A Glimpse Of The Garden

By Nancy K. Crevier

“A Glimpse Of The Garden” is a miniseries focusing on the heart of a gardener’s work — a special spot, an extraordinary plant, a place of respite, or a place that evokes a heartfelt memory. What is down the garden path of your friends and neighbors? What is down your garden path?

Beth Caldwell’s newest garden is a garden of traveling memories. Just outside the side door of her Bethel condominium, where Beth Caldwell, a longtime Newtown resident, realtor, and president of this year’s Labor Day Parade Committee, moved one year ago, she has created a shade garden filled with plants that have accompanied her through the many moves she has made in her lifetime.

“I’ve moved several times over the years,” said Ms Caldwell, “and I always bring certain plants with me.” The garden includes hostas and painted ferns from her mother’s garden in Virginia, a lone iris that she harvested from her grandmother’s North Carolina garden, and plants from her own gardens and friends’ gardens in Newtown.

The little border garden is accented with Indian artifacts collected by her father. “As a young boy, he used to be the one to follow the plow in the fields down in North Carolina, and a lot of items were unearthed as he walked along,” said Ms Caldwell.

A broken piece of pottery juts from the earth near a pile of smooth stones, some of them early Native American cooking tools. Other stones are chiseled, primitive ax heads or cutting tools, all part of her father’s collection that has graced garden plots wherever Ms Caldwell has put down roots.

Over the course of 20 years, the hardy iris and hosta plants have dug in their heels in gardens in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Connecticut, moving twice in Tennessee, Carolina, and Connecticut.

Other green memories come from more recent moves. “I have a primrose and a ginger plant from Caroline Stoke’s Newtown garden that she gave me when she moved to Southbury,” Ms Caldwell said. The ginger still grows through a hole in a brick, just as it did in the Stokes’ garden.

A moss-covered entry mat at George Miller’s Main Street home in Newtown captured her eye, and he willingly passed it on to her. The mat is fitted neatly into Ms Caldwell’s Bethel garden now.

Another row of giant hosta came with her from her last home in Newtown, she said, and all together, the garden makes a pleasant gathering of memories to greet her each time she steps out the door.

That is what you will find down the garden path at Beth Caldwell’s.