By Virginia M. Wright
Photos by Kelsey Kobik
From our August 2024 issue
Thirteen years ago, Laura Boyett stepped onto the deck of a house for sale on Augusta’s Howard Hill, and her gaze settled upon the grove of hemlocks, maples, and ashes at the foot of the steeply sloping backyard. “I’d been under a lot of stress, and I felt the tension lift away,” she recalls. “I could see, in my mind’s eye, walking paths through the woods, with gardens alongside them.”
She bought the one-acre property and shared her vision with Jason Allerding, the Windsor landscaper who’d helped her spruce up her previous home’s postage-stamp yard. “I thought, ‘Man, that’s a lot of work. I’m not sure she knows what she’s in for,’” Allerding says, laughing. “But she did. Laura is ambitious when it comes to her gardens.”
A self-described “daylily fanatic,” Boyett has a large collection of the hardy perennials in a wide range of colors and forms. Popping up among them are her sister’s ornaments, crafted from vintage glass tableware.
Boyett and Allerding have worked together ever since to make those woodland paths a reality, lining them with Joe Pye weeds, astilbes, snakeroots, bloodroots, European gingers, and geraniums and putting stones and Prince Tut grasses around an existing frog pond at the entrance to the forest. They’ve also transformed much of the lawn into beds containing hundreds of varieties of flowering plants — uncommon species of daylilies, alliums, irises, coneflowers, rudbeckias, bee balms, and more. “You’ll see more different types of plants here than in any garden in this area,” Allerding says. “It’s like a botanical garden — we do species, rather than landscape in bulk.”
Boyett takes her inspiration from garden magazines, or she may come home from a specialty nursery with a trunk load of unusual perennials and thoughts about where they should reside. Allerding refines her plans according to how tall the plants are likely to grow and the conditions they prefer. “Jason has an eye for flow,” Boyett says. “The way plants are arranged leads you through the gardens’ curves.” Allerding maintains his methods are a bit more practical. “I say the flow comes from the mowing,” he says, noting that many of the gardens cover slopes where maneuvering a lawnmower is hazardous. “You have to work with the land and not against it.”
Boyett shops specialty nurseries for unusual varieties of familiar perennials, like this cranberry echinacea (left). She and landscaper Allerding have worked together to create several gardens, most with small sitting areas, and they expand or add beds every summer.
Allerding and Boyett built their first bed along the front of the house, and it now curls widely around the corner and downhill along the side. It’s bisected by a gently tiered stone path leading to a small patio, where Boyett sips her morning coffee among bright-yellow globeflowers, deep-red bottlebrushes, and fancy daylilies like Holiday Party, which have big, peony-like crimson blooms edged in gold. Sunlight guides her palettes — red, yellow, and orange flowers dominate the sun-drenched roadside beds; blues, pinks, greens, and purples are found in the cool shade of the woods. Nestled among the plants are fanciful ornaments made from vintage glass plates, bowls, and vases — gifts from their North Carolina maker, Boyett’s sister, Lynn Haynes — and little sitting areas. “Sometimes, I come home from work, and a neighbor will be in one of the chairs, enjoying the flowers,” Boyett says. “It’s one of the things I hoped for.”
