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What is a garden? Is it flower beds neatly tended, filled with colorful blooms? Is it composed of trees and shrubs, teased into shapes that nature never intended? Is it a man-made construct, with rocks and flowers and ferns carefully composed to create an artful whole?
All of these and more can be found on the 70-acre property that surrounds the Cornwall home of Bruce and Debbie Bennett, successful entrepreneurs whose Kent Greenhouse and Gardens provides full-service design and gardening services for homeowners throughout the region. The Bennetts have focused their considerable abilities on their own land over the past decade, creating a verdant landscape, more natural than contrived, around their elegant home—itself a representation of the traditional New England landscape.
The property is one of four on the Saturday, June 23, garden tour to benefit the Cornwall Library. Also included on the June 23 tour are the gardens of author Roxanna Robinson; Jane Garmey, author of “Private Gardens of Connecticut,” and garden designer Alexa Venturini.
The tour will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., followed by a cocktail party with getaway raffle tickets for sale. Tickets to the garden tour are $25 per person; $50 per person for tour and cocktail party, and $80 for two people with the cocktail party. For more information, contact Amy Cady at 860-672-6874 or by e-mail at acady@biblio.org.
As with many Baby Boomers, the Bennetts found their way into their ultimate occupation without design. He had been a pre-med student; she studied English lit. He dropped out, much to his father’s annoyance. “My father wanted to know what I was going to do now,” said Mr. Bennett as the early spring sun dappled through the trees on his beautifully landscaped lawn. “I said, ‘I don’t know—get a job I guess. I always believed that if you work hard enough, things work out.”
They have worked hard and things have worked out. Today, their Kent Greenhouse and Gardens provides design-build services for sophisticated and discerning clients, as well as extensive nursery plant and gardening equipment sales.
For a few years, the Bennetts lived in a small house on Great Hollow Road, but that was simply a way station on their way to their ultimate home. “We wanted some land,” he explained. “I spent 10 years going out every single weekend to look at property—eventually my realtor refused to even get out of the car. I couldn’t find something we could afford that was nice enough to meet our needs.”
Finally, a 75-acre parcel—five acres have been peeled off and sold to a neighbor—came on the market in Cornwall. Just as in “Goldilocks,” the Bennetts had found a place that was “just right.”
“It was incredible,” said Mr. Bennett. “There were no invasives.” And that is a state they have since worked hard to maintain.
“The woods were very dense,” he went on, “but we wanted to develop the property in a natural and organic way.” He gestured toward a huge sweep of ferns growing under the trees at the edge of their lawn. “Those ferns were here,” he said. “We just let them go and expand.” Continued…
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