Good thing for Janice Becker’s backyard, she swears she wasn’t so good in the mama department when her kids were babies.
“I’m really a Type A. I needed to get out and do something,” she says of those long-ago years when long naps punctuated the endless hours of the day.
She wandered no farther than the quarter-acre that surrounded the Deerfield ranch house she had not set out to buy when hunting for a place to live back in 1983. What she and her husband, David Shaw, had wanted was a townhouse, a place with no yard whatsoever, because neither one of them had the least bit of interest in gardens.
Ah, but all stories worth spinning have twists of plot, and lucky for that backyard plot — at the time a “massive pile of buckthorn, and hawthorn and scrub” — Becker had had two babies.
And, well, the putzing around in the yard just led from one thing to another: Becker, who walks the yard in Muck boots, with clippers at the ready, is now a master gardener, an avid volunteer at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s evaluation gardens. Nearly everyone who knows her birdhouse-studded garden — from the non-gardening neighbor across the street to the dozens who pass by her busy corner each day — seems inclined to call it Botanic Garden West.
Hers is not a garden upholstered in broad swaths of any few favorite plants, but rather it’s a petit point of one sumptuous something bumping up against another, a canvas of floral abundance. Only the garden knows how much grows within its borders, but it hardly seems too much to estimate that it’s a census in the many thousands.
“I’m just a plant geek, a real plant geek!” is how Becker bluntly puts it.
To prove her point, she produces a three-ring binder that’s a good 4 inches thick. This is only one of three such binders, each one an alphabetical listing of every single plant ever planted in her ever-creeping plots.
She records where she bought each specimen and when, where and when she planted it, what its real growing requirements are (never mind the labels that are often hit or miss). And should the poor thing die, she records its death.
“The reason you garden,” she says, “is that it is the most positive thing you can do — you are always looking ahead. I never say, ‘Oh my garden looked great yesterday or last week.’ It’s always, ‘Wait’ll you see what’s next.’ Yes, this is awesome but there’s always something great that’s just going to happen. It’s always looking toward the next season. That’s what you need to do in life.”
Becker claims it was “a natural evolution” that transformed her from disinterested putterer to master gardener who tucks some 1,000 bulbs into the beds every fall, hauls countless wheelbarrow loads of leaf mulch every spring, and serves as the personal irrigation system, spending two-plus hours hand-watering every last thirsty plant or shrub or tree, wielding nothing fancier than five old-fashioned rubber hoses and her knack for knowing when and who needs a nice, tall drink.
When she started gardening, Becker followed the nascent gardener’s timeline: Began with annuals, trod into perennials, dabbled with shrubs and trees. But 12 years ago, she signed up for master gardener classes at the Botanic Garden, and was then assigned to work in the evaluation gardens.
“My plan was, very basically, to find the best and brightest at the Chicago Botanic Garden and volunteer for them,” Becker says, “to indenture myself to them, which is exactly what I did.” Martin King, formerly the manager of plant sales, and Richard Hawke, the garden’s manager of plant evaluation programs, are her two horticultural mentors.
Clearly, she absorbed her teachers’ every lesson. To come around the bend into Becker’s backyard is to know that you have wandered into the well-loved plot of this plant collector who cannot be contained.
“The fact that there’s any design at all is just because I knew what plant to put with what. There was no master plan. I just love plants, is all.”
In fact, this garden that is now a geography of peninsulas and islands, with sweeping arcs and curves, started out once upon a time as straight lines that hugged the borders, rimmed the house.
But, well, then to fit in that stellar weeping white spruce or that prize-winning Easy Does It rose (cantaloupey-mango would be its mouthwatering color), Becker grabbed the shovel and did what any hard-driving gardener does best: She dug another bed.
“I always had to make more room, and that’s how the garden grew.”
More Top Picks Best Wine Presses For Home Winemaking
And so too, the once-reluctant gardener who hadn’t a clue what this plot had buried just beneath its surface: the makings of her most magnificent obsession.
Tips from a gardener
Janice Becker is living, breathing proof that a little bit of digging can someday bloom into unstoppable beauty. Here are her sure-fire suggestions for the finest garden you can fit in any size plot:
Mulch, mulch and more mulch. Becker has 5 cubic yards of organic leaf mulch dumped on her driveway every spring. She hauls it by the wheelbarrow to every breathing inch of her garden. It’s all about amending.
Who says Chicago’s growing season is too short?: Extend your season, says Becker, whose beds are in bloom from March to November, beginning with thousands of bulbs in early spring. (“Pick any area you can see from the house, not next to house,” she advises, to provide an emotional pickup after the long dark winter.) Then wind up with the last of the asters, fall-blooming crocus and a host of colorful berries.
Sun, yes, but water moreso. Sure, you need to pay attention to shade versus sun, but drainage is too often overlooked. Becker contends it’s more important than sun, and she urges you to pay attention to what the label says — and take it to heart. “The label might say, ‘Will survive dry conditions,’ but what they really are saying is ‘We won’t tolerate standing in water.’ And with so much clay in the soil around here, that’s key.”
Shop nonstop.”Don’t stop shopping for plants or planting just because it is July and abysmally hot. If succession of bloom is the objective (and it is), you will miss some great late summer and fall blooming perennials if you don’t frequent the nurseries. For example, chelone (also known as turtlehead) is an absolutely great late summer bloomer that you will never see unless you shop later in the season. And everything is usually on sale then.”
Be ever on the lookout. “Visit gardens all the time. There is practically nothing in my garden that I did not see someplace else and copy. Take notes; take pictures; and ask questions, particularly why that plant is growing successfully here when you haven’t had any success with it.”
— B.M.