Take an inside look at Betty Montgomery's 5-acre garden in northern Spartanburg County

On a chilly Saturday morning in early April, Betty Montgomery was preparing for visitors she feared might be deterred by the weather.

They were not.

About 75 had people had registered to visit Montgomery’s garden at Forty Oaks Farm in Campobello. Most of them showed up, she said with a slight sense of surprise.

Linda Knippa and Michelle Keyes of Tyron came for the tour, expecting the usual stroll in well-planned and manicured gardens surrounding a home.

This was something different, they said, marveling at Montgomery’s seven-acre private park, built down the hill from the home she and her husband Walter built in 1983 on a hilltop near Campobello.

For the visitors, the roughly five acres of woodland garden, surrounding a triangular two-acre pond and intertwined with lush grass walkways, evoked Callaway Gardens near Columbus, Ga., or the Duke Gardens in Durham, N.C., or the South Carolina Botanical Gardens at Clemson.

“It’s just fabulous,” Knippa said, as she looked toward the pond, ringed with azaleas and other flowering bushes and plantings.

Montgomery greeted the visitors at the entrance to the garden, chatting with fellow Master Gardeners and other gardening enthusiasts and seemingly astounded at just how far some of them had come to see the garden.

“Raleigh? You came all the way from Raleigh?” she marveled at a group of four visitors who had indeed made the 250-mile trek as part of a weekend tour.

There were local visitors, too.

Scott and Theresa Cochran made a meandering circuit along the pathways, stopping often to admire the color or just enjoy the atmosphere. Scott Cothran is president of Spartanburg Methodist College and said he has attended events at the Montgomery’s home and knew them socially and from their extensive philanthropic work but had no idea about the extent of the garden.

Participating in The Garden Conservancy’s nationwide Open Days was just one part of an exceptionally busy spring for Montgomery, who also had said “yes” to hosting gardening groups from Charleston and Columbia, Greenville and Spartanburg.

“I was shocked when I got a call from this friend of mine from Charleston who wanted to bring her garden club up here,” she said. “They’re coming. She says she loves my layout and all the different structures I have in the garden.”

The layout and structures are the products of a 20-year project for Montgomery, sculpting the landscape, then using broad brushstrokes of deep greens and brilliant whites, yellows, pinks, and reds.

It all started because she wanted to grow camellias, a love she developed growing up in the North Carolina town of Hamlet, just east of Rockingham.

When she and Walter built the house, which is now surrounded by towering, symmetrically placed oaks, it was “in the middle of a pasture on top of a hill.”

Exposed to the wind and cold, camellias just wouldn’t thrive. They needed a more sheltered spot.

'Down the hill and Down the Hill'

Betty and Walter Montgomery have four children, who spent a lot of their time roaming and exploring the cattle pasture and woods outside their door. At the time, most of the house looked out over open pasture, but one side faced a dense pine thicket.

“They never came on this side of the house because the undergrowth was so thick,” Betty says.

The hillside was cleared slowly at first, providing enough shelter for camellias and a few other plants. Beyond the fence that once marked the edge of the yard, about 50 yards from the house, the garden was born. And kept growing.

Standing near the middle of what she says is the “finished” garden, she points back up the hill. “I started my camelia garden, right up there at the entrance,” she says. “I kept coming down the hill and down the hill and I put in the bridge, and the path down here, but all that was still woods,” she gestures, looking toward the far side of the pond.

Now, it has beds bursting with color in spring, more lush grass, and a brick-floored hexagonal gazebo.

Montgomery says one of her daughters-in-law "laughs at me, because for years I said ‘I’ll never build on the other side of the pond. I’ll never go all the way around'."

Asked if the garden is truly finished now, she says her plans are “just maintaining and seeing things that need to be done. Then another tree will fall and I’ll have to plant something.”

Montgomery says that she has detailed records of every variety of plant among the 18 enormous beds around the garden. But as for how many plants, shrubs, and trees in total, “No. One day, I guess I ought to look,” she says. “I have a lot.”

Garden trowels and heavy equipment

Montgomery has an album with photos of every step of the process of building the garden, beginning in 2002.

The pictures show progress that has been steady, but occasionally dramatic.

