We kept opening them, she explains, amused as she looks back on it. Spending a day with Mary Lou during the growing season is not unlike following a human backhoe around. She is slightly built, with brown eyes and chestnut hair, and though she s a few years past 50 she often looks like a teenager in work clothes. On a recent morning she was determined to divide mature beds of hybrid, Asiatic lilies and daylillies and extend a border where a pond was being built. By the time I arrived she had already dug up and moved one of those checking account rhododendrons.
Growth can be a gift, but at the moment it s become a nuisance.
Then the lawn opens up to an expanse of lush beds that begin with a red purple smoke bush and its underbed of intense yellow. We take a seat on the far side, on a rickety bench in the shade, ingesting color while the cool greens around us envelop us like a quilt. She and her daughter, Chiara, now grown but still the official flower picker in the family, often sit in this space when she visits. This summer she and her younger son, Michael, have returned to the stone work that Rob and his grandfather began some years ago. If assembled at one of Mary Lou s festive dinner parties they d make for an exotic mix.