50 AUGUST 2019 STLOUISHOMESMAG.COM
AROUND THE GARDEN 1. Athyrium Filix-femina "Lady Fern." 2. Selaginella braunii "Arborvitae Fern." 3. Athyrium Filix-femina var. angustum "Lady in
Red Fern." 4. Adiantum pedatum "American Maiden Hair Fern" (Native.) 5. Onoclea sensibilis "Sensitive Fern" (Native). 6. Athyrium Filix-femina "Dre's Dragon
Fern." 7. Athyrium "Ghost." 8. Athyrium niponicum "Japanese Painted Fern."as 40 hours a week in her yard. “I don’t want to feel like I
coulda’, woulda’, shoulda’,” she explains. She is generally up
between 5:30 and 6 a.m., when it is light enough to take
her Norwich Terrier Pippa for a walk. “Then, I get to it. The
garden is never finished. There is always something that
I am trying to get right; spaces I am trying to fill in when
something dies, or something that gets twice as big as
expected.” To keep weeds down, she uses a lot of mulch
along with a lot of hand weeding as well as amending
her soil with homemade compost.
Her reward is seeing the beauty she has created but
also in sharing what she has created with others. “You
don’t want to do all this in a vacuum,” she emphasizes.
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summer and red and orange in fall. She also is partial to
low-growing, shade-tolerant Japanese forest grass, which
comes in gold, variegated and green varieties.
Favorite local nurseries she visits to add to her plant
collection include Timberwinds Nursery, Greenscape
Gardens, Rolling Ridge, Garden Heights Nursery and Maypop
Garden Shop. In addition, she occasionally travels to
Springfield, Illinois, to a nursery specializing in Japanese
maples.
Martha does 99 percent of the work in the garden herself.
While her husband Paul occasionally helps with the heavy
lifting, “he is a golfer and I prefer he saves his back for
golf,” she says with a laugh. “I used to play a fair amount of
golf, but I would rather do this,” she says with a wave of her
hand toward the garden.
In the spring and early summer, she can spend as much