Sometimes the work has been kneeling over a new bed of Hosta or daffodils or tulips. Other times orchestrating a heavy-equipment crew to muscle an earthen dam into existence or a leading a brigade of friends and relatives, some wielding chainsaws, to clean up downed trees and other damage after a particularly fierce storm.

Nature has delivered several.

Montgomery tells of the terrible ice storm of December 2005, and the fierce winds accompanying the remnants of Hurricane Zeta in October 2020. Both took out big swaths of trees, destruction that ultimately became opportunity, providing open space for larger beds and new plantings.

Even more than the destruction and recovery from storms, the most dramatic change to the landscape came soon after the garden’s beginnings.

The pond was formed when a 250-foot wide, 15-foot-high earthen dam was constructed to connect facing hillsides that sloped down to a small creek. Page after page of photos in the album show the clearing and earthmoving and planting as the pond filled over the course of a couple of years and the raw, red clay became garden.

The top of the dam is now a grass walkway, lined by azaleas both at the water’s edge and cascading down the slope on the other side.

In April, it’s a riot of whites and pinks, reds, and magentas. Montgomery said that one of her friends was flying over the Campobello area one spring and later told her that the colors were so vivid they acted almost like a beacon.

At the opposite end of the pond, a path of steppingstones winds across the shallow water. The concrete circles rest on a natural granite shelf and the path ends on the far side at a flagstone terrace bordered by stone walls and a stone walkway that climbs toward the gazebo.

Montgomery says that the steppingstones are a favorite of her 14 grandchildren. “They love it here. They were here Easter, hunting Easter eggs.”

A solar-powered creek

The creek that flows into the pond winds through the upper part of the garden. It began as a natural drainage gully but was deepened and lined with river rock, and bordered by flat stones and boulders.

Montgomery points out a flat face of a one boulder that was split by the force of a tree felled by Hurricane Zeta. The boulder had come from Tennessee, she said, and the flat faces revealed fossilized seashells from an ancient inland sea.

Runoff from heavy rainfall is routed into the streambed and there is also a natural spring near the pond, but most of the time the soothing burbling and splashing is provided by water that is pumped uphill from the pond. The pumping system is well hidden.

Montgomery says she brought in North Carolina stonework expert Terry Hudson to build the stream.

“It’s hard to make a manmade stream look natural,” she says. “The way he placed the boulders and all, I think he did a good job.”

The pump runs on electric power provided by a bank of solar panels located in a nearby pasture. Montgomery says that when her husband complained about the cost of running the pump, she invited a solar power company to come discuss installing just enough panels to keep the stream flowing.

“But my husband was so fascinated that he just decided to put some in, too,” she said.

There are seven rows of solar panels in the pasture. Two power the pump. The other five supply the house.

‘Gardeners are nice people’

Betty Montgomery is well-known in Spartanburg and elsewhere as a dispenser of horticultural advice and knowledge. Over the past 15 years, she has written hundreds of columns and features that have appeared in the Herald-Journal and this magazine, as well as the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News and dozens of other affiliated newspapers across the country.

She has written two books, both in collaboration with photographer Dick Carr: “A Four-Season Southern Garden” and a guide to the care and cultivation of hydrangeas, one of Montgomery’s gardening passions. There are many. She especially enjoys successfully growing “things that people told me you can’t grow here.”

Long before she wrote her first column or book, Montgomery was constantly learning and honing her gardening skills. She was in the first group to become a Master Gardener, when Spartanburg County began offering classes through Clemson’s cooperative extension in 1985. The designation carries with it an obligation to pass on knowledge. For Montgomery, that seems far more joy than requirement.

“Gardeners are nice people. All the gardeners I’ve met have become fast friends,” she says.

An Open Days visitor, Sarah Froneberger from Gaston County, N.C., walks up the driveway to the garden entrance. A fellow Master Gardener, she instantly recognizes Montgomery.

“You’re Betty! I met you in Greenville,” she says excitedly. “I love your books! They are right beside my bed, and I look at them every night.”

“You’re so sweet! Aren’t you nice to come,” Montgomery says.

Told that several others from Gaston County are on the way, she is once again surprised.

“From Gaston County??”

“Yes, yes! To see your garden!”

This story will appear in the summer 2022 edition of Spartanburg Magazine

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Longtime Garden Columnist Betty Montgomery opens her garden to guests