Master gardener, Karen Atkins, has a passion for plants
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A French parterre garden in a shape of snaffle bit at Karen Atkins garden in New Brighton. -
Two Australian swans at Karen Atkins garden in New Brighton. -
Karen Atkins with Rascal the rooster. -
Karen Atkins' vegetable garden. -
Karen Atkins' home in New Brighton, Beaver County. -
A shed made from old telephone poles at Karen Atkins garden in New Brighton is home to her sheep.
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Karen Atkins discovered the magic of a garden when she was 16, vacationing with her family in North Carolina's Outer Banks.
"I stuck my nose so far into the lilies that I had pollen all over my nose in all the pictures," the Whitehall native said, laughing.
But it took nearly 30 years and successful stints as an efficiency and sales and mail-order consultant before she finally made her living in the garden.
"Gardening extends your appreciation for your home. I don't know how people live without it," she said.
Through her business, Proper Gardens, Ms. Atkins has designed winners the past two years for the Great Gardens Contest sponsored by the Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. This time, she entered her own farm/garden on nearly 12 acres in New Brighton, Beaver County. She easily won the large garden category for fall and year-round gardens.
A specialist in formal parterre and knot gardens, Ms. Atkins, 44, designed and planted several around the 160-year-old brick farmhouse she shares with her husband, David, two children, Henry, 13, and Zoey, 11, two dogs, two rabbits and three cats. She would say her family also includes two horses, five chickens, three sheep and two swans. In her mind, the "people" she lives with actually number in the thousands.
"I hate when people call it 'plant material.' They're not materials. Plants are closer to people than materials," she says with complete sincerity.
Ms. Atkins is a master gardener but not a landscape architect. Architects often focus as much or more on hardscape and design elements than they do on plants, she says. For her, plants are everything.
"I love gardening. I read about it all the time. It affects my mood. It's visceral," she says.
Her clients love her passion for plants and for garden history. She has written two articles for the magazine Historic Gardens Review, one on the Harmonist gardens at Old Economy Village and another on Mount Vernon, George Washington's home in Virginia. When she heard that the staff there was replanting the first president's vegetable garden with what was growing there the year he died, she had to see it for herself.
"You don't necessarily have to have the exact same plants. But you should get the same feeling from the place," she says.
Ms. Atkins notes that her favorite designer, the late Russell Page, said a garden is like an autobiography, both revealing and changing with the gardener through various stages of life.
First Published October 8, 2011 12:00 am
