From the road, passersby can see Nancy Broughton’s front yard popping with brilliant yellows, purples, pinks, reds and greens.

People often stop by to make encouraging comments about the garden, with one woman telling Broughton that it does her heart good. But what they don’t see — and what no one sees without an invitation — is that just behind the house, there’s so much more to take in.

Yet tomorrow, the public is invited to wander around her entire garden. That’s because her home is one of four on this year’s annual garden walk from the Tellico Village Garden Club.


‘A GARDENER’S DREAM’

“It’s like a gardener’s dream to be asked, but it made me very nervous,” Broughton recently told The Connection, while standing next to bunches of lemon verbena, thyme and medicinal St. John’s wort. “I just still can’t believe that I’m doing this.”

A Tennessean for the past 13 years, Broughton moved to the Kahite neighborhood two years ago. As the daughter of a dad with a horticulture degree and someone who grew up in a nursery garden center and flower shop, she considers gardening to be in her blood.

“I love it. I’m just in my glory, my time with our Creator, and I just love being out here. I put my K-LOVE (Christian radio station) on, and I can spend hours and hours,” Broughton said. She estimates that 1,000 plants live in her garden, including 220 that originated from her former home of Connecticut.

In addition to being a calming space, Broughton’s garden supplies her with natural medicine. She’s a bit of an herbalist who knows what to harvest for different benefits, such as plantain.

“Most people consider it a weed, but it’s really good for a bee sting or a bite. You take off a leaf and you kind of chew on it and macerate it and you put it on your bite,” Broughton said. “I’m allergic to bees … so I wanted to have it where I could get to it easily.”

She uses comfrey in homemade salves and creams, because “it’s really good for your skin,” and picks her elderberries for the medicinal properties. She harvests stinging nettle to use in things like tea, eggs and soup — calling it and dandelions some of the most nutritious plants on the face of the Earth.

Swiss chard, kale and asparagus are some of the vegetables she grows, along with snap peas that her grandkids love to get right from the garden. She does everything organic or almost organic, through methods such as avoiding chemicals and synthetic fertilizers and using hot pepper spray as a deterrent to squirrels and rabbits.

Compost bins, rain barrels and a bluebird house are worked into the scenery discreetly, appearing almost ornamental. Broughton has also stationed art throughout the garden, including a bird bath filled with succulents instead of water, metal butterflies, a tall monolithic sculpture she got at a silent auction during a seminar at the University of Tennessee and a blue cat she found during a garden trip in Pennsylvania, which stands in honor of her late mother.

GARDENERS TALKING GARDENING

This year’s self-guided and free tour, dubbed The Gardens of Kahite, runs from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. this Thursday, June 6. Printed tour guides with directions can be picked up from the Kahite Pavillion on Kahite Trail, where organizers will also have refreshments and an attendance drawing going.

The other three gardens this year aren’t to be missed. THE BOWERS GARDEN includes a Koi pond with more than 100 fish, five types of iris and hundreds of daylily varieties, many of which have been hybridized by Dolly Bowers.

THE CLENSEN GARDEN shows off a 60-foot water feature, vegetables in a patio garden and plants that began as seedlings inside the home. And at THE ROBISON GARDEN, you’ll find ferns, astilbe and Lenten roses — which are said to have an unusual beef-like odor.

Although attendance is highly weather-dependent, organizer Geri Bahn expects 75 to 125 people to come out for the walk that’s been held yearly for more than a decade. She believes the event is important to inspire people, especially those who have recently moved into the area.

“Tennessee dirt is a real conundrum to a lot of people that have moved from the Midwest and the North, because they take one look at it when their house is being built or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘Nothing is ever going to grow here,’” Bahn said. “And (there’s nothing) further from the truth. … It’s amazing.”

Broughton looks forward to helping people learn how to handle the clay, of which she has firsthand experience pickaxing.

“With the fine particles, the nutrients — it’s good stuff once you learn how to work it,” she said.

Anyone who’d like a garden included on a future garden walk should contact Bahn through the Garden Club. There’s no criteria, but preference goes to home gardeners who do the work themselves — or at least design the work themselves — instead of having it entirely professionally landscaped.

Broughton’s back can attest that she dug each hole in her garden, she said. Her husband may say he hasn’t done anything, but she credits him with hauling hardscape and soil, and constantly going to Sloan’s Hometown Hardware.

Bahn said the Garden Club generally has to beg people to participate, as people tend to think their garden isn’t good enough.

“And then when they think about it the way Nancy did, and she thought, ‘Well, you know, I would like to share this with people’ … because if you know gardeners, there’s nothing better than talking gardening with another gardener,” Bahn said.

“It’s a pleasure, because we all like being out and digging in the dirt and watching things grow and all that kind of good stuff.”