By Tovah Martin

Before Lynden Miller tackled the public gardens of New York City, she transformed her landscape in Sharon. 

Lynden Miller makes every moment count—especially in her garden. As soon as the snow melts, her garden kicks in. Even before spring is official, hellebores and winter aconite perform when the ground is not blanketed with snow. As the weather warms, a pageant unfolds. It’s all part of a lifetime spent choreographing color. Previous to her trajectory as an internationally known landscape designer, Lynden was an artist composing abstract collages. She just swapped shovels for paintbrushes. “This is really an enormous painting,” she says with a sweeping gesture that encompasses her Sharon landscape. And like a canvas, every hue is premeditated. Spring might look like it has spontaneously sprung, but really, it all happens on cue. 

Like wardrobes, color schemes change according to season in Lynden’s Sharon garden. For example, snowdrops are planted sparingly. “You don’t really need white flowers in spring, do you? You want color,” declares the award-winning mastermind/consultant behind many public gardens in New York City. To follow Lynden Miller through a garden is to receive a crash course in aesthetics. Among the treats of your tutorial is visiting a canvas that has evolved over nearly half a century. 

Lynden and Leigh Miller bought their Sharon property in 1976, prior to leaving for a two year stint in Britain. While her husband was working in that country, Lynden took full advantage to educate herself as a gardener. She enrolled in courses, but she also opened her eyes. “I went to every garden within reach. My young sons were always saying, ‘Oh Mom, not another garden!’ But that’s where I gathered ideas.” Back in the US, she continued her formal education in landscape design at the New York Botanical Garden. Meanwhile, she was laying the groundwork for her personal Sharon garden—starting with a long, curved yew (Taxus hicksii) hedge that defines the garden’s borders. The hedge serves as a backdrop behind a mixed border of carefully selected and clipped perennials and shrubs. On the other side, axes lead to perennials all calibrated to match in height, girth, and blooming stint. But the real genius is the masterful color palette, and spring is when it really steps out. 

Lynden Miller has always been about connoisseur plant selections. In 1982, when she was asked by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Administrator of Central Park, to resurrect and then mastermind the six-acre Conservatory Garden in East Harlem, she created such a confection of color that the donations poured in and the vandalism vanished. The list of her further projects in public spaces is phenomenally impressive, including Bryant Park, Battery Park City, the New York Botanical Garden, Madison Square Park, Fort Tryon Park, Hudson River Park, as well as the campuses of Columbia University, Princeton University, and Stony Brook University. Meanwhile, she somehow found time to develop her own Sharon garden.

The formal sections of the Sharon garden feature wonders like long ribbons of grape hyacinths escorted by daffodils. But it’s not all formal—the woodland garden went in decades ago, but only now are the lungworts, hellebores, Spanish bluebells, mertensia virginica, Solomon seal, hostas, etc., gaining the substantial numbers necessary to make their statement of heart-stopping lushness. Beneath the birch trees that she added as “domes and minarets,” the woodland perennials scamper. Scattered through the scene, a graceful daffodil of luscious color catches your eye. Not surprisingly, narcissus breeders Brent & Becky Heath named it for a particularly tasteful and accomplished steward of horticulture. It’s called ‘Lovely Lynden’.