Less than a mile from the crowded center of Camden, Maine, Leslie Fillnow’s garden winds from the pumpkins and squash curling over the fieldstone wall below her steep lawn to the patch of purple crocuses from which she harvests saffron to the tiered vegetable patch out back.
“The reason the garden started is because I like food,” says Fillnow, who teaches Italian cooking at the nearby Penobscot Language School. Rather than planting humdrum rows of organic tomatoes, beans, and eggplant to use in cooking, Fillnow nestled them in colorful perennial beds surrounding the comfortable Colonial farmhouse she shares with her husband, Bob.
She began planning and planting when they moved in seven years ago, replacing tired arborvitaes with holly, hydrangeas, and pots of flowering vines. “It was just for fun,” says Fillnow, surrounded by gardening books in her sunroom overlooking the back of the 1-acre property. “Then all of a sudden it grew.”
One challenge was the water flowing continuously from the Camden hills through the lawn to the nearby harbor. After installing an extensive French drain, the couple planted a half-dozen weeping willows to absorb runoff and provide a canopy of shade. Next they added a curved fieldstone patio wreathed with pink fairy roses, dahlias, daisies, ferns, and coneflowers between the towering evergreens flanking the front door.
Out back, a restored stone wall now frames a secluded lawn and patio with a stone fire pit for summer entertaining. Along the edge, potted tomatoes, herbs, and a school of porcelain fish peep through spiky irises, plummy pink queen-of-the-prairie, and old-fashioned peonies and hostas — all of which flourish in damp conditions. Stone stairs lead to concealed bins of compost to nourish the raised vegetable garden and a small plot of potatoes, which produce delicate white flowers.
A local builder constructed a raised wooden “salad bar” from locally grown rot-resistant Douglas fir. Filled with soil and lined with water-permeable cloth, it provides seasonal greens. Leslie Fillnow has also tried growing mushrooms, seeding a downed maple in a shady grove with shiitake, chicken of the woods, and oyster mushroom spores. Wild burdock, milkweed, and elderberry — all of which are edible for humans as well as butterflies and birds — add to the rough, wild design.
“People don’t realize how beautiful vegetables are,” says Fillnow, who often gets asked whether she is the lady who has the pumpkins budding on her wall.
“I don’t want everything to be so pristine.” She nods. “I like a mix.”
Meadow Rue Merrill writes for children and adults from a little house in the big woods of mid-coast Maine. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter @BostonGlobeMag.
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This story has been updated to correctly identify a flower in a photo caption as well as the name of the photographer. The flower shown is called foxglove, and the photographer is Stacey Cramp.