Elise Freeman, MD'68, MPH, left, with her daughter Esther,right, posing in part of Freeman's garden,above.

by Bernadette Gillis

While growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., Elsie Freeman, MD’68, MPH,
never gave much thought to perennial gardens, water gardens, or any
type of garden for that matter.

Now she says it is hard to imagine a life without gardening.

During her days as a Duke medical student, Freeman would park her car in the
Duke Gardens parking lot and walk through the gardens to get to the medical school. She says it was perhaps these daily walks that first piqued her interest in gardening.

It took some time, but over the years her interest blossomed into a full-fledged passion. Today her own garden takes up about two acres of her 100 acre-property in Boothbay, Maine, stretching from the house down to the shore.

Even though the garden’s intricate design may suggest otherwise, Freeman says she did not have a plan laid out when she and her late husband Jonathan, MD’68, bought the property more than 30 years ago. “The garden is a set of rooms that have evolved,” she says.

The couple bought the land in 1972 and built a summer home on it ten years later, after their children had been born. Freeman says once the house was built, things began to evolve out of necessity.

First they created the lawn to keep from sinking in the construction mud, and then
they added a traditional perennial garden to frame the lawn. Overflow from their well had created a “murky, miserable spot,” so they next decided to create a water garden. It attracted frogs, and Freeman says it always had a bit of a Wind in the Willows theme.

Freeman and her husband had that theme in mind when they came across a human-sized toad sitting outside a shop on Ninth Street in Durham several years ago. They knew they had to have it, but unfortunately the toad wasn’t for sale. In town for their 30th Duke Medicine reunion in 1998, they were determined to get a similar toad before they headed back home. The store owner got in touch with Charles Smith, the Charleston, S.C., artist who designed the toad, and told them he could get them a human-sized frog instead. They paid for the frog on the spot, without ever seeing it until it arrived at their home in a crate a few weeks later.

“It’s like a family member,” Freeman says of the garden. “It’s a part of our beings.”

The frog now sits on a granite bench near the water garden and is very popular with visitors.

Over time Freeman became very interested in the design aspect of gardening and traveled around the world to learn as much as she could. She has made two trips to Japan, but it was actually during a visit to Duke with her daughter Esther, who was considering Duke School of Medicine, that she decided to create her own Japanese dry garden.

While she wasn’t successful in convincing Esther to attend Duke, she did manage
to get the name of the company that supplied the gardens with their large urns and purchased the same ones for her Japanese garden.

For years Freeman and her family lived in Boston and only visited their Boothbay
home during the summers. Her husband died unexpectedly in 2000, and four years
later Freeman decided to make Boothbay her home year-round. Jonathan’s ashes were scattered in the river in front of the garden and a Shakespearean sonnet was engraved on a stone bench in his memory. She says the garden has offered an outlet for reflection and healing.

“Jonathan was a sailor, not a gardener, but he was tremendously supportive of my interest in the garden,” she says.

Freeman says she would love to spend all her time in the garden, but her full-time job as the medical director of adult behavioral health for Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services won’t allow it.

These days she has someone to help with the garden’s maintenance and is able to devote much of her free time to design. Freeman’s children still live in the family’s
home in Boston but often bring friends to Boothbay to see the garden during the summer.

“When guests arrive, the children bring them first to tour the garden, even if that
means flashlights at midnight,” she says.

Noah, 30, works in Boston in investments, and Esther, 27, is a second-year medical student at Harvard. In July Esther will be married in the garden.

“It’s like a family member,” Freeman says of the garden. “It’s a part of our beings.”