For the novice gardener, touring the Kent County garden of Judy and Peter Van Dyke is an experience in delightful sensory overload. As Judy and Tonka, her black lab, escort you around her lovely weekend home along the shores of Langford Creek, plant names jumble in your mind and colors, textures, and sounds make your skin buzz. You see things you know—cattails, daisies, Russian sage, butterfly bushes—and many more you don’t, with fuzz, thorns, tendrils, and the most gorgeous colors.

One minute Judy’s telling a story—“We saw an eagle take a goose right out of the air and dunk it in the water”—and the next she’s cradling a leaf—“Look, this is the castor bean plant,” source of both castor oil and the deadly toxin ricin. “I’ve got HTH disease,” Judy jokes. “I see a plant and Have To Have it.”

Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, a large, well-known firm in Washington, D.C., orchestrated the landscaping. “They did a fabulous job, just gorgeous,” Van Dyke says, as she waves her hand toward grasses that spike softly along the creek, where Cacaway Island, a nature preserve, swells in the distance, and points at patches of greenery around the contemporary cedar home she and Peter built in 1998.

The property—at seventy acres, roughly half the size of the National Mall—is tucked down a narrow country lane ten miles from the heart of Chestertown. When the Van Dykes bought the land, covered with trees, brush, and saplings, it was intended as a place where Peter, a Harvard-educated engineer who loves solitude, could hunt geese and ducks. With Judy, two grown sons, and their wives involved in the planning, however, the simple lodge Peter had envisioned eventually turned into a mini-compound, with a house and adjoining guesthouse (2,800-square-feet total), a swimming pool, two garages, and a greenhouse added later.

Baltimore architect James R. Grieves achieved what the Van Dykes sought, which was for the house “to sit into the landscape,” Judy explains. “Not the focus point, but something you drive up and discover.” The native grasses growing around the house looked pretty and natural, so they thought they’d keep them exactly as they were. “But then we discovered all the ticks,” Judy says. “And there was no direction, no framing of sight lines. You couldn’t see the cove or even trunks of trees.”

A self-avowed “plant nut” who has completed the entire series of ornamental horticulture classes at Longwood Gardens and can rattle off names like Epimedium sufureum and Heuchera villosa, Judy realized that the scale of the property called for professional help. “I have no natural sense of design,” she claims, but she loves gardening so much that as a young bride in the sixties she grew vegetables on the roof of their Baltimore rowhouse garage, climbing a ladder each day with a hose.

In Chestertown, after one false start, Judy called on German-born Wolfgang Oehme, whom she knew from gardening lectures and tours. Before 1977, when he and James van Sweden formed their partnership, North Americans had made little use of ornamental grasses. The duo emphasizes native plants and “drifts” rather than tidy, well-defined rows and rectangles, incorporating meadow and grass to create a feeling of peace and freedom—a style now known as the New American Garden.

Judy and Peter explained that they wanted “an extension of what’s here—a transition into marsh,” as well as windows to the water and plantings to attract waterfowl. Oehme, van Sweden & Associates tackled the property in three phases, the first year designing the gardens around the house, the second year beautifying the driveway, developing a large circle beyond the front walkway, and the third year putting in a pond—transforming about ten acres in total. Now, in all directions, there’s something the eyes can savor, from tall trees to gray-blue water, cool patches of green lawn, and lacy expanses of blue, yellow, white, red, orange, and towering flowers on leafy green stalks.

Among the grasses Oehme, van Sweden brought in include fountain grass, feather reed grass, and several switch grasses. One of Judy’s favorites is purple moor grass: “It’s a ‘see-through’ grass, tall and graceful, wispy, so that you can see right through it as it moves in the breeze.” The landscapers introduced perennials, including yellow-flowering cup plants, false sunflowers, wild senna, and Joe Pye weed.

Judy enjoys feeling like she can “play” in her garden, adding varieties she falls in love with, such as the blackberry lily with its dainty orange flowers and shiny green seed pods, which she grows across from the pond, and dwarf oakleaf hydrangeas in a bed she created near the swimming pool. The best time of year on the Eastern Shore is autumn, Judy says, “I like the natural palette, all the fall colors, tawny, gold, and red.”

Around the house, a sea of yellow bursts from a goldenrod called Solidago Fireworks, with long arching streamers. Gardening is “a nurturing thing,” she says. “I like to create new life and help things thrive. It’s almost a primal thing—maybe the same reason Peter loves to hunt. He sees the garden as my domain—and no, he doesn’t work in it.” She laughs. “A friend suggested we get license plates that say ‘Hunter’ and ‘Gatherer.’”

They built a greenhouse this year; now Judy will be able to extend her growing season and start seedlings and propagate shrubs—her latest passion. “It’s something I want to master—sort of like, ‘I will grow these!’”

Then, the blue, beaded cord of her reading glasses swinging like a trapeze, she bends to pull a weed.

Novice gardener Vicki Meade writes from Annapolis.