♪ [soft breeze] WILLEM: Today, I'm at Bedrock Gardens in Lee, New Hampshire, and I'm talking to John... JOHN: John Forti.

WILLEM: I keep wanting to say Gotti.

JOHN: That would be a different syndicate!

WILLEM: You’re telling me!

The executive director here at Bedrock Gardens.

This is a commercial venture?

JOHN: No, it's a private nonprofit that's been established to open up a new public garden here in New Hampshire.

WILLEM: And it's been here a few years?

JOHN: Well, the folks that created it, Jill Nooney and Bob Munger, made this their backyard project for the last nearly 40 years.

And in the last seven years, we worked to turn it into a public garden with the parking and the restrooms and the shops, but also all of the amenities, so that when you go around this 30-plus-acre site, you have wonderful places to sit and vistas and all that.

WILLEM: That's nice.

Good.

How long you been here?

JOHN: This is my eighth season.

WILLEM: Wow.

You like it all right, then?

JOHN: I've been having a great time.

It's been my career; my whole life has been working in public gardens.

And, all around New England, especially, but this whole connection to land and the ways we live in habitat have always been meaningful to me.

But this is a great connection between art and landscape and wild places.

WILLEM: Well, let's go take a look at the place, okay?

JOHN: Love to show you around.

WILLEM: You think you can find your way.

JOHN: I hope so by now.

WILLEM: Me too.

Okay.

♪ [streamwater falling] ♪ [animals calling] This is called The Acrobats.

JOHN: Yeah.

This is our entryway arch.

It's one of the sculptures here created by Jill Nooney, one of the creators of the garden.

And it's really indicative of the type of metal work she does a lot of repurposed, old farm, and preindustrial and mill work that gets recreated.

And then, this is our forest bath path that leads you into the site so that while you're up here in our parking lot and are visiting our shops, you can step away from all of the world and find a little bit of serenity away from the world coming into the woods into the garden.

WILLEM: We may not come out?

JOHN: A lot of people wish they didn't have to.

[laughter] ♪ [soft breeze] So, what's up ahead is one of the first gardens we put in when we opened as a public garden so that we could separate out the old landscapes and the new.

It's an old Victorian-style stumpery where you collect stumps, and the idea was that it looked like nature took over again blew all of these things over.

And then, we put in over almost 500 ferns, both native and Asian, so that we could bridge this space between the natural woodlands and the Asian teahouse that's up ahead.

♪ [insects calling] ♪ [streamwater falling] A big part of this garden, it's here as a place of serenity, and I can't help but think a big part of this was Jill and Bob's background.

Jill was a clinical psychologist.

Bob was a family physician.

And this was designed as a garden journey to take you through room after room, and each room has its own mood, its own emotion and color palette, plant palette.

Our volunteer coordinator likes to say your blood pressure goes down about 20 points by the time you come out the other side of this garden.

♪ WILLEM: Glad to meet you.

You heard John talk about the landowners Jill Nooney and Bob Munger.

♪ [chatter] We found Jill at work on one of her sculptures.

Her artwork kind of springs up from the landscape all over the property.

♪ [birds calling] This is... this is your place You and Bob.

JILL: It is.

WILLEM: And you've done all right with it.

JILL: Well, you know, it's our backyard.

WILLEM: I love your sculptures.

Thank you!

I'm working on one right now.

Oh, it's in the studio, though.

WILLEM: Oh!

With all the all the spikes.

JILL: Yeah.

These are going to be the legs of the cop top.

It goes with a big story.

I won't bore you with it.

WILLEM: Thank you.

JILL: Yeah!

[laughter] WILLEM: Well, you're still at it.

I mean, this is still a project of yours.

JILL: Oh, very much so.

I just went to a conference in Portland, Oregon, this weekend and brought back plants.

♪ [soft breeze] WILLEM: 40 acres, right?

JILL: It's 30 acres and 20 acres of garden.

And naturally, you know, this was one of the first gardens I made because it's right by the house.

Everyone starts at their house.

And then, through circumstances, like The Zipper ... I gave my husband a zipper what I called a golf cart so that let us go miles away with the gas and the chainsaw instead of walking back and forth.

So, it opened up I say it's like barbed wire in the Midwest it opened up a whole new world.

♪ WILLEM: When did what you're doing become something more more of a garden?

JILL: I would say ten years ago, we realized that our kids weren’t interested and that the public really loved the garden.

And you can't take it with you.

What would we do with it?

So, I said to Bob, if this becomes a public garden, I think it'll take ten years.

And if we're successful, great.

If we're not, it would be an interesting ten years.

And that's what it took ten years... for the nonprofit to grow legs and be robust enough to take it over.

♪ In 2023, we gave the bulk of the property away to the public.

So, it's their garden.

