Martha Gray and her niece.

The Forgotten Landscaper

I first saw Martha Gray when I was working at The Great Big Green house in the winter of 1982. She had backed up her old truck to the Nursery section and was loading up perennials. Her Carhartt coveralls hung on her. Her gloves looked huge. Her curly hair stuck out from her stocking hat. She was directing some of the staff while they pulled dormant perennials. They handed them to her and she would organize them in the back of her truck. Her partner, Roger, who was forever by her side, stood watching. There was lots of laughter. She talked the whole time and drove off without asking for a bill or paying for her load. I guess no one was worried about that. My co-worker next to me said, “Oh that’s Martha Gray. I hear she’s really good.”

Ten years later we actually met. We passed each other while biking through Windsor Farms. At first, we waved. Then, after a few weeks we stopped and spoke about her job and mine. As a teacher with a family, I was struggling financially and needed a job for the summer. By summer, Martha introduced me to a wonderful character, Tish, who needed help in her garden. I loved the work and paydays especially when Tish counted out 100 dollar bills on the hood of her Land Rover.

A year later, I quit my teaching job and worked full time with only Martha’s referrals. All the places she referred to me were gorgeous houses with large gardens. A few of them were the estates with Gillette Gardens that overlooked the James River.

Here were some of the lessons I learned in my first few years of apprenticeship with Martha.

Lesson One: “It’s gotta be perfect.”

That meant grade, plant spacing, plant depth, pruning and the right plants in right place. Her brother, Ben, told me how when he drove through certain neighborhoods….“ You could just tell when they were one of Martha’s gardens. They were perfect.”

Another client who lived in a house previously owned by Gillette’s foreman wrote me saying, “After seeing Martha’s extraordinary work and then meeting her, I doubted she could even lift a shovel. Martha worked hours at a time with an inordinately rare combination of intelligence, knowledge, strength, stamina, and perseverance… a rare gift.”

Her perfection was sometimes a tough act to follow. A lot of times I had to go back and redo a job.

Lesson 2: “If you don’t get the grade right, it will always look bad. You have to work from the ground up.”

The gardens she created were graded and sometimes first cleared to the ground. She worked from space, and was able to ‘see’ it when she “got all the junk out”. Even as a Smith College graduate in Landscape Design, I don’t think she ever drew a plan. Someone told me once that she saw Martha completely rip out a garden, and then put one dogwood back in the exact same space. I guess she was setting the grade.

Lesson 3: “Plants should look like they grow in Nature.”

No planting in evenly spaced zig zags for ground covers, daffodils or perennials was allowed. Lined up plants were fine in the more formal areas or in the front of the house.

Lesson 4: “Prune so the plant is airy and almost see through.”

Once she asked me to renovate old boxwoods in a garden on Oak Lane. There were six 5′ tall plants. She came by in mid morning and said, “Crawl inside them. Prune from the inside out.” After lunch she came by and said, “Do it again!” By late afternoon and the third round of her visits, I had done it right.

Lesson 5: “You can’t buy too many plants. They just disappear once you start placing them.”

She invited me once to learn more about perennials by meeting at her client’s garden. She wanted me to look over an order of perennials that had arrived. The client had waited a year for her to start the job and was excited for the planting stage to begin. There must have been 500 perennials in the driveway. Martha stepped between the black pots saying, “Let’s see… I think I remember what I ordered…” To me it looked like dirt with a few leaves showing. Luckily I could read the tags.

Lesson 4: “Annuals are such a cop-out.”

“Why would anyone want to have to replant spots in the garden or in pots year after year,” she would say.

Even in pots, she used small Japanese maples, boxwoods, herbs like lavender and rosemary or perennials.

Lesson 5: “You can clean your own house or take care of your garden, but you can’t do both.”

In her mind there were just some things that had to be taken care of first so you could work in your garden. When she saw that the master bath in our new house was unfinished she said, “Honestly Christie, you have to have a bathroom before you can have a garden.” She told me to get it started and she would donate $5000.

Mr. Gillette

I loved hearing her talk about Gillette and the Gillette gardens. She had met Mr. Gillette when he came to consult with her father on a design for a terrace at her home.

Her house overlooked a ravine off Cary Street Rd. After a long discussion her father told Mr. Gillette that he thought the project was too expensive. Gillette’s comment was, “Mr. Gray, if you don’t build this like I am saying, you will regret it the rest of your life. She told me the terrace was stunning, but of course cost twice as much as he had proposed. Maybe that’s where Martha got her belief that the cost of a garden wasn’t anything to worry about.

From her I learned that Gillette used double rows of boxwoods as allees and that he used locust trees because they let grass grow underneath them. She told me which gardens in Richmond had been done by Gillette. Most were gone because of house updates or lack of maintenance.

Labor was cheap back in his day. He could do lots of hardscaping, design fountains and garden ornaments because craftsmen were available and inexpensive.

I also learned how he saved Mary Parsons after she was kidnapped! Mary Parsons created the Mary Parsons Foundation for the arts and community, which is still active today.

Gillette was brilliant, but common sense wise not as good. He forgot to write up bills and get paid. He was quite poor when he died.

Martha’s Garden

The back garden was like a woodland fairy land. Alongside the path through the woods were smooth stones and small boulders, speckled pulmonaria, different shades of columbine, huge ferns, 3 foot tall thalictrum, small blue forget-me -nots, Virginia bluebells, moss, poet’s laurel, and fragrant daphne. They were tucked in to slopes by the path. Each time the path wound around the trees there was a new vignette.

As you came out of the woods her patio welcomed you with a gorgeous Lutyens bench, seat walls, big stone pots and rare plants like a climbing fern that wound around a wrought iron railing.

In her shed, there was a large gray garbage can filled to the top with iris. All were cut back with not a speck of dirt on the roots. She said those would last forever like that. She gave them to clients if they needed them.

Her garbage can was immaculate with not a speck of dirt clinging to the sides. Inside the house she had a calendar with the temperatures and weather conditions of each day written. Her house inside was decorated like the cover of Southern Living. Not one item was out of place.

Martha died at the age of 48 in 1999. She had always battled her complicated eating habits and was diagnosed with cancer after I had known her only 7 years. She was so thin that they couldn’t operate or do chemo effectively. She worked as long as she could. Even when she had to stop formally with paying clients, she was somewhere scraping dirt for an improved grade or pruning azaleas. She even ‘renovated’ a garden at a house she rented because she couldn’t stand looking at it from the upstairs window. I think her realtor friend had to smooth the waters on that one.

I googled her once a year ago. The only place that her name came up was on my own website under Gillette Gardens. I have asked clients, tradespeople, teachers at J. Sargent Reynolds and my students at Lewis Ginter if they heard of her. Only a few had.

It just doesn’t seem right. So I wrote this article exactly 25 years since her death. I myself just retired and liquidated my company in December. Writing about her lessons has a certain karmic rightness to it. I hope this story gives you some sense of who she was. She changed my life. She is and has been the Angel in my Gardens.

Her memorial service at St. Mary’s Church was packed. When her Eulogy was read, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place. It was a sad day for us all.

Christie lives in Manakin Sabot , Virginia where she manages a 3 acre garden. Her blogs are written from her 35 years as a personal and professional gardener.