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Creating a Connecticut Garden with English Roots
June 10 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Pom Shillingford grew up in England surrounded by beautiful gardens. Moving to the US in the late 1990s she was horrified to discover the concept of a ‘yard,’ something to be managed, controlled and ignored. That she wasn’t on the next plane back out of JFK was thanks entirely to the piecemeal conversion of the half-acre of vineyard surrounding her and husband David’s house on Shelter Island back into a ‘proper’ garden.
Ten years ago, they uprooted themselves and their three young children from Manhattan to Salisbury, CT, under the pretense of restoring an 1830s historic wreck. In reality, it was so she could get her hands on the three barren acres of ‘yard’ that surrounded the house. Never one to be tagged with the label of low-maintenance, she set about creating a modern-day version of her beloved grandmother’s previous sixty years-in-the-making Arts and Crafts English garden.
Three years ago, bored by her own constant lamenting of the lack of seasonal garden flowers that had always graced her grandmother’s house, she began her own cut-flower business, English Garden Grown. Focusing on what she describes as ‘proper flowers’ i.e., those shaped entirely by the hand of Mother Nature, she offers three subscriptions a year, as well as supplying garden flowers throughout the year to individuals, florists and event planners.
Through the regaling of her own garden’s trials and tribulations and her writing for local publications on the how-tos of sourcing and growing seasonal flowers, her new over-ambitious mission is the absolute demise of the supermarket rose.
