BELMONT — For 15 years, Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell’s garden in Belmont has been evolving virtually under the public eye. On Saturday, July 29, you are invited to return to this well-loved garden when the Belfast Garden Club showcases it for the first time in seven years as part of its summer event series, Open Garden Days.
The Trotochaud and McDowell’s garden at 103 Northport Road in Belmont will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Admission is $5. It is the sixth of nine private gardens the club is presenting on Saturdays through Aug. 19 during Open Garden Days.
The Belfast Garden Club featured the couple’s garden for the first time in 2011 and then again in 2016. Their two-acre property is also home to Trotochaud’s Everyday Pottery Studio, a popular stop on Maine pottery tours.
Trotochaud’s pottery — including bowls, cups, and vases—are designed for daily enjoyment. She says her glazes often take inspiration from colors in the garden. Ceramic birdbaths and bird feeders from her potter’s wheel are among the highlights of the couple’s garden beds.
Trotochaud and McDowell developed the garden year by year, clearing trees as necessary, cutting back scrub brush, extracting roots, and enriching the soil. Today they have 13 vegetable beds, a half dozen perennial beds and nine fruit trees, including cherry, peach, apple, pear, crabapple, fig and plum. Trotochaud and McDowell also grow cranberries, blueberries, rhubarb, raspberries, bread seed poppies, hazelberts and mushrooms. A romantic grape arbor supports three varieties of grapes.
“We kept expanding our space,” says McDowell, a carpenter. “Every year we evaluate what we did, what worked, what didn’t.”
These energetic gardening partners — one-time Iraq policy specialists who worked in Washington, D.C., and Baghdad and moved to Maine, McDowell says,