By Virginia M. Wright
Photos by Kesley Kobik
From our April 2024 Home & Garden issue
James McCain’s garden reaches its final, glorious crescendo in September. Raspberry and deep-blue spikes of mountain fleece and lobelia poke through a meadowy tangle of yellow daisy-like sneezeweeds, purple and white coneflowers, and mauve dwarf Joe Pye weeds. Shrubby clusters of violet-blue October Sky asters are paced like stanchions along the borders’ edge as if to hold back the ebullient crowd. Bees and butterflies enjoy their last hurrah too. They bob from blossom to blossom, and the air hums with the beating of their tiny wings.
To create this joyful garden behind his 1961 South Portland ranch, McCain, a landscape designer, took cues from the wildflower fields around his family’s vacation home in Cushing. “That’s the inspiration,” he says. “It’s forgiving — you don’t have to put a lot of time into it. You can just enjoy it.”
When he and his husband, Patrick Jones McCain, moved to their densely packed, post-World War II neighborhood six years ago, the landscape was mostly “mucky soil and weeds that had been mowed like a lawn,” McCain says. They tackled the small, shady front yard first, removing a pair of muffin-topped yews that framed the front door and, to showcase a “glorious” American elm, replacing a red maple with a shorter Winter King hawthorn, whose berries attract flocks of birds in winter. They planted a shallow channel of golden Alexanders, blue flag irises, white turtleheads, and sedges in a wet area near the sidewalk and a hedge-like formation of dwarf arborvitaes along the house’s sides, which had been overrun with invasive Norway maples, bittersweets, and multiflora roses.
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Clockwise from top left: Patrick Jones McCain and James McCain with boxer-terrier mix Finn; a backdrop of black spruces and Atlantic white cedars provides cover for birds seeking seeds, pollen, and insects in the garden; lacy spent petals; alliums; a spider awaits a meal; the small oval lawn where the couple entertains.
McCain had no master plan for the backyard beyond the vision of a small oval lawn ringed with wildflowers where he and Patrick could host friends. “I call it improv: I know how things are going to grow and relate to each other, but I allow for serendipity, like native weeds — bulrushes, wild strawberries, potentillas, geums — that provide a natural mulch and don’t compromise the larger perennials,” McCain says.
The garden rolls through a series of peak blooms, gaining momentum as the seasons unfold. “We might have friends over for dinner in June, then in mid-July, and again in September, and they’re amazed because it’s a different garden each time,” McCain says. In anticipation of the early fall surge, he does a spring pruning to delay flowering and minimize legginess. It results in undulating clouds of white mountain-mint blossoms in September, when the garden burgeons and other plants appear ready to bust free of their beds. “It’s like a bit of sculpting within a wilder garden,” McCain says, “something calm and flowing to rest the eye.”
