Twenty-one years ago, when Andy Turocy moved from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to a 1732 colonial on an idyllic forested road in Georgetown, the “garden,” such as it was, was nothing but two apple trees and an expanse of boring lawn.

In his mind’s eye, though, just as he knew the house was home the very first time he saw it — “I’m living here. This is it. I’m not going any further,” he’d said to himself — he immediately saw the promise of the yard. He spent the next two decades transforming grass into garden.

Turocy, who is retired, devoted as many as six hours a day to the 2-acre “park” he carved out from the 11-acre plot, filling the space with unusual trees and shrubs he carted home from around the country; building tile features, stone walls and staircases; establishing hedges; creating romantic garden nooks; planting a heritage orchard (it didn’t go well); and dotting the landscape with birdhouses, benches and decorative Chinese vases so big a person could stand up inside them. Also, fighting epic battles with insatiable deer.

“That was my baby,” he said on a late spring day as he gave a tour of the now enchanting spot, naming what seemed to be every bush, bloom and tree and relating the often amusing stories behind their acquisition. “This was my creative palette. This is my artistic outlet, is what it is.”

The confusion of tenses is understandable. That Tuesday morning would likely be his last stroll through his garden. Turocy was selling the house; the closing was scheduled for Thursday. He was moving to Wells, where he’d been spending a lot of time already. He was moving in with his boyfriend of five years, who needed an easier commute to work in Boston.

“I think I’m ready,” Turocy said, a little unsteadily. “It’s time. Well, OK, last year was the Year of the Snake. Let me tell you, I shed a lot of layers of skin to prepare myself for this move. I’m OK about it now. Nothing is forever anyway.”

Leaving a garden paradise is, of course, an archetypal Western myth. Unlike Adam and Eve, though, Mainers who do so are probably making the decision without celestial interference, to downsize or accommodate a new partner, a new job or a divorce. When passionate gardeners move, they leave behind a patch of earth where they’ve spent countless hours digging, mulching, watering, weeding, pruning — and dreaming.

TRANSFORMATION

Three years ago, Claudia Thompson and her husband moved from their home of three decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Piper Shores senior living community in Scarborough. Over many years, Thompson had taken their Cambridge yard with its “decrepit old garage,” unsightly brush pile, invasive plants and nonexistent landscaping and turned it into “this rich, biologically diverse, beautiful, absolutely beautiful native landscape.”

She’d experimented with some 160 native plant species and documented more than 81 species of birds using her garden to nest, rest and dine. She’d given garden tours, led workshops and lectured. Glossy garden magazines featured Thompson’s trailblazing native gardening successes.

Thompson can still talk at length about the transformation of that urban plot, and by extension herself. Though she trained in ecology, biology and the environment, and served on the board of the New England Wild Flower Society (now the Native Plant Trust), “I started planting the way most people do,” she said, “which is going to the nursery and seeing what looks pretty.”

Gradually, her growing woodland garden taught her about “flora-fauna relationships.” Gradually, her skepticism vanished that from an environmental perspective, changes in a single garden couldn’t amount to any more than a hill of beans. In a telephone interview, Thompson paused to interrupt her own stories of creating the garden to acknowledge she’d actually been asked about leaving it.

“I know I haven’t fully answered your question yet, but I’m getting there,” she said. “In a way, leaving a garden obviously starts with developing a garden and loving that garden.”

Thirty-one years passed. Planting trees was harder than it used to be. The couple faced health challenges. “We’re realizing we’re not going to live forever and we’re either going to give up and die there and somebody’s going to haul us out then or we’re going to give it up in a way that we have a little more control over,” Thompson said. They made the difficult decision to put their house, with its cherished garden, on the market.

“It was really the recognition that we’re part of the cycle of life just as much as the garden is.”

FRACTURE

Like Thompson, Westbrook resident Jennifer Rowland was also nurturing a native garden, and she’s at a major life turning point as well, in her case, divorce. Rowland and her husband split up this spring.

