‘No Place I’d Rather Be’

WAITSBURG – For those who are fa­miliar with Markeeta Little Wolf’s unique personal style, the way she views her garden should come as no surprise.

“It’s like the way I dress,” she said dur­ing a recent interview at her home on Fourth Street. “Cowboy boots and a silk dress. Not everyone would dress like that. But I know what looks good on me.”

As part of their monthly meeting Saturday, 20 members of the Waitsburg Garden Club toured the former entertainer’s lush landscape a few doors down from the Bruce Mansion and feasted their eyes on the hidden botanical beauty that was a mere rumor to some before.

They found it exactly the extension of Little Wolf’s eclectic and outgoing taste, laid out in sections before them like a never- ending string of beads, each with their own rich display of flowers and foliage.

“This is fantastic,” said Terry Hofer, a longtime Waitsburg resident who is an avid gardener himself. “You can’t drive anywhere to find something like this.”

And that’s precisely the point, according to Little Wolf and her husband, attorney Mi­chael Hubbard: they don’t have to and they don’t want to.

“We don’t have any bad habits like golf or riding motor cycles,” Little Wolf said, tongue in cheek. “We work and we come home. I would rather be in the garden than anywhere else.”

From the ashes

As most Waitsburgers who were in town at the time recall, the couple’s historic 1895 home burned down on May 15, 2005, after the wiring behind a refrigerator shorted, is­sued sparks and sent flames up the walls.

By the time the fire woke them up in the small hours of the morning, the couple’s just-remodeled structure was “completely involved,” as Hubbard put it in fire-speak. They said they were lucky to escape with their lives. Little Wolf’s dog and everything they owned did not.

“We had nothing,” she said.

Except the birch trees in front, the early beginnings of a garden in the back and a small cottage that is now one of the many punctuation marks in the green-threaded ter­rain where the two may be seen lounging on a Sunday afternoon listening to Garrison Keil­lor’s “Prairie Home Companion.”

The garden dates back to 1999, when the couple bought the home with a wasteland for a yard. That’s to say there was nothing but star thistle, dead grass, crushed beer cans and an apple tree in distress.

“Water makes a lot of difference,” Hub­bard joked.

About a third of the yard had been devel­oped by the time of the fire – an experience so traumatic to Little Wolf she did not want to come anywhere near the home’s burned-out shell that stood there for two months while the couple struggled with their insurance company and lived in a home she had bought for her mother. Meanwhile, Hubbard would do some basic watering to keep the plants and trees on life support.

Once Clyde Burdine bulldozed the home’s charred skeleton, the focus was all on bring­ing in the new manufactured home, which Little Wolf wanted to have completely set up, wired, painted, decorated and furnished by Hubbard’s birthday on Sept. 26 that year. The garden would simply have to wait.

But the following year, Little Wolf and Hubbard were ready to go back at it, building on what was left and starting a whole new layout that kept evolving as the flora grew where and how it wanted.

“The garden designed itself,” Little Wolf said.

Nooks and crannies

Mike and Markeeta’s gar- den benefits from the large trees on and around their lot. Most of them were al- ready there when they bought the house 14 years ago or emerged as volunteers in lat- er years: locust, birch, maple, walnut and blue spruce.

These form the backdrop and give the garden its pri- vacy. From the upper deck behind the house, you would never know you were in a town surrounded by wheat fields. Looking west and north, only the occasional roofline and glimpse of a dis- tant crop break the illusion of being, say, somewhere in the Carolinas.

The new house is sur- rounded by garden decks, patios and courtyards – all with ponds, fountains, glazed pots, statues and whimsical garden art, but not a single irrigation line or drip hose. Hubbard waters the entire spread by hand.

“It’s amazing, all her little nooks,” Hofer remarked dur- ing the tour.

The way Waitsburg Gar- den Club founder Karen Stanton Gregutt put it: “She’s created vistas. You never want to look at something that’s not beautiful.”

Each of the 10 little gar- dens within the garden has its own name and botanical identity. There’s the foredeck garden overlooking Fourth, where the couple likes to catch the morning sun and have their coffee under the birch trees that survived the fire.

There’s the court yard on the east side of the house where the path that leads to Hubbard’s workout space and music studio is sur- rounded by rocket junipers, boxwood, trumpet vines, sword ferns and hibiscus.

There’s Shivers’ garden, a shaded morning-sun section named after Little Wolf’s late cat and planted with short bamboo, ribbon grass, Japanese maple, hostess and reed under the neighbor’s grape vines.

There’s the Zen garden with its moss-covered rock wall, sweet woodruffs, hon- eysuckle and lilacs under the sheltering maple tree.

The list goes on: Maude’s garden named after Little Wolf’s grandma, complete with a fountain statute of Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology, ensconced in a traditional mix of spirea, lavender and roses; the Koi- filled pond garden with its Russian sage, ornamental grasses and Japanese Irises; and the wisteria arbor with stems like pillars of an Art Nouveau concert poster.

Behind the cottage, club members stumbled on a secret garden with its verbena and cherry tree “gone mental.” That part of the garden flows on along the fence (an area affectionately known as Shelly’s garden, for Little Wolf’s neighbor to the west) with bishop’s weed, smoke bush, forsythia and plumbs.

Sprouting among all this are gnome statutes, butter- fly bushes and winged gar- goyles. The apple tree is still there and thriving. Behind it is the couple’s new weekend getaway: a refurbished trailer with a second story decorated like a scene from Moonrise Kingdom.

And to top it off, the home’s vast back deck, com- plete with bar and barbeque, is home to several thousand dollars worth of annuals, including a banana plant that gets moved into Hubbard’s man cave during the winter.

No need for a car

With each garden section visually offset and differ- ent from the next, one can imagine being in a different world in each of them: the foredeck, the courtyard, the Zen garden, the arbor, the cottage and the back deck that overlooks it all.

But Little Wolf’s favorite place, particularly to read a book or have an evening cocktail, is a Tuscan-style brick patio under the wisteria in front of the “Little House” (the structure for- merly known as “the trailer”) and in view of the Koi pond and waterfall with the cottage in the distance.

The tail end of summer and early fall is perhaps one of the few times of year Little Wolf and Hubbard finally have their fill of gardening and just enjoy being there.

The rest of the year, the couple and their assistant, Joe Nieto from Dayton, are constantly moving, digging, weeding, pruning and planting to keep up with their landscape’s seasons and evolution.

“It’s always changing,” said Little Wolf, who gues- timates her financial invest- ment in the garden at around $50,000 over the years. The annuals alone can exceed $2,000 or, as she joked, the entire defense budget of Fiji.

During the first few years after the fire, the gardening felt like “retaliation,” Hub- bard said, echoed by Little Wolf’s own description of the work as “vengeance” against the loss of everything they owned.

But after several years of marking the tragedy’s anni- versary, Little Wolf realized one year she had missed it and soon helped her trau- matic memories out of their misery.

“This is this life,” she said.

Now, her time in the gar- den can be spiritual at times full of contemplation or con- versation.

“I’m not religious, but I do believe in God,” she said. “This is my church. How much closer to God can you be?”