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Phyllis Greenberg: How Does Her Garden Grow?

This is garden time—not only to tend your own but also to indulge in the pleasures of visiting other people’s plots. Just so, Friends of the Essex Library presents a tour of eight local green havens, Our Friends’ Gardens, on Saturday, June 4.

The garden Phyllis Greenberg and her husband Paul maintain is one of this year’s showpieces.

At each site—“All different kinds of gardens, casual to formal,” Phyllis says—there will be a master gardener to answer questions about the individual garden as well as a broader spectrum of gardening issues.

The proceeds from ticket sales for the event are a significant part of the funds the Friends contribute to the library every year. They support activities for all library patrons like museum passes and Ancestry.com, a computer program that enables people to trace their family’s past. The library provides the program at no cost, unlike other computerized genealogy programs that charge people a fee to search their family history.

The library gets approximately half its annual funding from the Town of Essex and has to raise the rest itself every year.

“The financial assistance that we receive every year from the Friends is critical,” says Essex Library Association Library director Richard Conroy.

On a recent morning, as Paul continued to work outdoors, Phyllis, who is a member of the board of trustees of both the library and the Essex Garden Club, took time to tell a visitor how her interest in gardening evolved. When she and Paul lived in Manchester, their house was on a rocky ledge unsuitable for planting, but their weekend home on Cape Cod had a sunny yard where they became interested in gardening.

Phyllis took several gardening courses at a Manchester gardening center and, when she and Paul retired and moved to Essex some 16 years ago, they had both the space and the time to work outdoors. They both are now graduates of the University of Connecticut’s master gardener program.

Phyllis adds that important as the classes are, the best way to learn about gardening is by doing it yourself. She credits her time working with gardening experts at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme as particularly beneficial.

“That’s where I really learned,” she says.

When the couple moved to Essex, the garden of the house they bought was in some disrepair, overrun with weeds and brambles. Still, it had some beautiful plantings with which to work, including beds of peonies, a laburnum or golden chain tree, and a beach plum.

“You could see it had once been lovingly cared for,” Phyllis says, “and it was a learning experience, but we worked to bring it back.”

The vagaries of temperature, Phyllis pointed out, have challenged the garden this year, with the particularly warm March that encouraged things to bloom and then the cold, wet April that killed some of that early growth. And then there are the ongoing threats to gardens, among them deer.

“They have already eaten all the phlox,” Phyllis says.

She is never discouraged about the long-term health of the garden, however.

“I love plants; I love seeing them grow,” she says.

Phyllis grew up in Norwalk, as did Paul, whom she met when she was still in high school. After graduation from the University of Connecticut, she taught high school English in Hartford in an urban education pilot program. She still remembers her trepidation when she began her student teaching in Hartford, presenting Shakespeare’s Othello.

“I didn’t know how I was going to get through it,” she recalls.

Not only did she get through it, she went on to get a master’s degree concentrating on reading. She taught in a special program for teenage parents.

“I loved the kids; we did things like take them to the Hartford Stage,” she recalls.

Later Phyllis moved on to teaching in Wethersfield. There she took classes to the local Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum to give them a taste of life in 18th century New England and wrote a curriculum centered around the material in the museum. Ultimately she became the director of education at the Webb-Deane-Stevens, focused not only on teaching about its contents, but on getting grants to bring more schoolchildren to experience the museum.

Phyllis had always thought she and her husband would retire to Cape Cod, but when a close friend bought a house in Old Saybrook, they decided to explore this area. A realtor spent a day with them showing several houses, none quite right, but then mentioned there was still one more residence to show. And that was the one.

“We just couldn’t resist,” Phyllis says.

Looking out at the Connecticut River from her home, Phyllis talks about the different birds that are part of the scene at different times of year, among them osprey, eagles, swans.

“It’s different every day,” she says.

Phyllis and Paul have done a lot of traveling, but now she is happy with the beauties of home and garden.

“I love it here. I know it isn’t possible, but I’d like things to stay just the way they are.”

Phyllis is looking forward to the upcoming tour, but with some trepidation.

“When I look at our garden, I can see the things that are wrong,” she says, adding the feeling is one many gardeners experience.

As the tour approaches, however, she and Paul are working hard to show their plantings to the best advantage.

“It’s spring; this time of year we spend most days working in the garden.”

Our Friends’ Gardens

A Garden Tour to benefit the Essex Library Association on Saturday, June 4 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets ($25 in advance and $30 on tour day) are available at the Essex Library, 33 West Avenue. For more information, call 860-767-1560. All proceeds benefit the Friends of the Essex Library.