Margherita Fabrizio and her husband, Andy Jordan, live in a beautiful historic 1918 home in the heart of downtown Ithaca, New York. When they purchased their property in 2009, they certainly fell in love with the house, but it was the landscape that truly sealed the deal. The steep, north-facing quarter-acre property sits at the mouth of a mile-long gorge. The beginning of the gorge’s shale walls is the backdrop for their garden. The main walkway (built in the 1920s and ’30s) provides a grand view from above and then descends into the garden with stairs that mirror the graceful swoop of the native terrain.
Over the years, Margherita and Andy have worked as a team to curate the nearly 100-year-old man-made landscape into a harmonious garden connected with its natural surroundings. It has been a labor of love as Andy has dug in to rebuild and expand the hardscape into a series functional and beautiful terraces, pathways, and garden rooms while Margherita has used her artistic eye to edit and enhance the captivating softscape plant palette.
Learn more about this garden
See how Margherita and Andy’s garden strikes the perfect balance in Fine Gardening #209.
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