A Vegetable Garden, Greenhouse & Rose Garden in Coastal Connecticut

When artist Jennifer Csengody-Novetsky and her husband moved from New York City to Old Lyme, Connecticut, they went all in on perfecting their green thumbs — building out a vegetable garden, greenhouse, potting room, and formal rose garden across their expansive grounds.

The vegetable garden is a serious operation, run entirely organically with no sprays. In-ground beds, chosen to stay connected to the earth, hold a rotating layout that lets them move crops each year to outsmart pests.

There's Zephyr squash that changes color as it grows, fairytale and Italian eggplant, a garlic patch grown from saved cloves so they never buy garlic, overwintered artichokes left to bloom, and rows of blackberries and raspberries the couple picks straight off the vine each morning. They grow ornamental flowers for cutting too — David Austin climbers, coneflowers, towering Casablanca lilies — and plant fennel and dill specifically to feed the butterflies, part of a thriving ecosystem of honeybees, bumblebees, and dragonflies.

They even grow rare pineberries, white and pineapple-flavored, by the handful. At the heart of it all is the greenhouse, where most plants are started from seed, connected to a custom potting room built into what was once the scary back of the garage.

Their longtime contractor built the workbenches and poured the concrete countertops; Jennifer found the showpiece — a 1930s double concrete trough sink — free on Facebook Marketplace and sent her crew to Rhode Island to rescue it from a basement.

The greenhouse holds an exploding bougainvillea and kaffir lime from the century-old Logee's greenhouse, propagated figs grown from twigs shipped around the world, kumquats, and a much-revived kiwi plant nicknamed Fuzzy Jenny. The newest space is a formal rose garden, carved from the original vegetable plot. Working from Martha Stewart's boxwood resource, the couple planted baby boxwoods to grow into architectural hedges, then filled each bed with a single color story of David Austin roses — fragrant whites in front transitioning through peach and yellow to dramatic reds in back — climbing roses trained up a central obelisk, and lavender humming with bees.

Jennifer also shows how she pots up whimsical allium and diamond frost arrangements for alfresco dinners by the pizza oven, replanting everything in the ground afterward so nothing goes to waste.