Garden Diaries: Discover How Bunny Williams Spent 40 Years Transforming a Connecticut Lawn Into Mesmerizing Garden Rooms Filled with Beauty and Nostalgia

When interior designer Bunny Williams first found her house in north-western Connecticut, there was no garden. Just lawn stretching from the house; a monoculture punctuated by beautiful old trees standing like sentinels. But she saw something else entirely.

'I really bought the house because I wanted to create a garden,' she says. At the time, she knew little about gardens. Nothing about design principles, planting schemes or the architecture of outdoor rooms. 'I just knew that I loved getting my hands in the dirt, I loved flowers, and I loved vegetables.'

What began as that simple knowing would unfold over four decades into something extraordinary: a series of interconnected garden rooms that marry the precision of her interior designer's eye with the wild, uncontrollable beauty of the natural world. Connecting them all are crucial stretches of negative space, clipped hedges and green lawn, that allow you to breathe between one garden's complexity and the next. One has to remember that this is a 40-year endeavor. The garden ideas did not happen overnight, as Bunny recalls below.

The gardens of elsewhere – Learning from the masters

In those early years, I became a student of gardens. I travelled to France, Italy, England – anywhere I could to see great gardens in person, to walk through them and understand what made them work.

It was on these pilgrimages that something shifted in my understanding. One of the things I learned over the years is that a garden is not just about the flowers and the vegetables, it's very much about design.

The revelation came gradually, garden by garden, as I visited Sissinghurst with its famous white garden and intimate outdoor garden rooms, Hidcote with its perfectly proportioned spaces, and Russell Page's masterworks in Normandy.

That last visit proved transformative. Standing in one of Russell Page's French gardens, I saw how division could create intimacy.

I returned home and immediately staked out six beds in the grass of what would become my Sunken Garden, adding flagstone paving between them. Doing this created a much more intimate space. I had finally got the floorplan right.

And there it was: the vocabulary I knew so well from decades of interior design, now applied to the earth itself. Rooms. Floorplans. Furnishing. But with hedges instead of walls, and flowers instead of textiles.

The gardens evolved organically, each new space emerging in response to changes in the buildings themselves.

When we converted the barn into living space and added a conservatory, it immediately suggested the Parterre Garden behind it. So much of the gardens is their relationships to the buildings.

A lot of the development of the garden came over a period of time, and as we developed another part of a building, that allowed us to create another garden.

Those first beds I planted 40 years ago were filled with my favorites: peonies, foxgloves, roses, and lilies. I still grow them all today, though it took years of trial and error to understand how to mix color, texture, and height properly in a perennial border. The learning was slow, sometimes frustrating, but deeply satisfying.

And as each garden room took shape, I discovered something crucial that set my gardens apart from many I'd visited abroad. Garden rooms need connections. The one thing that is different about my gardens from many that I've gone to see is that I have negative space.

After the intricate, jewel-box complexity of the Sunken Garden, you walk through serene clipped hedges and green lawn to reach the Parterre. It's another complicated space, but approached through calm.

I find that gives me a place to relax in between. I tried to apply my designer's understanding of visual rest, pacing, and of knowing that a house filled only with pattern and color would overwhelm. The same principle applies outside.

Moving through the day, moving through the seasons

There is no better feeling than walking through my gardens. I don't have one favorite place; I'm always moving throughout. Each space holds its own discoveries depending on the time of day, the season, the quality of light.

On sweltering summer afternoons, I retreat to the Woodland Garden, always shaded, where I can watch dappled light moving through the trees. When you sit there and you take in nature, you have to be thankful.

Other times, I'm touring through each part of the garden in sequence: from the cool shadows of the woodland out into the bright sun of the Parterre, ending up at the birdhouse village.

And I spend considerable time in the vegetable garden, that most productive and demanding of spaces, where the work is constant and the rewards immediate.

My cutting garden supplies the house with a constant rotation of blooms: peonies, dahlias, and zinnias.

I'm particularly fond of 'queeny lime red' zinnias, you can find seeds on Amazon, as they have such vibrant color. I also love taller flowers like foxgloves, delphinium, lilies and sunflowers (find seeds on Amazon) that add great height to an arrangement. I love mixing in coleus leaves too, their burgundies and limes add unexpected foliage interest.

Memory and morning glories – The garden as time machine

The roots of all this go back much further than four decades, back to a Southern childhood and a mother who gardened.

When I was very little, I used to go out with my mother and a little trowel, and she would be picking tomatoes or staking this and that. I would help pick vegetables or peonies and bring them into the house. That made me love the idea of gardening and growing things.

There's one plant that bridges then and now, childhood and present, the hot South and cool Connecticut: morning glory. When I was growing up we had a large screened porch and my mother grew morning glories up on the screens for shade which I thought was beautiful.

In the South, porches were essential; places to escape the heat, to catch any breeze, to live during the long humid months. It was a place we spent a lot of time. I still grow morning glories in my garden. That simple act of planting them each year contains so much nostalgia.

What the garden teaches

Gardening is something that has taught me a lot about life. It's certainly taught me patience, which I don't have much of.

More profound still is the lesson of humility. For someone who has spent a career mastering interior spaces, controlling every element from paint color to pillow placement, the garden offers something radically different.

Whereas I can control the interiors of a house, I can't control what is happening outside. You have to give in to nature, the weather, the bugs, to whatever is going to be a part of your gardening experience. This surrender – learning to work with nature rather than imposing my will upon it – might be the garden's greatest gift.

You can read and see more of Bunny's garden in her delightful coffee table book, A Life in the Garden, available from Amazon.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.