She moved out just as her Portland garden was waking up — the blue lobelia and black bugbane, the switch panicgrass and plaintain-leaved pussytoes, the wild cucumber, wild geranium, asters and anemone…

Many of these plants she grew from seed in the cold frame her ex-husband built her, some from seed she’d saved herself. Each spring, she’d nurture some 80 plants in the nursery along the front fence the couple put in. She’s especially proud of the two pagoda dogwood trees she germinated from seed.

Rowland, who is the sustainability and landscape coordinator at Piper Shores, kept meticulous color-coded spreadsheets on her garden, listing Latin names, common names, growing conditions and where she planted the seedlings. Over 12 years, she planted hundreds of them and several dozen trees and bushes, too.

The garden was always her project, but “he was definitely a really good hole digger,” Rowland said of her former husband, “and very generous with his time when I said, ‘Can you dig me 30 holes this weekend?'”

He’s still living in their house. She comes back regularly to walk their shared dog, and she’ll water whatever looks like it could use a drink. Her plans to espalier the beach plums growing in front of the mud room will never come to fruition now, though, and she’s anxious about the Carolina allspice. It’s too close to the recently installed heat pumps. “I should have just taken it out in the fall and replanted it,” she frets. “For obvious reasons, I didn’t have the capacity.”

What Rowland misses most is tending the garden each day and observing the seasons of bloom. “Last week, it was the Jacob’s ladder. This week it’s the red columbine and the (trumpet) honeysuckle and the pagoda dogwood.” She sounds wistful as she ticks off a list. “I just loved watching the phenology, which is a scientific term for … it’s like when things bloom and how things grow and looking at the cadence of that. I could walk around my yard and be like, ‘Oh this is coming next! I can’t wait for that!’

“I don’t have that now.”

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

In a perfect world, Thompson would have sold her house to someone who would love the garden as much she did. But typically, buyers and sellers are kept far apart during negotiations and warned not to communicate directly; sellers likely won’t know if the buyer is an avid gardener — or any sort of gardener. Beyond that, in order to afford their retirement community, Thompson and her husband needed to prioritize getting a good price.

Gardeners generally would be pleased to know their gardens will continue to thrive under new owners. But do not get your hopes up on that front, cautions Aaron Chadbourne, immediate past president of the Greater Portland Board of Realtors and an agent with Demetria Real Estate’s Gorham office. He advises clients not to return to check out their garden after they’ve sold their house “no matter what (buyers) said when they were purchasing it.

“Maybe they don’t have the same green thumb as you. Maybe their plans change. But once you sell the property, you can’t really control what happens to it. Even the best intentions don’t always result in the same level of care when it comes to gardening.”

Jenny Kastelic understands that. Her children are grown, and in June she and her husband were about to leave Portland and “my beautiful messy garden” for a new home in Ellsworth. They’ve lived on a quiet street in Deering Center for 12 years, “the longest I’ve lived anywhere,” she said. The garden is a low-key, low-fuss, welcoming oasis of perennials, lilacs and towering white pines.

Six days before her scheduled move, Kastelic, who studied organic and biodynamic farming in college, is at ease saying goodbye. “I feel like I improved on it. I like to plant for nature more than for humans, so this just being barren grass was doing nothing for anybody, and now … it’s just lovely birds and bees, and everything is coming along.”

But if the new owners chop down trees, yank out shrubs and flowers beds, and bring back the lawn, so be it.

“It’s their karma,” Kastelic said. “There’s very little you have control over, especially in other people.”

CHANGE OF PLANS

Donna Anderson, who describes gardening as a “major hobby,” had a harder time. For the first nine months at a new job as director at the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, she commuted from her home (and garden) in Harrison.

She and her husband had bought that “forever home” just four years earlier. As the then-director of the McLauglin Garden in South Paris, she had a vision for her own garden that was partly inspired by medieval cloister gardens and was buoyed by expert advice and special plants from McLauglin and accomplished gardening friends. “It got under our skin a little bit,” she said.

But the 3.5-hour daily commute proved wearying, and “we made a really tough decision to move closer to Portland.” Since March 2020, they’ve lived in a condo in Westbrook.

