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"View Slideshow\n\nIn between Fay Wray and Naomi Watts, King Kong's main squeeze was Jessica Lange, making her film debut in 1976. It was not an auspicious beginning. The critics savaged Dino De Laurentiis's version of the ape epic\u2014and Lange disappeared from the screen for another three years. She came back with a vengeance. In 1982 the actress received both a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of movie star Frances Farmer in Frances and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Dustin Hoffman's dream girl in Tootsie. She earned three more Oscar nominations, for her work in Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985) and Music Box (1989), and she won an Academy Award for her characterization of a military officer's mentally unbalanced wife in Blue Sky (1994). And in April she will receive a Lincoln Center tribute for her body of work. \"She reaches into characters to suggest the strength of vulnerable women and the vulnerability of the strong,\" Caryn James once wrote in The New York Times.\n\nLange, who appears as Sam Shepard's ex-lover in Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking this winter, has played Shepard's real-life partner since the early 1980s. They have a daughter, Hannah, and a son, Walker; the actress also has a daughter, Shura, with Mikhail Baryshnikov. For 10 years Lange and her brood shared a large farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, but in 1995 they moved to her home state of Minnesota. \"I had this kind of romantic image of the children growing up not dissimilarly to the way I grew up, in a small town where they could walk to school,\" explains the actress in her light drawl. \"And I wanted to raise them close to their extended family.\" In the town of Stillwater, on a knoll above the St. Croix River, they settled into a rambling 1890s Victorian house directly next door to the home of Lange's mother.\n\nThere is a Monet-inspired pond, surrounded by yellow- and blue-flowering plants, and at the bottom of the hill there's a large lily pond.\n\n\"There was quite a bit of work to do on the house,\" says the actress. \"There was more work to do on the property.\" That's a somewhat coy way of describing the two acres of scrub that had to be cleared away, the walls and steps of locally quarried limestone that were installed to terrace the sloping grounds, and the nine years of intensive gardening that would go into beautifying them.\n\nLange\u2014who had never gardened before but believes she may have inherited a green thumb from two aunts, whom she remembers studying plant catalogues in the dead of Minnesota winters\u2014started out modestly enough: \"I was going to work on one little area, a tiny horseshoe garden by the house that hadn't been planted or designed or anything.\" Taking her cue from English cottage gardens, she planted a loose ring of lilies, ferns, daylilies and clematis around a mosaic birdbath in the form of a skirted farm girl.\n\n\"I then had the idea that off of that central garden I would create three gardens, one for each of my children. I wanted, through colors and plants and light and shade, to capture what I felt was the essence of each of them.\" For her older daughter, Shura, Lange designed a purple-rich tapestry of lilacs, violets, irises and hydrangeas; after Shura was married in the garden, Lange added a birdhouse modeled after the wedding cake. \"With Hannah, I wanted to do the kind of flowers and plants that women encountered when they first came across the prairie. So there are a lot of earthy, powerful plants\u2014echinacea, monarda, yarrow.\" Her son's patch is equally distinctive. \"There were some beautiful oak trees at the side of the property. There was something very quiet and peaceful back in that area, so I decided to make it Walker's garden. I left everything that was wild, like the toad lilies, trillium, violets and jack-in-the-pulpit. But I put in a lot of shade-loving plants, a lot of moss and hostas,\" she says. An avid angler, Walker also got a small pond with a copper fountain of an angel holding a fish.\n\nThat inspired the idea of adding water to the garden. Before long, the actress was spending eight hours a day\u2014during Minnesota's warm months, anyway\u2014working in the garden. \"There was a pond, and then there was a waterfall, and then there was a stream, and then there was another pond, and then\u2014you know,\" Lange continues. Each of the children's gardens contains a water feature. Between Hannah's and Walker's gardens there is a Monet-inspired pond, surrounded by yellow- and blue-flowering plants, and at the bottom of the hill there's a large lily pond\u2014but we're getting ahead of ourselves. \"At one point a big tree came down in a storm, and suddenly there was a space that needed to be addressed,\" recalls Lange. \"I had become friendly with the monks and the Rinpoche at a Buddhist monastery in Minneapolis, so I decided that in their honor I would build a Buddha garden based on the wheel of dharma.\" Here a Tibetan Buddha statue presides over a sweep of peonies\u2014held by believers to be the flower of compassion. \"Then, because the Buddha garden looked like it was stranded in the middle of the yard, I had another pond built.\" The large lily pond, flanked by a stone terrace overgrown with wild daisies, is also home to hyacinths, elephant ears and lotuses.\n\n\"Then I saw the pictures of Sissinghurst and thought, Oh, well, I have to have a white garden.\" For that garden, Lange created a quiet tableau of Casablanca lilies, white thistles, daisies, white-blooming hostas\u2014\"every white flower that we could grow there,\" she says. Less thematic areas receive no less care and attention\u2014the borders around the lawn, the flower beds lining the steps and walls, the beds around the dining terrace. Set just below the house, the terrace is a family hub in the summer. \"You can see the river from there, and it's so beautiful,\" she says.\n\nA few years ago Lange and Shepard acquired an adjacent lot, remodeled its swimming pool and built a guesthouse on the property. \"Suddenly I had a whole other acre to design,\" the actress says. \"But I kept it really wild. It's almost all woods except for right around the pool and poolhouse.\" Which means she's faced with the dilemma of all passionate gardeners. \"I've run out of space,\" Lange admits. \"There's not much more I can do. Unless I buy another lot. Or tear up the lawn."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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