When P. Allen Smith starts planning how to design a garden, he doesn’t think of it as a patch of soil, grass, flowers and shrubbery. He thinks of it as a room in his house.
“What will the floor of your garden room be? In your home, it’s hardwood, but outside, you may want to do turf or gravel. What are the walls? I couldn’t afford brick, so I used hedges with holly. What do the entry ways look like? I used arbors covered with roses,” he said. “What is the focal point? What is the seating? What is the element of fun and whimsy? These are questions we ask ourselves when we are doing interior design. We should ask the same questions in the outdoors, when we’re doing exterior design.”
Smith will bring his unique perspective on garden aesthetics to the Mark Twain House Museum in Hartford on Saturday, Nov. 17, at a daylong seminar, “The Garden Home in All Seasons.” He is the keynote speaker.
Tomasz Anisko, curator of Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and Ruth Loiseau of Suffield, who does floral arrangements for the White House, also will give talks at the event, which is sponsored by the Connecticut Horticultural Society.
Smith, who has two shows on CPTV, “Garden Home” and “Garden to Table,” hosts the P. Allen Smith show on radio and has written several books about gardening, said in a phone interview from his Little Rock, Ark., office that late autumn and winter, when the ground is beginning to freeze, is the perfect time to talk about gardening.
“When it’s cold outside, you can be more focused. You can talk about design and begin to think about the space throughout the winter, so you’ll be ready to move in the spring,” he said. “Spring is a distracting time to think about gardening, because you’re out there doing it.
“In the spring, I’m always running around as hard and as fast as I can to get the plants into the ground I can’t think of where the garden is going,” he said. “In winter, you can think of things you might need to move, and you have time to move them. You can mull it over in your head and noodle around on a piece of paper.”
But there still can be work outside to do this time of year. “It’s the holiday season. How can you work outdoors in a creative and stylish way?” he said.
Smith designed his first home-centric garden after he came back from grad school in England. In that country, he is now a certified fellow in the Royal Horticultural Society.
“I don’t know that garden style there is so different from here, but I had the good fortune to see really great examples of garden design, and some of the best of the world are in England,” he said. “They put the emphasis on structure, on the ‘bones’ of the garden.
“I came home realizing that if you create a confined space, an enclosure, you have the opportunity to deal with the space that isn’t overwhelming.”
Included with admission on Saturday are a demonstration of seasonal greenery designs by Woodland Gardens of Manchester, a silent auction, tours of the Twain House and a vendor market, which includes tools, gardening supplies, house plants, holiday decorations, gardening books, antique engravings and lithographs, photographic prints,notecards, pottery, decorative tiles and birdhouses.
“THE GARDEN HOME IN ALL SEASONS” will be at Mark Twain House Museum, 351 Farmington Ave. in Hartford, on Saturday, Nov. 17, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is $95, $85 for members of the Connecticut Historical Society and the Mark Twain House. A box lunch will be provided. Tickets to a VIP reception with P. Allen Smith will be Friday, Nov. 16, at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 77 Forest St. in Hartford, are $40. To buy tickets, call 860-280-3130.
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