Southern Charm

"I JUST LOVE FRONT PORCHES," says Kelly Wingo as she walks across the wide boards of her Needham porch, past an array of potted ferns. "My family is from the Deep South, and [this] makes me think back to Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama." The porch brings back memories of both place and family, including a dear aunt from whom she learned to love gardening.

The road from garden-loving child to landscape-designing adult was not straight and clear, however. She studied photography and subsequently worked at Boston's Museum School for eight years, "still trying to pursue photography on my own. It wasn't quite fitting. I was looking for something creative to do, and once I started playing around with plants, it was just incredible. It felt right."

A decade later, after classes at the Radcliffe Seminars, Wingo has found her way with a small but growing garden design business. She started literally in her own front yard. When she and husband Steve Capone, their two children, and two Jack Russell terriers moved in to their early-1900s house with its modest yard six years ago, Wingo was looking "to work part time, and I thought that maybe this would be a good career path. . . . But I knew that before taking a job designing someone else's garden, I needed to make my own, with my personal aesthetic."

Wingo envisioned a shady green garden in the front of the 8,500-square-foot lot, a sunny courtyard garden in back, and transitional plantings along the side yard. Creating her own landscape would give her an opportunity to start collecting and evaluating plant combinations.

She and Capone began an addition to the house as soon as they moved in, and the construction on the house and transformation of the plain, sugar-maple-shadowed lawn around it went hand in hand. Wingo got the chance to oversee a general contractor for the first time, one charged with installing stonework and garden layouts of her own design.

The front garden, bathed in cool, dappled light filtering through a substantial sugar maple, was the first to be completed, at the end of the family's first summer in their Mayo Avenue home. The maple's shallow roots made cultivating and planting hard going, but Wingo created a calming, green-themed garden using foliage plants such as hostas and ferns and grasses like Carex and Hakonechloa. To add horizontal lines and ensure greenery all year long, Wingo incorporated small hedges of boxwood. "It's a front garden, so it's important that there are four seasons of interest," she says. Around the hedges, pachysandra adds to the year-round greenery. A Fargesia bamboo, even without its summer leaves, gives the garden a vertical accent in winter. Japanese maples and twisted beeches (Fagus sylvatica 'Tortuosa') also add their distinctive silhouettes to the winter landscape.

Stone, too, works wonders in the winter as well as the greener seasons. In her own and her clients' gardens, Wingo has gotten more involved in stonework for structural elements - for the patterns and textures that the stonework gives and for what it can do for the plants, she says. "Elements such as birdbaths, troughs, even rocks and boulders become four-season interests. Even when covered in snow, they give contours to the scene. And they don't die, you don't have to water them, and they aren't going anywhere."

While the front garden took just a summer to complete, the more formal rear courtyard was longer in the making - two years officially, but Wingo says she's still editing. Potted bananas and other tropicals, a multitude of many-colored coleus, and containers filled with assorted plantings accent the patio. The lawn is a terrestrial version of a lap pool, a narrow green strip where the children can run and play. There is also a real pool at the far end of the courtyard. It is a tiny home to water-loving papyrus and Colocasia. All this is framed by borders that Wingo acknowledges are packed to rule-breaking proportions with perennials.

The designer's urge to incorporate the unexpected can be found in hundreds of subtle delights tacked on here, hidden around a corner there, or tucked behind a planting or concealed in plain sight: the rusty, shabby-chic chairs that blend into the garden alongside the garage; the pool made with curbing from an old Boston street. Visitors are surprised and delighted when they find the entrance to an unexpected path at the garden's far end.

"We spend lots of time out here," says Wingo of what began as a horticultural test lab, "time with our kids and seeing what's going on in the neighborhood. It is really an extension of our home."

Ellen C. Wells is a freelance writer and horticulturist. E-mail her at askthegardener@globe.com.