Autumn can be the sweetest of icings atop the gardening seasons here in Baldwin County.
Long after that last luscious lily has faded, fall bloomers like camellias and Rose of Sharon and plants with electric foliage, such as fall-hued crotons, peek out from the shadows and take center stage.
In self-taught gardener Janice Hillman’s lovely Spanish Fort landscape, the seasons lend themselves graciously to her gardening visions, and every season becomes a showy backdrop for her gardening talent.
This Kansas City, Mo. native retired from a long 34-year career with ATT, and with her son Ryan already living in Daphne, she chose this lovely area to create her retirement paradise.
“I love the variety of flowers and plants I can grow here,” Janice says. “I have always loved the South and have considered myself a southerner for quite a while.”
Janice first learned how to enjoy gardening and how to grow tomatoes from her mother during her childhood in Missouri.
Since then, she has enhanced her gardening knowledge by growing in many types of climates and conditions — from living on a farm on the Texas plains, where she learned to successfully grow vegetables, to nurturing tropical gardens in San Antonio, Texas.
“During our first year in San Antonio, it snowed 12 inches when it hadn’t snowed there in 100 years,” Janice shares with a smile.
Later, as she established homes in different locations, Janice began to view gardening as decorating, and through designing poolside gardens and starting eclectic plant collections, she began her love of decorative gardening.
“I loved creating and landscaping a decorative water pond on a river at one of my homes,” she shares.
This adventurous gardener once lived on her own 65-foot sailboat for several years in the Bahamas,and later, on the Dog River in Mobile, where she enjoyed growing herbs near the dock.
Successful garden design requires learning certain skills, whether through a curriculum or through life experiences, as Janice has done, but in the end, a garden’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder and needs please no one except the gardener herself.
“When I bought this house four years ago, there were no grass or plants at all here,” Janice explains. “I started with a blank slate, and since I love a variety of plants and love to experiment with plantings, I have had fun choosing the colors of my palette and putting them all together in a way that pleases me. I choose colors and try to create a portrait around my house.”
Through her eye-catching creativity, Janice has not only pleased herself with her garden, but her neighbors, as well. On neighborhood walks, friends gaze on with wonder at her colorful garden beds and container plantings, and they often compliment her talent.
Janice began a helpful gardening habit by taking before and after pictures at her various homes, comparing the gardens and enjoying the visual representation of the changes she creates. In addition to learning with her hands in the soil, Janice reads gardening books, roams garage sales and garden centers looking for ideas and asks questions of other gardeners.
In addition to choosing and planting thriving and charming beds, Janice “does it all” concerning home projects.
“I have ripped out an old hot tub at this house, put up a wooden fence with my son’s help, mow the sizable lawn, fertilize my plants, trim trees and shrubs, have made my own rainwater collectors to help water my garden in addition to choosing my plants,” she shares. “It is a full time job taking care of all that.”
Every garden needs a focal point, and large, dramatic plants can provide this, often getting larger and showier every year. Focal point plants in Janice’s garden include tall potted cordylines, which she loves, near her entranceway onto the welcoming screen porch.
Janice has two bedding areas in the sun, which she uses as a test garden to determine optimum growing conditions. She likes to choose plants that encourage visiting butterflies and hummingbirds to stop and stay awhile. She also grows vegetables — pole beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and a blueberry bush — which “provides enough blueberries for my cereal,” she says.
Janice is a trial and error gardener, planting and replanting until she gets it right.
“I don’t know what I would do if I ever get it perfect,” she shares.
Perfection is not what gardening is about for Janice and most gardeners. In her case, it is about the fun of discovering colorful plant combinations that work to enhance the structure of her home. It is about creating that soothing spot to savor the peacefulness of the dawning or the ending of the days that grace each season. It is about, in Janice’s words, “the peacefulness, the solitude and the creativity that gardening provides.”
It is about starting with nothing except the soil and enhancing it with the beauty of carefully chosen blooms and gifts from family and neighbors to create, with God, a garden that is a gift to all who view it.
“To me, working in the garden is heaven,” Janice explains. “It puts me in touch with the importance of the whole process. A garden is a life of its own — it brings forth new life and it buries life in its time.”
Janice Hillman toils and sows and reaps in her garden with joy and wisdom, and so shares the gracious beauty of life with us all.
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