Postage Stamp Gardens
by Jennifer Brizzi

If you stroll or drive into Rhinecliff hamlet, you see that most of the small antique houses sit on lots that slope quite dramatically up or down a hill. And then you may notice that many residents have created gorgeous cottage gardens on their hilly, rocky lots, in spite of yards that seem too small to fit a garden in, on land that seems too steep to support plant roots. To me, these postage stamp gardens are a kind of baroque opulence contained in neat packages.

In one garden the owners have created a landscape that pleases from every angle -- installing wooden fence that welcomes rather than closes off, designing charming framed vistas. From Orchard Avenue behind the house rises a system of rock-rimmed terraces and raised beds; here you might find amid the shrubs and statuary a stray tomato plant, surrounded by lush plantings or a few lettuces tucked between daisies. Even on the street side of the guardrail, you might find a hyacinth or a dahlia.

Across Kelley Street is an even tinier house with an even more challenging lot. Years ago, I toured it with an eye to buy, but as an amateur gardener I saw no possibilities in its scrubby steep hill. The owners have made it beautiful, sprucing up the house and putting in more plantings than the space seems able to hold. By thinking vertically and putting in hours of painstaking work, they have improved the space in spectacular fashion, with roses, tall annuals, trees and vines that twine upwards. In the narrow space between house and street, the owners have espaliered trees on a short chain link fence and put in a network of patio rocks, sticking in colorful flowers that peek out in between.

I have heard tell that Rhinecliff was once the wrong side of the tracks, with nine saloons on Shatzell Avenue. It's certainly not the kind of place for those who like blandness or large open spaces. But for those with aesthetic sensibilities who love to perch on life's edge, what could be better? Making a garden here is not an easy task. It's not just the challenge of finding room for what you want to grow, or ensuring peaceful compatibility between close-together plants, but that it's just so hilly. Few types of plants and shrubs hold their footing well; most things will slip down a steep hill, thanks to gravity and the downward pull of earth.

Again and again, Rhinecliff gardeners rise to the challenges of living on a cliff. Up on Orchard, a sharply downward sloping lot has been graced with tall, sturdy, reinforced raised beds full of annuals and perennials. A lovely series of wooden steps, landings and walkways meanders toward an arbor where two kinds of clematis climb between wide terraces.

My own Rhinecliff garden is a recalcitrant sort of beast. I have the rocky soil everyone else has, while the bumpy yard is full of weeds and slopes up to a rocky outcropping full of pricklebushes, skyscraper ailanthus weeds and young maples. I have put in two rickety raised beds and two crooked borders. I have little sun and the sunflowers I want to grow, won't. Still, there's more sun than I had years back when gardening fever first took hold of me and I tried to grow plum tomatoes in the bottom half of a plastic doghouse on a shady patio.

Sometimes, by the phases of the moon or some unknowable force I can't determine, a crop of something surpasses my expectations: the Swiss chard, the French filet beans, the pretty clump of pink poppies or the deep blue monkshood that pops up in April, doesn't bloom until October, yet returns faithfully every year.

My third-of-an-acre mostly goes uphill, with a bit of a naturally terraced area now littered with rusty tin cans and the remains of an ancient in-ground pool. But I dream that my own steep hill is full of meandering stone retaining walls with flowers and herbs spilling out of them. I imagine wide languorous steps made from railroad ties or stone that lead to a cozy sitting area in a shaded woodland enclosed by the existing maples, where plumes of astilbe, elegant ferns and bamboo sway in the breezes.