“Have a passion for your own little space,” her Scottish father told her. And that’s exactly what this gardener and her husband have done on the grounds of their 1915 stucco house in Guilford.

When the couple arrived 34 years ago, stone walls, English boxwoods, azaleas and mature trees gave formal stability and weight to the property, but the yard was mostly green grass. As a gift to herself on her 50th birthday, the wife and freelance designer Rose Wolford created a walled space with a fishpond, patio and densely planted beds just outside the home’s back door. Though the space has a decidedly English flair, its lattice pergola entrance is reminiscent of tranquil Japanese gardens.

A good decade later, the owner decided to transform her garden into a blend of West and East, a marriage of her and her husband’s interests in English gardens and Asian art. With the help of the late landscape designer Wayne Hand, she flanked a flagstone path with both English-looking perennial borders and Japanese-influenced ornamental cherry and dogwood trees. She covered another lattice fencing with a riot of shrub and climbing roses. An English hallmark of this Baltimore garden, the roses now trail down the driveway, past a patio, onto the garage roof. There an English-style wood gate, copied from the original, connects to a more solid, latticework screen that brings in yet another touch of the Japanese right in front of an elaborate Victorian fountain.

At the other end of the garden stand a Japanese shaped arch, a stately amalancher and an intimate walled garden, and across the lawn sits a simple stone bench. Flagstone steppingstones wander along a shady, woodland bank and a Japanese fountain to create “the Zen end,” as the owner calls it. “It is contemplative and peaceful to sit here and look back up to the garden and that magnificent Kwonsa cherry tree,” she says.

Various forms and specimen of dogwoods, Japanese maple and cherry trees, Japanese camellia, Japanese holly and beech ferns thread through foundation plantings, offering pockets of delicate, visual tranquility amid a tightly planted English garden. All forms of typically English boxwoods (dwarf, columnar and traditional billowy mounds) as well as daphne and sweet box, are surrounded by layers of free-flowing perennials, Victorian stands, planters brimming with annuals and an abundance of roses.

“I’d like to have one of every plant,” says the owner. “That’s why designers are good for me. They say, ‘No. Let’s have 10 of this instead.’”  With the assistance of a succession of designers, the owner, a lifelong flower arranger and gardener, has successfully integrated original trees and shrubbery, gates and walls with thousands of new plantings in dozens of beds. After she removed a hemlock hedge, the west side of the garden opened up. Foxborough Nursery helped her continue the blue and pink palette of the rose and perennial borders with hydrangeas and crepe myrtle. She also added the golden glow of a dragon-eye pine, a sourwood tree and variegated chartreuse hostas.

The owner has even interspersed a few plantings commemorative of the couple’s regular worldwide travels (they’ve taken four trips out of the country every year for the last 14), including plants like acanthus to remember Sicily and laburnum to remember Denmark. “I get carried away!” she says, laughing. Just as her father advised.

RESOURCES

Original design Foxborough Nursery, 410-879-4995,
www.foxboroughnursery.com

Recent design Jessica Geczy, 410-378-9181

Replanting & installation Harvest Moon Landscaping,
410-399-2000

Stone work Aldo Construction Inc., 410-592-8999

Deep fertilization A & A Tree Experts, 410-486-4561

Containers Muffin Evander, Cultivated Designs,
410-771-0534, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Lighting Bob Jones, Jones Lighting Specialists,
410-828-1010