Landscape designer and Wareham resident Patty Wylde has been working her magic all over the United States and Europe since the 1970s.
Although she retired in 2007, Wylde has been known to gather her garden shears and sketchbook when called on by her friends.
One of those friends, Chrissie Bascom, reached out to Wylde when time came for getting Marion’s Point Road Memorial Forest into shape.
The Stone family donated the two-acre parcel to the town in 1994 to be used as a cemetery – the only one in town for solely cremated remains. Since then, Bascom and her fellow members of the Forest’s Advisory Committee have been working to maintain the natural feel of the land.
It was the committee’s perseverance to keep the area intact that drew Wylde to the project, she said.
“I’m certainly interested in the effort of people in a town to pull together to preserve a piece of land,” she said.
For the Point Road Memorial Forest, Wylde designed benches carved from tree stumps to be placed along the trails. She also designed Memorial Circle, a granite marker in the middle of the trail for unmarked plots.
When she is designing a landscape, Wylde only uses plants native to the region where she is working. Artificial gardens are something you will never see in one of her designs, she said.
“I’ve always designed with native plants, which few firms actually use,” she said. “You get the right plant in the right place and it’ll take care of itself.”
“In planning, I leave nature to take its course,” she said. “I love what nature has to say without the interference from mankind. Treading gently on this planet is very important to me.”
Previously, Wylde worked as a fashion illustrator for Jordan Marsh. She studied art and architecture at the University of Florence in Italy and at Simmons College in Boston.
Combining her love of design and gardening was a natural progression, she said.
“I’ve always been interested in gardening. There’s more to gardening than just putting plants in the ground. I’m comfortable with the art part of design but I had to learn the plant part,” she said.
To get the plant part down, Wylde enrolled in courses at Radcliffe Landscape Design.
Before retiring, Wylde operated her own business in Wareham for over 30 years.
“I loved that what I do coalesced into what I love to do,” she said.
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