When Anderson left Harrison, she gave the new owners detailed maps of what she’d planted where, how to take care of it, when to prune and generally how to maintain the garden. Five years later, she went back to pick up a package that had been mistakenly mailed to her former home. She was dismayed to see the garden.

“They just weren’t up to it,” she said. “It wasn’t just that I was letting it go when we moved, but I had to let it go for the future. Change is inevitable, but it was really hard. You know what? It was easier to let go when I saw that it had been lost because I thought, ‘It’s gone. Now I can move on.'”

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU

There’s a spectacular, very fragrant yellow azalea in Turocy’s garden that came to Maine from an old house he bought in Ohio in 1974, via his home in Provincetown. Many of us have plants with sentimental meaning that we’ve hauled from place to place. Our new house isn’t home until we’ve graced it with our grandmother’s irises, our great Aunt Ruby’s rose bush, rhubarb crowns from the 75-year-old patch at the old family farm.

But bringing them with us isn’t as simple as digging them up and transplanting.

“The real estate world makes the distinction between real property and personal property,” Chadbourne explained. “Personal property is stuff that you can take with you, which is anything that’s moveable and not affixed to the property. So usually when we’re talking about fixtures, we’re talking about stuff in the house, right?

“The same thing goes with landscaping, gardening, plants that you’ve planted. If it’s permanently attached to the land, it’s considered part of the land, part of the real estate, part of the real property.”

It is possible to move favorite plants with your loveseats and bed frames, but only if you’ve explicitly excluded them from the purchase and sales agreement, he said, something that’s routinely done. Sellers often attach maps, lists or pictures of the plants they intend to move.

“After the closing,” Chadbourne cautioned, “anything physically attached belongs to the new owner.”

A little more than a year ago, Rowland’s father died unexpectedly. She’s still grieving him deeply. Her former boss at Wild Seed Project gave her a small pagoda dogwood in his memory that she planted at a front corner of the garden, underneath a majestic maple tree. If she and her former husband eventually sell the house they shared, what then?

“I’m definitely not there yet with that one in particular. Number one, it looks pretty happy,” Rowland said about the sapling. “I guess if a future homeowner was like, ‘I’m going to come and take down this tree,’ then I might come salvage it. But in some respects, I feel like it belongs to this place because that’s how my dad knew my life when he was alive.”

PLANTING A FUTURE

Life is happier if you grow where you’re planted.

Anderson has become the garden advisor at her condo, a place she picked in part because it offered room to do a little gardening. There are space constraints, and condo rules and regulations, but she’s learned to live with that. “The Harrison house was the big love,” she said. “This is a happy, practical, responsible place.”

Kastelic is eagerly planning for her new 11-acre property. She and her husband plan to pull up invasives, plant native trees and blueberries, raise mushrooms and build a greenhouse. She’s excited for a quieter home and garden.

For the immediate future, Rowland is taking a breather from the garden. Even before she and her husband faced irreconcilable differences, that was her plan; her garden was maturing and needed less attention. Given that, she thinks — she hopes — it’ll be OK without her. At her new rental apartment, she is working on accepting, “This is my new life over here.”

Thompson is deeply involved in native landscaping at Piper Shores and has lectured there and for the Scarborough Land Trust and the Scarborough Garden Club. Her Cambridge garden taught her so much.

“What I always told myself from the time we were selling the house is that the garden is only as good as what it helped me learn and has helped me to teach others,” she said. “That potentially gives it a longer life than it may have physically.”

GOODBYE TO A GARDEN

At only one point during an enthusiastic, humorous, even perky final tour of his beloved Georgetown garden did Turocy get emotional. For a brief moment, he grew teary and choked up. But he quickly regained his composure.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he said, not for the first time. “I had my time. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Way back when, he and a buddy used to sell “anything cool, arty, or weird” at flea markets in Ohio. One day, as they were setting up their booth, his friend looked at him and said, “‘Someday, some old queen is going to be picking through all our stuff.'”

“It’s the same with this.” Turocy gestured at his garden. “It’s going to be for the next person to interpret. You just have to pass it on.”