Never A Yard, Always A Garden

Never a Yard, Always a Garden
By Jill E. Vercelli
“In England”, she austerely corrects the caller, “even the smallest
plot of land is a garden, but never a yard. Scotland Yard is the only
yard I know of and I certainly wouldn’t go there for a picnic.”
And this is how I, along with thousands of other listeners, am
introduced, if not intrigued by The English Lady, a professional
multifaceted English landscape designer whose history reads like a
cross between a Jane Austin Novel and a Jackie Collins book.
Most of us aspiring gardeners, unlike the self-proclaimed English
Lady, toil the soil, plant, pull, and pluck until we’re black, blue,
and blistered, yet we’ve still got some militant aphid eating its way
through the very heart of what we have slaved over. Of course I’m
talking about our gardens.
And while this isn’t the time of year typically known for its power
of planting persuasions, it is the time of year to cultivate what we
can be doing to make this Spring’s gardening experience a triumph
of blooming gratitude. For inspiration and valued gardening tips, I
seek out that mellifluous English accent that, one anticipated third
Thursday per month, rallies my indignant green thumb out of bed
into perusing the radio dial in search of my gardening guru, The
English Lady, a.k.a. Maureen Haseley- Jones, whom I listen to
religiously on WRCH 100.5 FM radio in Hartford from eight to
nine a.m.
Last September I was able to put a face with that marvelous
English accent when I met The English Lady at her home in the
hope of learning more about this knowledgeable landscape
designer.
When she greets me outside her home I quickly realize that like the
horse whisperer she is the garden whisperer, evidenced by her
magnificent gardens that sprawl graciously like practiced royalty
around her cozy red farmhouse in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Maureen, like her gardens, is gracious and inviting, flowing from
plant to flower and teaching me what’s as natural to her as sunlight
is to daylilies. There in her garden of Summer delights she looks a
lot like Mother Nature herself.
I learn over a cup of afternoon tea, of course, that Maureen,
otherwise known as Mo by close friends and family, has been
planting, pruning, and pulling from gardens since her first toddled
steps some fifty plus ten even years ago in Shropshire, England.
Inspired and taught by a multitude of family members inspired and
taught by their family members and you’ve got a lengthy lineage in
landscape design and installation that dates back to the sixteen
hundreds.
As gardeners to the Earl, Maureen’s family worked on the first
Gardens at Powys Castle in Wales. There are water gardens and
terraced gardens dotting the English countryside designed and
installed by great, great ancestors whose very genealogy spreads
like determined Wisteria vines. Passed down to us today in the
landscapes designed by this talented English Lady designer.
Not to be outdone by those who have gone before her or by her
aunt’s house, registered on the National Trust Garden Tour, is the
design of The English Lady’s hometown garden in Shrewsbury,
England. In the picture perfect postcard she holds in her hand,
(Maureen believes it is still sold to travelers,) is a remarkably
colorful display of flowers, shrubbery, and greenery all poetically
displayed for the strollers participation if not jealous enjoyment.

Then as rebellious as the weeds in the gardens Maureen so often
pulled she left it all behind; the family heritage, the degrees from
the prestigious Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in England, the
mounting accolades that assured her position as flag bearer in a
prided heritage, if not privileged society, and took off for the
friendly skies of TWA, joining them as a flight attendant; but only
after a brief stint racing Formula Ones in Europe.
The years to follow were even fuller ones for Maureen. She
married an American, had three children and dedicated herself to
the domesticity that would be her calling for the next ten years.
Maureen tilled the soil in her new homeland, just as she’d done
across the pond, a continuation of her birthright now blooming its
beauty in a backyard, “excuse me, garden,” that inspired all her
neighbors on Long Island.
But as if not to outdo herself, Maureen shares with me a time in the
mid-nineteen fifties spent as an actress on the English stage
understudying for famed Murder She Wrote actress Angela
Lansbury. “I always loved the theatre, acting, and dance,” she says
as I sip a spot of Earl Grey Tea while her purring cat Tindy tidies
herself on my lap. (She was auditioned for the Sadler’s Wells
Junior Corp de Ballet by the famous male dancer Robert
Helpman.) “I spent many of my teen years and early twenties
training for a career on the stage while at the same time cultivating
my family heritage in landscape design.”
What followed however wasn’t to be on the stage but rather, in the
same vein, a career with the Associated Redifusion Television
company, today known as Thames Broadcasting. Maureen, whose
air of royal assurance is tempered with just the right amount of
eccentricity, tells me how she led an executive to believe she was a
man just so she could get her foot in the door. Feet in, she worked
on numerous televised projects including time as production
assistant in Westminster Abbey for the live broadcast of Princess

Margaret’s wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones and the
Wimbledon Tennis Championships of 1958.
Maureen laughs in remembering her friendship with Britain’s
legendary comedian Benny Hill. “He wrote all his jokes on toilet
paper you know.” Then adds without the slightest hint of
affectation “He got that job at the BBC because of me.”
In the early eighties and another degree later, this one in
communications from Queens College in New York, a stage of a
different character beckoned when she landed a job as an intern on
the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light. “It didn’t take long for
them to realize what a talent I was”, she says in her delightfully
cheeky British humor, “Within a month I was invited to join the
production staff and was soon writing for the show.” And why not,
her own life story was the dramatic stuff that soaps were made of,
drama that keeps millions tuned in each week.
However, Maureen says she was left uninspired by the politicking
of a new corporate climate being bred into the once creative tenure
of daytime television and so she left for a job with a new cable
television network called Lifetime. Two years later she’d had
enough of the corporate world and left it for a future she had yet to
find.
Then after a destined visit one weekend to her friend’s home in
Lyme, Connecticut, she fell in love with the area and began to feel
the familial calling of a past and a passion soon to re-ignite.

A year later Maureen moved to Old Lyme, Connecticut and began
the landscape design and installation company appropriately
named The English Lady, LLC. “I was happy to finally be doing
what I was put on this earth to do.” Maureen says while looking
out her window to the sprawling gardens, “Astonishing to think it
only took thirty years and four thousand miles to come home to my
roots. “The rest, she muses in affable ease, is history.”
Maureen Haseley-Jones is the founder of The English Lady,
LLC, a full service landscape design and installation company
located in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Her company has been
designing and installing landscapes throughout the Northeast
since 1992. Her book “In Your Garden with The English
Lady” is due out soon. To contact her call 1-877-The-E-Lady
or www.TheEnglishLady.com
Jill E. Vercelli, is a freelance journalist living in Connecticut