Text by Katie Wood
Tucked behind a 1950s ranch-style home in Montgomery, Alabama, awaits a charmingly quaint cottage garden. Rows of manicured boxwoods offer structure to the garden’s interior sections while ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas line the exterior. Designed with the concept of outdoor rooms, the garden is grounded in architectural construction.
Homeowner Elisabeth Byram and her husband, Jim, designed the garden in 2005 with the help of Mike Kaiser, a landscape architect based in Nashville, Tennessee, and Charles Harwell of Harwell’s Green Thumb Nursery in Montgomery. The concept of the space was formed after the Byrams’ only child left home for college. “When he went to college, I said, ‘I’m going to birth a yard,’” Elisabeth recalls with a laugh. “It was just a heartfelt love of wanting to create a space that I could nurture after my only child had moved away.”
