If there were a manual on making your first garden, Chapter 1 would presumably recommend that beginners identify a piece of level ground where they can carve out a not-too-big bed or build a raised one.
One scenario unlikely to be suggested for novices: a series of beds and borders scrambling up and over multiple levels of terrain.
But that was precisely the situation Matthew Axe and his husband faced when they bought their home in Sea Cliff, N.Y., six years ago and began making its landscape their own. “We’re constantly battling the sands of time,” said Mr. Axe, a former vice president and creative director for Martha Stewart Living who now works with beauty, home and food-brand clients.
He’s not just talking gravitational pull: The growing medium underfoot is a shallow layer of topsoil over a base of sand. As they soon discovered, if they’re not careful with their plant choices and planting techniques, “things end up down at the bottom of the garden.”
The house is a pair of shingled, two-story cottages — one from 1920 and the other from 2000 — joined by an enclosed hallway. That makes for a total of five living levels with “lots of little stairs,” Mr. Axe said, likening it to “those houses that go down hills in San Francisco.”
Lots of little stairs are the order of things outdoors, too, where seven small staircases aid in navigating the precipitous spot.
The house was once the residence of a married photographer and painter, who added the second structure to serve as creative work spaces; the garden was an additional creative domain for the painter.
During the transition in ownership, the garden became overgrown. So although they were beginners, Mr. Axe said, the first step was obvious: a wholesale cutback the fall after they moved in. That included removing some elements that were too far gone, like the privet hedge in front, which they replaced with Manhattan Euonymus (Euonymus kiautschovicus).
From Observer to Hands-on Gardener
Months would pass before Mr. Axe could survey the garden properly. But spring finally arrived, and things re-sprouted in a less jumbled state. Only then could he see what was what, and begin to make more deliberate decisions.
He also studied the light patterns, noting the extremes he would be grappling with. The top of the garden is in full sun — a place “where the sunset is like somebody turned on the headlights,” he said. On the shady downhill side, moss is inclined to grow; just one dramatic sliver of sunlight hits the ground there over the course of a day.
Mr. Axe was no gardener — not yet anyway — but he was raised in Suffolk, England, by parents who were keen gardeners. And in his head was a catalog of aspirational images, gathered as a longtime viewer of the BBC series “Gardeners’ World” and during visits to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex and the Chelsea Flower Show — as well as too many exceptional private American gardens to count, thanks to his former job as a magazine art director.
One of his biggest challenges wasn’t so much practical as psychological: Could he allow himself to be a beginner in this new aesthetic realm, and not become paralyzed by those stunning visuals and his designer’s mind-set?
Being a fledgling gardener “is the opposite of being a graphic designer — that’s about control,” he said. “It was humbling, because gardening isn’t like that. I can put typography in place, and I’ll know what it looks like. But with gardening, you put it there and either it grows or it doesn’t grow.”
Nature’s shapes, lines and colors just won’t stay put.
He had to let go of any sense of mastery, and forgive himself any mistakes, too. That included the bed of bearded irises that were accidentally uprooted during the initial cleanup, and another patch that were over-mulched later on, their rhizomes buried so deep they sulked and failed to flower. (Deep mulch may be better suited to helping the dahlias his husband loves overwinter in place outdoors; they plan to test that this fall.)
Despite various educational misfires, joining the ranks of hands-on gardeners gave Mr. Axe a perspective that eluded him during his experience as a spectator. “The ‘why,’ and what the people got out of it, didn’t strike me doing all those gardening stories,” he said, or visiting all those gardens.
Now was he was getting at the really good stuff.
A Wall Full of Hostas
The first new project Mr. Axe and his husband tackled was a space intended for outdoor dining. This sprang from an idea he had seen in London gardens: a gravel square edged with low boxwood hedges.
Before long, neighbors were stopping by to ask gardening questions.
“The hedge was so low, and nobody’s kind of seen that before,” he said. “People would come by and think we were experts, and they’d ask our opinions on things, but at that point we didn’t know.” (Perhaps his English accent helped convince them otherwise?)
Another British-inflected element: To create a sense of enclosure, they erected panels of lattice between wood columns topped with Federal-style capitals to create two garden rooms, one sunny and the other shady.
The panels also supported an experiment with a kiwi (Actinidia arguta). The report so far: “This thing’s nuts,” Mr. Axe said of the vine’s inclination to engulf the lattice and then some.
The garden had come with some good structural bones. In addition to those seven staircases, there was a dry-laid stone wall that served an important purpose. But the drab, gray stones weren’t what Mr. Axe wanted to see from the bedroom window — especially not as it was, with Forsythia growing on top.
He imagined the wall’s potential if transformed into a vertical garden, like one he recalled from a long-ago magazine photo shoot. “And I had all of these hostas, so I thought, why not?” he said. “I could see it would be a wonderful place to have a hundred different types of hostas, because it would be the most beautiful showcase, but that wasn’t my journey. My journey was kind of like: This is what I’ve got. Let’s go for it.”
Into pockets between some of the stones he tucked small divisions of the many hostas that the previous owners had planted in beds and borders. On top, he planted Incrediball smooth hydrangeas (Hydrangea arborescens), ousting the Forsythia.
Another inheritance spoke to the previous owners’ artistic sense, and likewise appealed to his own. They had understood the importance of creating inside-out views and had sited garden areas on axis from key windows. Mr. Axe has sharpened those views, framing each one as he might crop a photo for a layout and adding fresh focal points, like a birdbath.
In other areas, he has heightened the garden’s visual impact with strategic transplanting, massing together similar plants that were dotted here and there about the place.
The latest module in his ongoing horticulture home study: developing the confidence to edit self-sown plants, like the tall biennial foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) that he now enjoys not just for their flowers, but later on, too. “I love it when they turn that lovely, limey green and they’re just about to dry to the seed heads,” he said, a phase he had never noticed until he grew them himself. “I just knew them as the little flower that the bees went to, and outside every English cottage.”
He is hoping to develop more of his mother’s intuition about which volunteer seedlings should stay and which ones should go. “She’s much better at editing things out than I am,” he said. “She’s very decisive about what she likes and what she doesn’t like.”
Such editing will be added to the tasks of weeding, watering and otherwise tending the garden that enrich his days, he said. They don’t bog him down.
“I don’t have a mindfulness routine that some people have, but that is my routine,” he said. “I go around, check all the plants, water the ones that need it, go around and deadhead every morning. And without consciously thinking, ‘Oh, this is my routine of getting myself square in the world,’ I think it probably is. I don’t like it when I don’t do it, at all.”
He continues to puzzle out the best cultural practices, and especially what goes where. Sure, it would have been easier to hire someone to do a master plan. But whether the budget had allowed for that or not, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. If someone else had done the planning, he would never have experienced this intimate, hands-on exploration.
“When people say, ‘Oh, somebody came and designed my garden,’” he said, “I kind of feel like you miss the best bit: the figuring it out, the thinking about it, changing it” — the surprises, the disappointments.
“If somebody comes in and just does it for you, you miss out,” he added. “You get the final ‘ta-da,’ but you miss out on the real meat of what it is to own a garden, I think: a personal point of view.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
If you have a gardening question, email it to Margaret Roach at gardenqanda@nytimes.com, and she may address it in a future column.