What is your Dream Garden?

Mine looks like it came out of the 1920s, and it's filled with hollyhocks.

The garden at Charleston Farmhouse. Credit: Annie Sloan

Gardens Illustrated, one of my very favorite garden magazines—and only second to The English Garden—has a podcast called Talking Gardens, in which guests are asked what they’d include in their dream gardens. It’s very fascinating, especially since most of the guests are famous in the industry and already have what I’d consider to be dream gardens.

It just goes to show that maybe a dream garden doesn’t really exist. You could have acres of space, access to huge varieties of plants, a greenhouse (!) and still long for something different. A different climate, say, or location. Different soil. Different neighbors. Or maybe the design is all wrong. I heard Monty Don on another podcast say that if he had the chance, he would have planned out Longmeadow differently. He designed it back when formal gardens were all the rage, but times changed, and so did the climate.

When we were in Portland and I was crying about having to leave our garden, Drew would remind me that it was never exactly my dream garden. It was too angular, set on a square lot that awkwardly sloped down to a ‘50s cement slab patio. My dream garden would be something more wild, more organic and curving. Maybe a garden growing naturally around an old house, with no square fenced-in yards to be seen.

More Charleston. Credit: Carolyn Carter

“Which famous gardens are you inspired by?” the interviewer will ask on the podcast. And if I were on it I’d have to say Sissinghurst, for sure, but maybe even more so the garden at Charleston Farmhouse, which was created in the 1920s by artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. I love this garden because it’s every bit as wild as were Bell and Grant and the multiple members of the Bloomsbury Set who lived there throughout the years in between the wars. Just as the house’s rustic hand-painted interiors are filled with color and whimsy, the garden is a mass of texture and romance. It looks like a cottage garden taken to the extreme, with roses climbing up to the roof and hollyhocks scattered throughout.

If there’s one thing my dream garden needs, it’s hollyhocks. My dad says that they were my grandma’s favorite flower, so it’s no wonder I love them. There’s just something so old-fashioned about hollyhocks. They make me nostalgic for a garden I’ve never been to before but that I’ve seen lots of times in silent movies and in old illustrations, the kinds I used to post back in the day on my fashion blog. If you were a reader then it probably comes as no surprise that my dream garden would be a very romantic one. I still dress in faded colors and I’d like my dream garden to be dressed in them, too, please.

Credit: Carolyn Carter

I’ve mentioned only British gardens so far, but I think that my dream garden might just be something more American, like the ones that appeared on the covers of home and garden magazines of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Most of them look very fairytale or silent film set, and of course there are lots of hollyhocks. Even back when these gardens were designed, they were already considered nostalgic. I love this article from the Smithsonian that explains how many gardeners of the time were doing their own idealized takes on colonial era America, a time period that probably seemed as romantic to them then as the 1920s does to me now.

What else does this dream garden have? A greenhouse, of course. Nothing huge, but big enough for raising seedlings in. I don’t want anything in the garden to be too big—I like the idea of small and charming and manageable. Because no matter how dreamlike it is, I do want practicality. Some of the guests on Talking Gardens resort to sorcery and ask for things like roses that stay in bloom all year or garden gates that serve as portals to anywhere in the world. I don’t necessarily want magic in my garden, but I do want it to look as though there were the possibility of magic.

Of course I’ll have to track down lots of ‘20s garden magazines for inspiration. Wishing Fruit, Garden and Home was still with us!

So, yes. A greenhouse, hollyhocks, room for perennials that will live longer than I will, mixed in with colorful annuals, Charleston-style. Some sun and some shade, but mostly sun. Rose arbors and handwoven willow obelisks. A courtyard with lots of those very heavy and fancy terracotta pots, a few spots for sitting. A yard that’s not too big, but large enough for a compost heap that we can hide away in a sunny nook—maybe behind the potting shed that of course is equipped with running water. Hot and cold!

And as lovely as a country plot sounds, I’ve been enjoying city living so much lately that it would be nice to garden somewhere with public transportation and a good library and lots of things to do. I suppose there would have to be neighbors, but maybe we’d luck out with some very private ones who keep to themselves and won’t get mad about a poodle that barks a little too much. And let’s hope that they don’t peek over the fence in the morning when I go out in my pajamas to check on the plants. Because my dream garden’s going to be so dreamy that I’ll be even more excited to go see it the moment I wake up.

The real garden, at the beginning of May

Garden Notes:

• The dahlias and cosmos are planted! I’m waiting on a couple of things before planting out the rest of the seedlings; I have some nicotiana plants that I keep having to pot up into larger nursery pots before I can put them in their final home along the shady wall. They were so tiny for the longest time, but now they won’t stop growing.

• We’ve been having a weird spring that can’t decide whether to be warm and sunny or rainy and cool, so the plants will have mini growth spurts only to slow down again.

• The raised beds are still a mess of plants—I was all talk when I said I was going to rip everything out, because it’s kind of nice to have established plants now while I’m waiting for my seedlings to take off. Still hoping to replace some, though. I planted some nigella, verbena, poppy, and blue lace flower seeds in there, and it’s fun to see them come up along with a whole mystery gang of other seedlings that I keep having to look up on Apple plant ID.

• But there is a bud on the snapdragon I didn’t pinch out. Maybe there will be an actual flower I grew from seed in the May update? Stay tuned!