Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden, with Jill Nooney

Name: Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden, with Jill Nooney
Start: 2025-05-10T12:30:00-04:00
Location: Gibson's Bookstore

Schedule

Sat, 10 May, 2025 at 12:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Gibson's Bookstore | Concord, NH

Gibson's Bookstore, in partnership with the Concord Garden Club, is pleased to welcome author Jill Nooney for her new book about Bedrock Gardens in Lee, NH, Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden.
Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden is a love letter from a woman to the 30 acre garden she spent 40 years creating in Lee, NH. Featuring over 300 photographs of the garden, sculptures, water features, and built structures, the book takes us from the garden’s private origin to a public garden.
The author's property, acquired from the original owners in 1980, was a 37-acre dairy farm that had been abandoned for about 40 years. The initial years were dedicated to clearing the land of poison ivy and pucker-brush. Work on the farm as a landscaped project started about 1987. Nearly all of the work has been carried out by the two creators. They cleared the scrub growth and overgrown fields, established access roads, and managed the woods with guidance from foresters and arborists. Gradually, gardens were created bed by bed. In 1991, a wildlife pond was added, and in 1999, a family room was appended to the original house. Despite these additions, the original house and outbuildings, including a three-hole outhouse, remain intact. Today, about two-thirds of the property is garden.
The garden features numerous structural elements such as paths, an espaliered fence, an arborvitae hedge, architecturally interesting rocks, pergolas, and garden art. The beds boast exceptional plant varieties, often started as seedlings, including many unusual specimens of perennials, trees, and shrubs.
About the author: Jill Nooney grew up in rural New Jersey. She attended Bennington College, Smith College School of Social Work, and the Radcliffe Seminars Program in Landscape Design. She has had a lifelong interest in plants, art, and healing the human spirit. She lives with her husband, Bob Munger, in an old farmhouse in New Hampshire. Together, over the span of forty years, they created Bedrock Gardens and in 2023, they gifted the garden to the Friends of Bedrock Gardens to be enjoyed by all.