to plant sales at the local library.

As Dickey writes in Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month, "A husband is all very well, but a husband in the garden is a mixed blessing."

The two wed ten years ago, he a widower, she divorced, with 13 grandchildren between them. Now they have three dogs, 20 chickens, four ducks and two turkeys.

And thousands of plants, from overgrown shrubs, trees and hedges to perennials constantly screaming to be staked, deadheaded or divided, or self-seeding all over the garden.

Schell is the plantsman, the collector, the one-of-everything type. Dickey is the designer with the painter's eye who started building this garden 30 years ago with her former, non-gardening, husband when they moved to this three-acre remnant of a 19th-century farm with their four children.

It had a few old lilacs and dogwoods around the house, a woodland edged with sugar maples and a pasture overlooking the blue hills of New York State's Hudson Valley.

Using the doors of the old clapboard house as site lines, Dickey created a series of terraces and hedged garden rooms, one opening to another, all on an axis to the house.

She loved flowers then - peonies, roses, irises, lady's mantle, bee balm, foxgloves, catmint - a multitude of perennials billowing over the crisp lines of geometric beds and trimmed hedges of privet, boxwood, euonymus, dwarf lilac, cornelian cherry, grey-twigged dogwood and hemlock.

I had come up from my own overgrown garden in Maryland, where the shaggy privet is 12ft high and the climbing hydrangea never stops climbing, seeking inspiration on scaling back.

It's one of the themes of Embroidered Ground, and an important one for people who still have the passion for gardening, but not the backs for it.

"I have a fraction of the vigour I once had, with bones that creak and muscles that scream in protest," she writes. But plants, of course, do not adjust to one's diminishing energy and arthritic knees.

And she had married a man who could add but not subtract, who would sneak red-striped yellow tulips into her careful combinations of mauves and purples and creams. "It was not my vision, my plan," she writes. But, "Bosco and I are slowly, at times painfully, learning the art of compromise."

Besides, he loves to prune, so what's not to like?

Schell attacked a monster strawberry bush, calycanthus floridus, one day when Dickey was out. She had planted it years previously by their bedroom, so that its delicious strawberry-pineapple scent would waft through the windows. But now this 10x10ft shrub was turning their room into a cave. Until Schell went at it, that is, reducing it to a rooted bit of the main stump.

They planted the tiny survivor by the paddock fence, which surrounds a small meadow, where it is now a good 8x6ft, on its way to 12x12ft. (I don't think there's much hope for these two. They finally found a place for their strawberry bush behind the herb garden hedge, where it too can grow into a giant.)

There is talk of ripping out the 6ft privet hedge that frames the main flower garden on the south side of the house (it has to be pruned every couple of weeks in summer). "But I don't have the energy or the heart," Dickey says.

Last summer, in the main garden, they managed to pull out the blue phlox, which tends to get mildew and self-seed everywhere. They are replacing it with shrubs such as Little Lamb, a hydrangea that behaves itself, and Bud's Yellow, a shrub dogwood with chartreuse branches that stand out in winter.

In the hemlock garden, so-called for the shaggy hemlock hedge that fronts the road, they have pulled out high-maintenance roses - more phlox and asters - and replaced them with variegated red-twigged dogwood, Japanese tassel fern and cranesbill geraniums.

These plants should take care of themselves. But Dickey cannot leave well enough alone. She has also planted Japanese anemones among the dogwood, imagining their white flowers swaying over the red twigs.

But what ageing gardener cannot relate. How can you yank up the plants that formed you?

Storms have made some of the hard decisions for her. A mini-tornado took down a line of great old sugar maples. Last summer's heat and drought killed a favourite viburnum on the edge of the woods, and a fungus is decimating the ash trees.

She and Schell have planted dogwoods where the sugar maples stood, and a red oak. "This will not do much in our lifetime," she says. But that's just it. These trees are for those who come next."

These days, both in Europe and in the United States, Dickey finds herself drawn to landscapes with simple mowed paths through high grass in an orchard. And here, at Duck Hill, she can envision just grass and shrubs within the bones of her hedges.

But seeing is one thing; doing is another. For now, Schell shows off the cuttings he has made of a variegated geranium, in a little pot in his greenhouse. It's a beautiful space, made from the glass and framing of old greenhouses, attached to the east side of a sunny studio they call the Boscotel.

"I was going to shut down the greenhouse this winter because it's so expensive to heat," he says.

"I won't let him, it's too much joy," Dickey says. "We'll just have to not spend money on something else."

It's so hard to cut back, I say.

Schell laughs. "But it makes us feel better that we tried."

The New York Times 2011

This article was first published in The Scotsman, 22 January, 2011