Catie Marron Discusses ‘Becoming a Gardener’

Catie Marron found the idea of being a gardener intimidating, though it was something she long wanted to do. Once she set aside her hesitation and began gardening, she wished she had done it sooner so she could have enjoyed it that much longer.

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will welcome Marron to the Bridgehampton Community House this Sunday afternoon, February 12, to discuss her gardening journey and her new book, “Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living.”

Marron, a part-time Southampton resident, has worked in investment banking and later as a senior features editor at Vogue, and she’s a trustee and former board chair of both the New York Public Library and Friends of the High Line. She’s also edited two anthologies on urban green spaces, “City Parks” and “City Squares,” but her own foray into horticulture came more recently, as she details in her new book.

“It’s a story about what I learned about the beauty of gardens, learned about time, learned about the meaning of being connected to nature, which I think is so important and so enriching,” she said from the mountains of Tennessee during a phone interview on Saturday.

It’s a personal story, she explained, about how she got to where she felt she was a gardener.

“I found the idea of being a gardener very daunting, like: ‘How do you do that? How do people do that? How do they know how to do that?’ It felt like some magical mystery to me, and I felt like I didn’t have the skill for it,” she said. “I certainly didn’t have the knowledge for it, and so I never did it.”

Her advice is to plunge in and try — and start small.

“Just try, because the only way you become a gardener, I think, is trial and error,” she said, noting that there are things gardeners will never be able to control, like the weather. “Things don’t always happen the way you want,” she added.

She also believes that what it is to be a gardener can be different to everyone. “You don’t have to have some kind of test to say, ‘Oh, I’m now a gardener,’” she said.

And gardeners don’t have to prove anything to anyone, she said. A garden is a special space and sanctuary for gardeners, according to Marron, and being able to have fun with it in their own way is important.

She had a garden at her Southampton home created by landscape designer Miranda Brooks.

“At the time, I would look at her and say, ‘I wish I could be her apprentice and just follow her around and learn,’” Marron recalled.

Then in 2018, she and her husband, Donald Marron, bought a home in Connecticut.

“We had often talked about having a bigger house which could accommodate our kids as they got older, and their families,” she said.

They fixed up the house and made it theirs, but something was missing.

“Somehow, I was not connecting to that house in a way, and I connected so much with our house on Long Island, so I really felt the difference,” she said.

She remembers feeling like she was living in somebody else’s house because she and her husband were only the second owners, and it had been built for the previous owners.

She was advised to get sage — an herb that is said to purify spaces and remove negative energy.

“I had never really done that or heard of that before,” Marron said. “I got it and weaved it around the windows and the doors.”

Then one day, while walking her dog, it occurred to her that if she could connect herself to the land by making a garden, it might connect her to the house.

“It really was the land more than the house that drew us to the place,” she said.

To get started, she did a lot of reading. She had an old fashioned library of gardening books in her Southampton home, she said, and found some enjoyable but others daunting for a reader who didn’t already know much about gardening.

She began by writing down some of the authors’ thoughts that stood out to her. She worked these words of wisdom into “Becoming a Gardener.”

“A major aspect of the book is quotes and thoughts from great garden writers,” she said, adding that they are talented writers who write on other topics but also have gardens — so they are compelled to write at least one book about gardens.

“Obviously, writers tend to be opinionated,” Marron said. “Writers on gardens tend to be very opinionated. These tend to be strong opinions. Some of them are very funny. I find them insightful, interesting.”

When picking where to site her new kitchen garden, there was an obvious spot: a beat up old basketball court with cracked asphalt and an old cutting garden that no longer had any flowers. It was a level area on a hilly property.

The asphalt was removed, and she had good soil brought in. “Soil is critical to making a good garden,” she noted.

“It was my own space, space that was new to me, and therefore I felt more connected to it because I’d sort of created it,” she said.

The garden is 48 by 54 feet, a size dictated by the preexisting flat area that she says she later realized was quite large and shrunk a bit to make maintaining the garden less work.

“We plotted it out. It seemed to make sense. It gave you room for several beds and at the same time good-sized paths,” she said. “I read about the size of paths and I remember one garden writer, Eleanor Perenyi, said have them wide enough to have two people walk arm-in-arm. Six feet is a good size, or four feet at minimum.”

Marron said one thing she learned early on is that in gardening it is important to have mentors. She recalled meeting the head gardener at Gravetye Manor in Sussex Manor who advised her to watch what other gardeners do and learn from watching.

Marron called up boutique landscape designer Katherine Schiavone, who previously worked for Miranda Brooks Landscape Design, and asked for help designing her new garden. She liked how Schiavone aided her as a consultant but at the same time allowed her to make her own decisions and have it be her own garden.

“When you’re making a garden, I think it’s important to make it yourself,” Marron said.

With Schiavone guiding, they laid out the beds and paths.

“I can’t come up with any layout better than that layout,” Marron said. “I really do love our layout. And, of course, we made a fence to go around it. And that was a complicated endeavor, but I did it.”

She liked the idea of a kitchen garden for a number of reasons, among them connecting with the early generations of New Englanders, who grew their own food out of necessity. “It was in part trying to blend in with the land and what I felt was American history,” she said.

Though obtaining produce is a shopping trip or a few mouse clicks away today, Marron has experienced what many vegetable gardeners have found: “There is a great sense of satisfaction to eating something you’ve grown,” she said.

It has also led to her trying vegetables she wouldn’t have eaten otherwise, like white turnips, which she planted at the behest of another one of her garden mentors, Gay Talese.

“We made a turnip puree and it was delicious — and here’s a plant that I never thought I’d be interested in and it was really superb,” Marron said. “… There’s a sense of sustainability of feeding one’s family out of your own land that I think is highly satisfying. And of course, one thing I really enjoy doing is giving produce to friends.”

She also thinks about the aesthetics of the kitchen garden, and each year, before the vegetables are planted, she plants rows of early, mid and late tulips, so there will be blooms for an extended period come spring and enough that she can take cuttings without ruining the look of the garden. And, in summer, there are dark brown cosmos and dahlias interspersed in the vegetable beds for cuttings.

The first harvest from her garden — white turnips and lettuce — came in September 2019. Her husband died that December, and she writes about her loss in the book and shares this Alfred Austin quote: “We come from the earth, we go back to the earth, and in between we garden.”

Catie Marron will discuss her book “Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living” at the Bridgehampton Community House, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton, on Sunday, February 12, at 2 p.m. Admission is $10, or free for members of the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons. Visit hahgarden.org for more information.