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"View Slideshow\n\nYears ago Edward Lee Cave went to Connecticut to purchase some 18th-century furniture, the contents of an 18th-century farmhouse. When he got there, before going inside to look at his primary interest, he decided to buy the farmhouse itself and none of the furniture. The house came with a garden, an American country garden: herbaceous perennials, such as peonies and baptisia, and shrubs suitable for a New England climate\u2014roses, lilacs and laurels\u2014and, of course, vegetables.\n\nCave until then had lived in New York City, but he grew up in the country, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and he was immediately reminded of this. \"When I first saw the garden here,\" he says, \"I thought of my youth. From the age of 12 I had my own garden, and I worked in it before school. My father had a victory garden, and my mother tended her flowers.\" From her, he says, he learned about the deep attention needed to make a garden seem as if there is nothing to it at all.\n\nAll this rushed through him, he says, when he first saw Captain's Farm, for that is the name of his house and his garden, and he spent the first year looking out at the garden, just to get used to the way the land lay, the contours of it, the green empty space of the expansive lawns and the things that grew in the garden beds themselves.\n\nIt was lovely to begin with: There were wide swaths of lawn in which later he would plant thousands of daffodils. There were the roses, the peonies and the old shrubs. These were all kept in the places he met them. But then after a year he began to expand. First he added patterned brick walks so that various parts of the garden became tied in with each other.\n\nThen he installed an extensive watering system; he says this was on advice from his banker.\n\nHe made new beds and filled them with the perennials he loves: geraniums, lilies, irises, poppies, veronica, dianthus, goat's beard, lady's-mantle, a garden that reaches a beautiful and high pitch of bloom and color around midsummer.\n\nAt the south side of the house, he made parterres of English box (and they are very sensitive to cold, so he builds them little jackets made of burlap to get them safely through a Connecticut winter), and he enclosed other beds with lavender. This part of the garden is formal and appropriately so, since it leads to some wonderful rooms inside.\n\nOn the other side of the house is a knoll, and this protects the house some from strong winter winds. He calls this area Spring Hill, for in spring it is abloom with primulas and early tulips.\n\nThe main project he undertook, he says, was enclosing his garden for privacy\u2014that is, privacy from deer. There are plenty of those in Connecticut. Once he had put in a fence, he planted some good-size hemlocks, arborvitae and birches, and he planted them in such abundance that they now seem to be the edge of a forest.\n\nHe carefully went through the apple trees on the property, culling some, and takes loving care of those that remain. Perhaps, for me anyway, the most beautiful aspect of the garden is the way he has various things climbing into them and spreading in their crowns: hydrangeas, roses and clematis.\n\nJust as I was leaving him and his garden, he said, almost mournfully, that he wished he had some things that would bloom in August. I immediately put on my gardening hat and went through a list of things I look forward to seeing blooming in my own garden come August. He listened to me patiently and then said, \"Oh, but I am never here then.\" I laughed and left him, thinking to myself, Gardeners!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/cave-article-062006>