About
About Judith Irven:
A New England gardener with old English roots
My love affair with gardens was kindled at an early age, as I roamed through the grand public gardens in Britain, and dreamed of a scaled-down but still impossibly-elegant garden of my own.
Growing up in England
A personal garden, oftentimes small but always satisfying, has been a constant force in my life. My parents always had a flower garden and a productive vegetable garden, supplemented in the early days by a goodly number of chickens and ducks. We would also visit other gardens, some quite magnificent. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going with my mother to Vita Sackville West’s famous Sissinghurst Gardens near our home in Kent.
Urban and suburban garden making
My own ‘first garden’, was a simple row of vegetables alongside the wash-line in the communal garden below our London ‘flat’. At the time I was a graduate student with a very young baby and (unbeknown to anyone) also pregnant with twins,
I came to America in 1966 with a freshly minted academic background in physics and three very young children. For almost thirty years I juggled mothering and homemaking with the demands of a high tech job in suburban New Jersey. And at each place I lived I made a small garden!!
A new life in Vermont
In 1994 Dick and I gratefully left the hubbub of suburbia, to start life anew in the peaceful mountains of Vermont. We live in an old farmhouse with a view westwards to our local Mount Moosalamoo, and beyond to the Adirondack Mountains in New York state. Since coming to Vermont we have gradually created an expansive garden, both for food and for pleasure. While our winters are cold and snowy and on occasion the thermometer may dip below -20℉ (that’s about -30℃), our summers are warm with generous rain. What more could a gardener ask?.
For eleven years we also ran a busy Bed and Breakfast, appropriately called Judith’s Garden. We no longer run the B&B, but we still live in the same farmhouse, along with our three-legged dog Bruno and our finicky cat Lizzie, all the while nurturing our garden-of-lifetime.
A new profession
After we moved to Vermont, with Dick’s help, I also completely changed my life’s trajectory. First I become a Master Gardener. Then, as a ‘fifty-something’ student, I went ‘back to school’ to study landscape design at Vermont Technical College. For the past fourteen years I have been a landscape designer; see more about this part of my life at Outdoor Spaces Vermont.
Over the past decade I have also developed a love of sharing ‘all things gardens‘ with individuals and with groups, both small and large. I now teach Sustainable Home Landscaping for the Vermont Master Gardener program and give talks to groups around the state, all of which brings me in delightful contact with a wide community of fellow garden-lovers.
All this has led me to the world of garden writing. Here in Vermont we enjoy living close to the land, as we celebrate an ever-changing world outdoors, from snowy winters to teasing springs, balmy summers to glorious autumns. So my writings naturally embrace what to grow in this climate and how to grow it, and also in some cases how to cook it; how to design a garden in harmony with ones personal life and with the natural landscape; and how we can make our gardens a positive force in our communities and in the environment.
About Dick Conrad:
Garden and landscape photographer
.And last but by no means least, I want to acknowledge my husband Dick. He is a skilled landscape and garden photographer in his own right and the genesis of many photographs you will see in The North Country Gardener. His photographs add immeasurably to any writing I do. Thank you Dick!!
Pay a visit to North Country Impressions where you can see many more of his pictures, both gardens and of Vermont landscapes.
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I also want to thank him from the bottom of my heart for his support and encouragement over the last twenty-five years. Without Dick at my side I would never have achieved anything like this with the second half of my life.