New Book By Rosemary Gramatico—

Making Gardening Less Of A Chore, More Of A Pleasure

By Shannon Hicks

BETHEL — The first response Rosemary Gramatico, the author of the just-release book A Gardener’s Work Is Never Done, to the suggestion for a location for an interview to discuss her new book was, “That’s great. I can check out the nurseries on my way over.”

Rose Gramatico has been gardening, she says, “forever.” Like the traces of dirt that can be spotted under a serious gardener’s fingernails no matter how hard they scrub at the end of a day, gardening is a part of Rose.

She started her own gardening business, called Rose’s Gardens, eight years ago. The Bethel resident has gardens at her own home, and through her business designs, builds and maintains gardens for clients throughout lower Fairfield County. She works outdoors ten months of the year; designing and planning gardens is done year-round.

About two years ago a client suggested Rose think about putting out a book. The client not only liked the way Rose designed her own garden, but also happened to be the owner of Hightrees Books, an imprint of the New York City-based Prism Corporation.

The result is A Gardener’s Work Is Never Done (illustrated by Dianne Marxe and Trudy Garfunkel; publication date May 2000, $10.95 paperback). The charming little book — handily enough, the perfect size to pack right into a basket of tools or a gardener’s apron — covers the basics of beginning and continuing a garden. In her first book, Rose offers a seasonal guide to getting better results and a more beautiful garden with less effort.

The book is a quick and easy read. There are no difficult-to-understand terms in there, and the writing is as breezy as a well-planned garden gazebo’s placement. Gramatico’s writing comes across as something done by someone who wants to share her love for this fast-growing hobby for many (a profession for some) quickly enough so that people who are interested in following up on their dreams of building a garden can read her suggestions, get outdoors, and get right to work.

Be forewarned: Gardening is not for the weak at heart, and Gramatico makes sure she points this out from the get-go. Right in the book’s introduction Rose offers a gentle admonition: “Think about what you’re getting into,” she cautions. “Healthy, beautiful flower gardens don’t just happen, they require maintenance.” Things to consider are how much time and energy a person has; whether they mind getting dirty, and whether they can endure bugs, rain, hot sun, and the cold; and the strength of a person’s back and hands, among other considerations. In order to expect a beautiful garden, she is saying, just be ready to put in the work for it.

Once beyond that point, the book moves quickly to the root of its purpose. Chapter One offers a brief overview of the elements of a garden; Chapter Two discusses the essential growing conditions necessary for any garden, including soil, water supply, sun, and shade; and the next four chapters break down gardening by season, with chores that should be done during the different months of the year.

Looking for plants that you will enjoy looking at and cultivating is covered in the seventh chapter, and then Chapter Eight moves into protecting your garden from unwanted visitors. Rose Gramatico is an organic gardener, a fact she mentions a few times in her book. None of her planting techniques or even the suggestions she offers for controlling what she terms “garden marauders” (deer, Japanese beetles, neighbors’ pets, et al) will create or cause harm to humans, pets, wild animals, or birds, or contaminate a water supply.

Chapter Nine offers an overview on choosing and maintaining the proper tools for optimum working conditions, and the final chapter includes Rose’s tips on taking good physical care of yourself while working in the garden. Again, the focus in Chapter Ten is for everyone to take their time. “Know when to sit down and take a breather,” she suggests.

The Epilogue shares Rose’s thoughts on how to continue to enjoy a garden, whether adding a birdhouse or two to attract a few birds (but not squirrels), walking through the area with a friend, sitting on a comfortable bench, or just sitting and contemplating the beauty of it all. An Appendix offers addresses and telephone numbers for plant and garden accessory catalogs.

“I’m so thrilled this actually came out in book form,” Rose said recently. “I made a lot of notes, and then went back and made sense out of everything, and it really wasn’t that bad. I wrote down things I assumed everyone knew and just backtracked from there, back to the basics.”

Her initial point was to put together something for beginners, and something that would be usable more than once. Rose was not out to create a hardcover, glossy-paged coffee table book. There are already too many of those on the market, she said.

 “I have stacks of books full of pretty pictures,” she said. “But many of them are not at all practical.

“This is just a basic, common sense, inexpensive, how-to-garden book. And it also proves that you do not, with some foresight and planning, have to spend a lot of money to have a nice garden,” said she.

Flower gardens, which are the style of gardens addressed in A Gardener’s Work Is Never Done (vegetable gardens, she alludes to at one point, have their own crop of problems and care) can be as large or as small, as ordered or as haphazard, and the gardener desires. Anything goes.

“My garden at home has no order to it,” she laughed over a cup of tea. “I find something I like, I throw it in there.

“I work with too much order surrounding me during the day,” she continued. “For my clients, I do whatever they want. But when I get home, it’s my own garden that is waiting for me.”

“Relax!” she writes in the chapter about winter chores. “Don’t worry about making mistakes; you probably will, we all do. Except for losing extremely rare or expensive plants, the worst that can happen is that you have to discard things here and there, or have to replant something in another location.”

And that idea — to relax, to have fun with a garden — is something she did not write just to fill space. It is something she lives by.

“Gardening is supposed to make you happy,” she reiterated last week. “Gardening is like fashion, which is something people change their attitudes toward as they grow up: You just do what makes you comfortable. That’s all there is to it.”

Rosemary Gramatico will be at Barnes & Noble, in Danbury Square on Backus Avenue, on Thursday, June 8. She will be available after 7:30 pm to sign copies of her book, meet readers, and answer garden-related questions.