By Pat Summers Special Writer
Polly Burlingham has left her mark all over the Princeton area. Unlike the results tornadoes or floods may leave, hers are benign — and beautiful.
Now, with spring’s arrival, she’s up to her old green magic again. As one person remarked after seeing Ms. Burlingham’s horticultural creations around town, “Polly plants Princeton!”
Though its scope may be a bit of a stretch, her work is distinctive while unique each time. A self-described “landscape gardener,” deliberately distinct from a “landscape architect,” Ms. Burlingham employs a variety of means to make her mark.
As owner of Polly’s Green Gardens for nearly a decade, she has designed “intimate garden spaces and seasonal container gardens” for individuals and businesses in the area. Although her website includes images of her residential and business projects, simply think of the alleyway outside Alchemist & Barrister or the public library’s pots and third floor deck, to begin with.
She’s the “green woman” behind the flower baskets along Nassau Street and the baskets and planters at Albert Hinds Community Plaza near the library. She also fills Drumthwacket’s two huge urns — splendidly — each summer. They’re “a joy to plant,” she says.
This will be Ms Burlingham’s sixth summer doing the baskets and planters. She starts with a “plant palette,” then mulls over flower possibilities as she drives around on various jobs. No two baskets are alike, and sun or shade also figure into her plans. She especially likes coleus for both sun and shade, and verbena for “sun baskets,” as well as combinations of trailing and upright plants — all in different color combinations.
“I try to achieve drama through different textures, shapes and colors,” she says. “I’ll pinch things back and deadhead, which is especially important for keeping containers looking good.” The eye-level baskets she plants in May flourish till frost. Besides her weekend watering and grooming, she credits Public Works employees for watering the rest of the week.
Hinds Plaza baskets and planters get a spring mix, a summer-to-frost planting and — as with the Nassau Street baskets — cut greens for winter. She never lacks for plant material for her projects, says Ms. Burlingham, who shops locally but widely to find a broad range.
“One happy client has led to the next” is how her business has steadily grown. Originally, she took classes at Mercer County Community College on how to draw for landscaping, after which she began working for her instructor, then took on her own clients. And so Green Gardens began.
“I’ve never had a horror story,” she says. “Most of my clients become friends in one way or another. The only difficulty: I have to send them a bill. It’s hard to bill your friends.”
One bill-paying friend says, “I ‘inherited’ Polly from the previous owner of our home in Constitution Hill. Some people inherit jewelry, others money, but I wouldn’t trade Polly for any of these usual inheritances. She is a horticultural blessing.”
An eight-year member and chair since 2007 of Princeton Borough’s Shade Tree Commission, Ms. Burlingham has also been an active Master Gardener since 2001. As a project for that organization, she “adopted” the Barbara Boggs Sigmund Garden in town, taking the lead in its revitalization.
Rounding out the greenery, Ms. Burlingham often wears green and drives a little green truck; needless to say, her thumbs are ever green. She exults that she can “make a living with my passion!”
Only after planting clients’ containers for a while did she realize they’re her favorite means of artistic expression. Now she says “creating amazing containers” is a key part of “her niche.”
She also loves “to come in and work on a small, intimate garden, or restore a garden that’s been let go.” However, undeveloped places don’t call out to her, and initial designs and planting are for others.
Last year Ms. Burlingham opened Polly’s Pots and Gifts, a shop at VERDE, the Kingston artists’ collective near the D&R Canal. Its charming interior suggests a walk through a rambling, picturesque garden: stone floor, multi-colored walls and staircase, myriad items, large and small, on walls and surfaces, to look at, admire and maybe buy. Most all have “some sort of nature or green connection, or I just have a passion for them.”
PP&G’s inventory includes plants, vases, ceramics and prints; earrings, felt work, candles and wreaths; baskets, wire-sculpture birds, metal insects and glassware made from wine bottles — and anything else handcrafted by her friends or by artisans around the world that Ms. Burlingham falls in love with.
Always there on Wednesdays, she often brings something else she loves to work: her 10-year old Pug, “Milla Diva,” a feisty-affectionate VERDE-protector, who alternates between patrolling and napping.
The range of her related pursuits might suggest that Ms. Burlingham’s entire career has been devoted to gardens and all things green. Not so.
Basically a Princeton resident since 1969, she was born in Ohio, lived in Indiana and spent her childhood in Alabama and Atlanta. She and her artist-husband have two daughters, one now living in Maine and the other in high school.
Ms. Burlingham originally studied dance and theater. Later, she joined a friend with “Art Tours of Manhattan,” a business involving walking tours of artists’ lofts, galleries and museums. At the time, she preferred organizing and trouble-shooting, but now if occasional tours feature gardens, she’ll gladly lead.
Although she had grown orchids on her New York windowsill and joined the Manhattan Orchid Society, it wasn’t till years later that she found the Mercer County Master Gardeners booth at Communiversity and felt “I had found my people!” So began her continuing happy relationship with that organization.
Since then, one horticultural thing has led to another, and now the season has come round again for Polly Burlingham to paint the town green.
PollysGreenGardens.com, 609-947-1015. The shops at VERDE also include Christine Cancelli Gallery, Jewelry by Suzanne and the VERDE Art Gallery. All are open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., and by appointment Monday and Tuesday.
