photography: Lynn Karlin
Thomas selects easy-care, hardy perennials and mixes in tropical plants for a blitz of all-season color. |
Thomas Lovejoy's first garden, an Asian-inspired affair, was created from the purloined prunings of a nearby neighbor’s yard. He discovered he could slip unseen onto her property, harmlessly take clippings and dig up seedlings, bring them home, and replant them in his own small patch. He was 7.
Some 40 years later, Thomas is a sought-after landscape architect with a showstopping cottage garden surrounding his 1910 house in coastal Cape Neddick, Maine. The well-tended space is a dreamy confection with layer upon layer of brilliant flowers, touch-me foliage, vintage garden ornaments, and surprises around every corner. Flowering vines ramble up towering pine trees, deep-red Swiss chard keeps company with royal purple plate-size dahlia, a back lawn wears an informal labyrinth pattern, and everywhere paths made for twilight strolling wind through the garden.
photography: Gill Tomblin
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Though trees across the road hide ocean views, the sea is ever present. Fog, thick as the foam on a cappuccino, rolls in some evenings, and in the still, early-morning air, the roar of the ocean echoes across the lawn, drifting up through open bedroom windows. This is the over-the-top romantic, jaw-dropping place about which Thomas has dreamt since he was a child gardener savant. Getting here, however, was not so rosy.
photography: Lynn Karlin
Why have a plain lawn when you can mow a pattern into it? “It’s really simple,” Thomas says. “There’s no measuring, no planning—you just start at the center and walk in a circle pushing the mower.” |
“Everyone told me, ‘You can’t make a living selling flowers,’ and it was difficult to disagree because I knew nothing about the landscape trade,” Thomas says. “I was just out of high school, and it was assumed that I, like my grandfather, father, and brothers-in-law, would work at the naval shipyard in Kittery, Maine. I had the signed application papers in hand when a friend told me about a two-year landscape program at the University of Maine. 
photography: Lynn Karlin
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"I knew my folks couldn’t pay for it, but I enrolled anyway.” He continues, “It was tough. I was 18 and cleaning offices at night just to get by. But on the first day, when we started learning about plants, I knew I had made the right decision. You never really know where life’s going to take you—sometimes you just have to go with your gut.” While at school, Thomas lived in the campus’s greenhouse rent-free: All he had to do was tend the plants.After finishing that program, Thomas managed local nurseries but soon was frustrated at executing others’ ideas when he had better ideas of his own. Enrolling at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, he received a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture. His first job was designing not beautiful gardens but parking lots. “You have to pay your dues. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but I learned a lot about the business and made great contacts,” he says. By 1989, his desire “to make pretty gardens” overwhelmed his need for security. Armed with a fat Rolodex and two of his feisty sisters as his crew, Thomas launched his own design firm, specializing in residential gardens, in southern Maine. Finally in 1992, he bought this house and set out to build the first real garden of his own. 
photography: Lynn Karlin
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The house was in good shape, but, instead of the iconic weathered-gray shingles, it was a peculiar shade of mousy gray that made it resemble “a giant beached battleship,” Thomas recalls. A coat of green stain transformed it, but the garden was not so quick a fix. Imagine this now-lush landscape as an ugly, choppy gravel driveway. No flowers, no paths, and only one lonely rhododendron. “The yard was one big driveway from the street all the way back to where the garden shed is now. I thought, ‘Why would I want to sit on my porch and look at cars?’ I wanted the experience of walking to the back door to be pleasurable,” says Thomas. He scraped off the gravel, regraded the property, and got to planting.
photography: Lynn Karlin
The border alongside the house has flourished during the last 10 years despite the very short Maine growing season. It began with a dozen large (“cheap, ugly, and misshapen,” Thomas adds) rhododendrons on sale at a local nursery.
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As a new homeowner he had no money, so rather than rack up a huge credit card bill, Thomas shopped savvy. “Most large nurseries have a section where they stash the less-than-spectacular plants. The stuff is still for sale; it’s just not in perfect condition—this is where you can find large plants on the cheap. When you’re in a nursery never be afraid to ask about back stock. They’ll be happy to sell it to you,” he advises. For $5 each, Thomas found a dozen large rhododendrons that, once nestled against a shrub border, gave instant age to the newly created bed. “I just put the ugly side on the inside and the pretty side out. Now, 10 years later, you’d never know what a mess they once were,” he says. 
photography: Lynn Karlin
Outside the shed, Thomas indulges his passion for semitropical plants he grows as annuals. |
Faced with the same overwhelming issues as many other homeowners—inadequate drainage, dense and rocky soil, poorly sited utilities—Thomas did a very smart thing. Rather than try to fix his garden all at once, he saved his money and tackled only one major project each year. “The whole game,” he says, “is to divert the eye away from what’s wrong and focus it on what’s amazing. If you see an arch smothered in roses, you’ll probably not be looking at the dead hedge on the other side of the yard.” In fact, Thomas’ place is one big lesson in smart gardening. Because his busy season is gardening season, he has no time for needy plants or finicky, high-maintenance hardscaping. He plants ground covers where weeds would love to live, uses readily available materials to keep costs down (like the stairs leading to the mowing circle—they’re made from granite blocks used by the city as sidewalk curbing), and has divided large plants every few years to get more without spending more. The result is a garden that looks expensive but, in fact, could be duplicated on a budget. For the past few years, Thomas’ garden has been a regular fixture on local garden tours. Visitors never leave without a rooted cutting or potted plant. It seems, even now, that old habits die hard. |
