Small space gardens: How to do a lot with a little

Residential yards on Long Island can run the gamut from small urban lots to sprawling, expansive estates. Often, they have gardens to match.

But that isn’t always the case: Some soil-challenged folks will do whatever it takes to surround themselves with plants, even if it means laughing in the face of square footage — or a lack thereof.

Take Nicole Gadaleta who, when she moved into her Sea Cliff home in 2016, didn’t know what to make of her new postage stamp-sized front yard.

“The previous owner was a chiropractor, so there was a spine sculpture in the garden and two big pine trees surrounded by red mulch and lava rocks,” she recalled. “And [the former occupants] were cat people, so they also had an outdoor cat jungle gym set up.”

Her then-husband immediately took over the garden. He planted pansies, hydrangeas and sweet potato vines and meticulously tended the 10-by-12-foot plot.

But when he moved out in 2022, Gadaleta said she neglected the yard. Within a year, “it had become overgrown, and I didn’t know what to do,” she said. Eventually, she hired a gardener to help. But after watching him cut back plants and clear weeds, she realized it was a job she could handle herself. And handle it, she did.

“I became a little obsessed,” the 40-year-old mother of two said. “I went shopping and started putting plants in, and they were so pretty,” she said. “Every time I went to the nursery, I would see a new plant and say, ‘I want this!’ So, I just kept adding and adding and adding.”

Gadaleta said she lost her job as a television casting director during the summer of 2023, but found solace at home. The yard by then was overflowing with lavender, ornamental alliums, hostas, creeping phlox and annuals. And she kept digging.

“I would just see a plant, think it was pretty and put it in the ground. I love that lush ‘FernGully’ look,” she said, referring to the 1992 animated film set in a flourishing rainforest. A massive coral canna, which she said reminds her of another film — “Jurassic Park” — took center stage in front of her porch.

In just a few months, Gadaleta said her little front yard grew into a meeting place for friends, who frequently stopped by over the summer to hang out and drink rosé on the porch overlooking the garden. It also grew into inspiration for a new career: Gadaleta said she enrolled in an online landscape design course and is now employed as a landscape designer.

I know it sounds dramatic, but this garden saved my life.

Nicole Gadaleta, of Sea Cliff 

Credit: Dawn McCormick

“I know it sounds dramatic, but this garden saved my life,” she said. “I love the satisfaction of putting something in the ground and looking at how healthy and pretty it is. It’s so satisfying and makes me so happy.”

The neighbors are happy, too. “I get compliments [from passersby] all the time,” Gadaleta said. “Sometimes, my boyfriend will thank them, but then I’ll run out and say, ‘He doesn’t even live here. I did that!’ ”

THE HOBBY STUCK

SEE PHOTOSLush, little LI gardens 

Chandra Sinha, of Syosset, can relate to the attention. His small front-yard beds are bursting with begonias, impatiens, dahlias, roses, gladioli, cannas, rubber plants and geraniums tucked in among shrubs and groundcovers. “People often stop and take photos,” he said, “and I offer to show them around for a closer look.”

The rubbernecking is warranted. Despite limited gardening space on the 0.2-acre property, which has a mostly paved backyard, Sinha, 72, has maximized every inch available. The consulting architect spends much of his free time starting plants from seed, propagating geraniums from cuttings and tending to myriad annuals, perennials and edible plants growing in pots and small beds, borders and strips around his property.

Sinha, who shares his home with his wife and his son’s family, said he caught the gardening bug as a teenager growing up along the bank of the Ganges River in Patna, India, when his teacher required every student to pick a hobby. Despite having no experience, “I selected gardening,” he said, “and my plants grew very well.”

Encouraged, he began gardening at home and, as an adult, installed a green roof on his own house in Patna, which he still owns. “I put almost 2 feet of soil onto the flat roof and planted bananas, lemons and seasonal vegetables like okra, cucumber, spinach, coriander, broccoli, lettuce and eggplants,” Sinha said.

He can’t grow all of his favorite plants on Long Island because “the weather isn’t conducive here,” Sinha said, but he has been able to nurture some tropicals, including a banana tree, rubber plants, Aglaonema, Dieffenbachia, Areca palm and Monstera in a sunroom-turned-greenhouse attached to the house, moving them outdoors for summer and slipping them back inside when the weather cools.

The backyard, which is almost entirely paved with bricks or covered in wood decking, hosts a kaleidoscope of potted plants, tropical trees and vegetables along the fence, around the pool and in every possible nook and cranny.

The veritable botanic garden on the property already had roots 10 years ago when Sinha moved in. “The previous owner kept it pretty well,” he said, adding that many of the tropical plants he overwinters indoors came with the house.

But there have been some disappointments: “We were not able to protect the previous owner’s dahlias,” Sinha said, and two hydrangeas he planted have not flowered.

But overwhelmingly, the garden is thriving — all without pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Instead, Sinha said he uses homemade compost and a layer of leaves left to decay and enrich the soil naturally.

When I see my plants coming out, I feel very happy and contented.

Chandra Sinha, of Syosset

Credit: Newsday / Alejandra Villa Loarca

A stroll through the garden reminds Sinha of the initial spark of joy he felt as a student in India. “The appearance gives me a lot of pleasure,” he said. “When I see my plants coming out, I feel very happy and contented.”  

PROM PHOTO BACKGROUND

Mary McDonnell, of Huntington, understands that joy. Her 10-by-30-foot front yard is abundantly planted with hydrangeas, hardy geraniums, cannas, honeysuckles, Mandevilla, Spanish lavender, petunias, verbena, catmint and some 20 flats of annuals that she incorporates every spring.

Sometimes I just sit on the grass in the rain and look around at my garden and enjoy it.

Mary McDonnell, of Huntington

Credit: Rick Kopstein

“Sometimes I just sit on the grass in the rain and look around at my garden and enjoy it,” she said. And since her front yard is directly across from a bank of mailboxes in her condominium community, the neighbors get to enjoy it, too.

“I’ve had people take pictures in front of my yard when they have a communion or a prom,” McDonnell said, adding that neighbors often ask for her gardening advice. “It’s become a social thing,” she said.

When McDonnell, 66, who retired from her job as an administrative director for a construction firm and now runs an animal rescue, moved into her home with her husband in 2003, she knew she wanted a garden. But “I had to learn the lay of the land” — and the condo’s rules, she said.

New planting beds within grassy areas, for instance, are not permitted, McDonnell said. Nor are installed barriers of any kind. Patios cannot be blocked with large shrubs, and planting in common areas is forbidden.

So, McDonnell started small, planting crape myrtles and impatiens. But after the impatiens burned up in the unfamiliar southern exposure, McDonnell said, she switched to begonias. Soon, she added dinner plate dahlias, lantanas grown on columnar tubes and vining plants like passionflower and morning glories, which wind their way through a berm of boxwoods, perhaps pushing but never surpassing the imposed limits, she said. “I’m respectful of the rules and do the best I can.”

Near the driveway, she carved a large flower-shaped bed into the soil, filled it with purple ageratums and white begonias, and added a towering canna at its center.

Although the other yards in the community are also well-maintained, turning the corner into McDonnell’s property is like entering the technicolor world of “The Wizard of Oz.”

But the garden isn’t visible solely outdoors. McDonnell strategically keeps some of the crape myrtles and limelight hydrangeas trimmed level with the kitchen window so she can enjoy them from inside. She lets others grow to the second story to line up with the upstairs windows.