And we operate entirely on the gate, donations, membership.

KATHLEEN: It's beautiful.

It makes me think how much work that they've put into this over the years and the different mediums that they have.

It's just lovely.

♪ DAVID: It's a lot to take in at first.

There's a lot going on.

It makes me glad that I rent.

There's a lot of work, but it's beautiful.

So, it's great that they open this up so people can come see this.

♪ [soft breeze] JOHN: So, this is Bob.

BOB: It was designed really as a sanctuary for Jill who was a psychotherapist and wanted to get away from the public and people's problems.

So, it was her private sanctuary, but it became really apparent that we could not bring it into the future.

The kids didn’t want it; would we turn it into condos?

WILLEM: Oh God, no.

BOB: Yeah.

♪ Now, you got people coming here just to see it.

BOB: We do.

WILLEM: And to regenerate.

BOB: There was a couple here that came 74 times last year.

Just couldn't get enough.

[stream burbling] JOHN: You know, the visitors Bob was telling you were here 72 times last year... they're here early today.

[chuckling] ♪ MAN: 80 times.

Yeah.

CINDY: We just live less than five minutes away.

So, if we're home and it's not pouring rain, we come and get a good walk in.

So, we don't come and stay for hours usually.

We’ll come and stay for, you know, 30 or 45 minutes, have a nice walk.

And the biggest thing I appreciate is there's places to sit everywhere where you can just sit, enjoy the pond, enjoy the Wiggle Waggle, and it's just a great spot.

♪ When somebody comes here to visit, what do you want him or her to take away from it?

JILL: Well, I can't prescribe that, but I can say that I built the garden, created the garden, for my own heart, and I think it’s a healing garden.

And, I hope people take away the sense of solace.

You know, beauty is always good for the soul and an antidote to pain.

♪ JOHN: That’s our pokeweed, but a variegated variety.

She's always collecting what's unusual.

You'll seldom see anything ordinary here.

[Willem chuckling] ♪ The sculpture out in the middle of the GrassAcre is called SyncoPeaks, and it's to evoke the White Mountain range.

She made that out of old oil tanks.

♪ You can see our beehives over there.

WILLEM: Oh, yeah.

Sure enough.

JOHN: We even make our own honey so that people can taste the gardens.

♪ WILLEM: There's one thing you could still do.

JILL: What's that?

WILLEM: People run around little garden cars like these delivering hot tea and biscuits.

[Willem chuckling] JILL: You're a spoiled brat!

WILLEM: Well, I am, but I don't want to walk way over there, get the tea, and then carry it back, you know?

JILL: Well, okay.

You make an appointment and I'll follow you around and treat you like a VIP that you deserve to be.

WILLEM: No no no no no, none of that.

It’d just be nice to have a cup of tea or a [inaudible] perhaps in em, now and then.

JILL: Okay... ♪ [birds calling] JOHN: A lot of people come away with this sense of, there's so much more that I could be planting than a U in my backyard, and this garden really, I think, gives a lot of people a take away that you can mix art, you can mix plants, you can mix great plants for pollinators and wildlife along with your vegetables and herbs, and just plant the things you love the same way we plant all the things that we love here.

And they tell a story of our life.

It's like a curated garden of you or me.

♪ That's one of my favorite Jill sculptures: a life-size mosquito.

WILLEM: The eyes!

Perfect.

JOHN: I love to say too that this is a great garden for reluctant husbands.

All these guys are like, I don't want to go to see a garden!

They come here and all of a sudden they're saying, Oh, that's the reflector from the first car I ever drove.

Or, That's a part from my grandfather's tractor.

And they're always discovering those parts the bits and parts.

WILLEM: 1953 Nash!

JOHN: Yeah, that kind of thing exactly!

♪ There's also a garden historian, Matt Griswold, who says, Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.

And when you look out over a landscape like this, or the ones that I've created at home or anywhere else I've ever designed the landscapes for, it's a slow evolution, but it's one of the most beautiful things you can watch happen that you think, I planted that and it's bigger than a house or a barn now.

Or, Look at the habitat that now we have to enjoy.

♪ I've always felt more at home in nature than anywhere.

You know, I think I'm a lucky man that way because for so many of us, when you're a kid, you might not know what you're going to do.

But I always knew my comfort place was in nature.

And I remember I was working in a museum in my 20s as their horticulturist and I just start, I'm not sure that this is a career I can have.

My father's just said, you know, You got to do what you love in life because you spend a lot of your time working, and you might as well find a career doing that very thing.

And I fell into one after the next, all great gardens that I had loved before I went to work in them and then got recruited from one to the next.

And this is my I was going to say my final resting place that sounds way too dire!

But this is a really wonderful place to, you know, finish out my career.

I've got many years left in me, but this is a pretty magical space.

♪ ♪