Tasha Tudor
(Page 2 of 6)
December/January 1994
By KATHLEEN HALLORAN
Most of Tasha’s property is undisturbed forestland, and she has
several pastures for her goats, but the two or three acres
surrounding the house and barns contain her wandering, overflowing
gardens, edged and defined by stone terraces that descend into the
countryside. At the height of summer, the garden is a vibrant
display of spontaneity, exuberance, and an intense love of plants,
and it was never planned on paper. “I’ve never made a garden design
in my life. It just grows,” she says. It is cottage garden
style—or, as she describes it, “a good messy garden.”
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Tasha’s orchard contains pear trees and crab apples that flower
spectacularly in pink and white; thousands of bulbs, and more each
year, flaunt their bright blossoms in early spring; the vegetable
garden gives her steady harvests, much of which she puts by for the
leaner seasons; and old-fashioned flowers bloom throughout the
summer. Tasha has many garden passions, among them old roses, an
heirloom dianthus collection planted in a fairy ring, peonies, huge
stands of bleeding-hearts. Another is a mature, graceful herb
garden with a massive, thirty-two-year-old potted bay tree at its
center.
“I grow a lot of culinary herbs because I’m famous for my good
cooking, of which I am inordinately proud—and it’s wholly due to
herbs,” she says. Friends testify to Tasha’s expertise in the
kitchen, learned in childhood from her Scottish nanny.
Tasha admits to having no modesty concerning her garden either.
She loves the thymes and basils, and she grows marjoram, chives,
the savories, and tarragon. She bundles and dries sage to sprinkle
on her goat cheese. Chamomile seeds itself everywhere, and for tea
and tonics she also gathers nettles and red clover that grow wild
in the meadows.
Tasha enjoys shaping various herb plants into standards. The old
bay that she brings into the house each winter (it wouldn’t survive
outside in her climate, which straddles zones 4 and 5) can be seen
in the watercolor painting of her herb garden that appears on The
Herb Companion’s cover this issue. In real life, the bay is about 4
feet tall and “bigger than you can get your arms around,” Tasha
says. She speaks nostalgically of a huge rosemary standard she had
for many years that finally succumbed: “I’m going to get my son to
carve me a spoon from the rosemary wood.” She even makes
short-lived standards from thymes.
Tasha has said that fragrance is the foremost asset of any
flower, which explains why the lavenders and rosemaries rank among
her favorites in the entire garden. Clumps of valerian send up
white clouds of flowers, and stalks of foxgloves tower over her
head. Tasha grows these not for their medicinal value, but for the
beauty or fragrance of their flowers, alongside her hollyhocks,
delphiniums, and Canterbury bells, and she’d rather call them by
their common names, so much more evocative and euphonious than
proper Latin botanical names. She collects flowers much as she does
her other favorite things, such as old toys, animals, and antique
clothing.
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