Bedrock, the Making of a Public Garden with Jill Nooney

Cultivation is just another word for commitment. You think you are just pulling weeds, but what you are really doing is writing a love letter to your patch of earth.” This Thomas Rainier quote opens Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden, and this book is a love letter from a woman to her garden. Over 40 years, Jill Nooney, a psychologist and a graduate of the Radcliffe Seminars Program in Landscape Design, and her husband, Bob Munger, a physician, developed twenty rural acres in Lee, NH, into a show-stopping garden of delight. The book features over 300 photographs of plants, water features, animals, and Jill’s unique sculptures, which brought the public to the garden. But the garden slowly evolved through their deep love for the land and a strong desire to get muddy, while raising three boys outdoors. Full of stories of moving boulders, carrying trees on planes, choosing plants, driving tractors, volunteers, thousands of visitors, making paths and ponds, and bonding with community members over the love of a garden, Bedrock takes the reader on a journey into green, wild days, and deep peace. 

JILL NOONEY had a lifelong interest in making things, plants, and the human condition. She made her first garden when she was nine. She and her husband, Bob Munger, over the past 40 years have created a complex and original garden spanning twenty acres in southern New Hampshire. It is filled with many pieces of her art, along with unusual plantings, water features, and 3/4 of a mile of paths. In 2023 they gifted the property to Bedrock Gardens, the nonprofit that will continue to steward it as a public garden. Last year they welcomed 11,000 visitors.

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