Memories of Greece bloom in Edina

When Susie Phill was a homesick teenage bride in a new country, she liked to imagine the garden she would have someday. It would resemble the gardens in her native Greece, with rustic stone paths and an abundance of fragrant roses.

Her dream was deferred while she and her husband, Tommy, were busy raising their three daughters. For many years, the garden bloomed only in her mind. One day she drew a picture and showed it to Tommy. "He was laughing," Susie recalled. "He thought I'd never do it for real."

But over the years, with Tommy's help, Susie's dream has blossomed into reality.

"I see now what was in my head," Susie said, gesturing to the lush, Mediterranean-influenced garden that fills their Edina back yard.

Brown-eyed Susie

The story of the Phills' garden begins in Delphi, where both grew up. Tommy came to the United States as a young man in 1951, first staying with an uncle who was living in Rochester, Minn. In 1957, Tommy returned to Delphi for a visit. There he noticed a beautiful brown-eyed girl who would walk past every day on her way to school. It was Susie.

"He was always looking at me," she recalled. He asked her parents' permission to court her, and they sent him to ask her grandfather.

The two talked, Tommy recalled, after which Susie's grandfather said, "He is an honest boy," and gave Tommy his blessing. They were married that year, and a few months later, Tommy brought Susie back to Minnesota. At first she longed for home. "Then I started having babies," she said, and soon was too busy to be homesick.

When the Phills bought their Edina house, in 1965, the large back yard was just an expanse of grass. Gradually, they began transforming it. They planted bushes, flowering annuals and a maple sapling that is now a huge spreading tree, shading the large, circular patio that Tommy later built.

Time for roses

By the mid-1990s, the Phills were empty nesters, and they began pouring more time and energy into their garden. They also began planting roses: hybrid teas, shrub roses, carpet roses, tree roses and moss roses.

Their garden now boasts more than 100 rose varieties, including 'French Perfume,' 'Love & Peace,' 'Sonia,' 'Paradise,' 'Taboo,' 'Queen Elizabeth' and 'Party Time.' Susie can identify most of the roses by name, but not all. "I don't pay attention to names," she said. "If I like it and it blooms all the time, I buy it."

Roses are the dominant floral theme but there's a profusion of other plants, including daylilies, coneflowers, hydrangea, mums, bleeding hearts, snapdragons, butterfly bush and bitter bush (pikrothafni in Greek). The Phills grow the latter plant in a pot to keep its leaves out of reach of Lela, the couple's fluffy white bichon/poodle dog.

Now that their girls are grown, Lela -- and the roses -- are their babies, Susie said.

Tending them means that Tommy usually can't accompany Susie when she makes her annual trip back to Greece. (Her cousins still live there; many of her closest relatives followed her and Tommy to the United States.) "I have to take care of the dog and the garden," he said.

Memories of Delphi

Susie's memories of Greece have shaped every aspect of the garden. In Delphi, a city famous for its ruins, gardening is an archaeological experience. "You find a lot of old stuff when you dig." She wanted that ancient feeling in her garden, so they added salvaged architectural relics and rustic brick-and-stone paths. "I wanted it to look like it was here 100 years."

Other elements that contribute to the garden's classic Grecian look include statuary, stone planters, a fountain, a pond and a grapevine-covered arbor. Tommy has fashioned a living monogram -- the letter "P" -- out of boxwood and marigolds. And Susie plants ground covers, such as sedum, in Grecian urns "because I like the way it looks," she said.

Creating a Mediterranean-style garden in a cold northern climate has been a challenge, Susie said. "I had to compromise a lot and read a lot of books. I had to find things that would bloom here."

After several years of trying to grow bougainvillea, she finally conceded defeat. She's still struggling, however, with a particular type of climbing rose, with limited success. "Every year they die. They don't do well at all in Minnesota. I keep trying. I wrap them in burlap. I don't give up that easily."

The Phills' garden had a starring role last year when daughter Dimitria, a Twin Cities food writer, married in a back-yard ceremony featured in the Taste section of the Star Tribune under the headline "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." There are similarities between the family chronicled in the hit movie and her own, Susie said. "Dancing, eating and talking all together -- that's us."

The wedding was the biggest social event held in the garden but far from the only one. The Phills enjoy entertaining, and the garden also has become a magnet for more informal social interactions. One teenage girl calls the Phills' garden her "secret garden." She discovered it with her mother when she was little, then started bringing her friends. "They still come," said Susie. "We asked, 'Why do you call it a secret garden?' They said, 'Because no one knows about it but us.' You can't tell from the front what's back here." The Phills' front yard is nicely landscaped, but they devote most of their energy to the back. "My kitchen and family room are in the back, so we live in the back of the house," Susie said. "I like to see and enjoy my efforts."

Christina Phill, Susie and Tommy's youngest daughter, who nominated their garden for the Beautiful Garden contest, said her favorite thing about it is "that it provides so much fun for my parents. It's work, but it's really social. Strangers see it, stop over and my parents invite them to come back. Every time I stop by in the summer, there's always someone back there."

His-and-hers chores

The Phills' 20-year gardening partnership reflects a clear division of labor. "I do the heavy work," Tommy said, such as building walls, laying paths and installing benches.

"I'm the creator; I plan in my head," Susie said. "I do the little fancy things, like placing and pruning. He doesn't have the patience for that."

Sometimes they have to compromise their different visions for what should come next. Tommy, for example, isn't keen to remove parts of his carefully laid walls or paths to make way for more plants. "I have to fight every time I want a piece of ground," Susie said. "He puts up a fight over the stones."

Their garden is time-consuming, Susie said, "but I don't think of it as work. It's a joy for me. I'm always doing something. I'll come out first thing in the morning and start pulling things, and soon it's 11 and I'll still have my nightgown on."

The garden remains a beloved work in progress. "We're not done yet," Susie said. "The beauty of being a gardener is that your work is never done."

Kim Palmer is at kpalmer@startribune.com.