How do you measure value of a garden? The emotional heft of selling a labor of love

Fifteen years ago, Mary Kernan and her husband moved from a condominium into a big house in Bedford and took on a gut renovation for the 4,200-square foot house. And then there was the yard, all 1.5 acres of it.

“The only things growing were invasives,” she said. “There was lily of the valley. There was buckthorn. There was bittersweet. There was knotweed. There were junk trees. It was an absolute mess.”

Kernan didn’t know much about gardening at the time, so she hired a landscaper. It didn’t go well.

“I spent the next 15 years undoing everything he did because so much of it, I realized, was wrong,” she said. “And along the way, I learned a lot.”

Over time, Kernan added a vegetable garden. Then came fruit trees, including pawpaw and mulberry, followed by hundreds of native plants. She leveled up by installing drip irrigation, so she could spend more time gardening and less time watering. Kernan learned so much that she began teaching others, sharing plants, and joining the Bedford Garden Club.

“It kept growing and growing,” she said. “And then the more it grew, the more I started sharing with other people.”

But when they bought the home, Kernan and her husband promised each other they would spend 15 years — no longer —there. That time is now up. The two have purchased a condominium with only a small outdoor space for gardening. And while Kernan said she accepts what feels like a practical and necessary downsizing, her ambivalence as she prepares for the sale is palpable.

“I’m sitting here on my front step watching the bees in my front garden, and right now, they went from the thistle to the bee balm to the echinacea, and they’re just kind of buzzing all over the garden,” she said. “I’m mourning the loss of this space, and we’re trying to figure out if we can find the right buyer who will appreciate what it is versus somebody who might come in and tear it all out.”

Ultimately she said, maximizing value will be the sale’s determining factor, and from there, she must let go.

Selling a home with an established garden adds complexity to already daunting work — it can carry emotional heft, along with practical considerations. Can a garden be quantified in numerical value? Maybe.

Investing in outdoor, curb appeal-oriented improvements is a good idea for sellers, and it can return value, said Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.

“For standard lawn care service, landscape maintenance, overall landscape upgrades, and outdoor kitchens, sellers are estimated to receive at least 100 percent cost recovery on the project,” she said via email.

But landscape design is a wildly variable field: trim lawns and boxwood rows are different from naturalistic native plantings, and may attract different buyers. For established gardens maintained as a labor of love by a homeowner over years, resale value is much harder to quantify.

“Our data shows that the more specific and functional the garden feature, the better it performs on price,” said Amanda Pendleton, Zillow’s home trends expert. “For instance, homes with fruit trees sell for 0.7 percent more than expected, while homes with a generic ‘garden’ actually sell for 0.4 percent less than expected.”

Buyers favor value and low maintenance, not just any greenery, she said.

“The most rewarding outdoor features tend to be ones that are productive, purposeful, or planet-friendly,” said Pendleton.

When Mary Huff prepared to sell her 1.26-acre property in Atlanta before moving to Littleton, Mass., the $3,000 native landscaping plan provided by the designer she hired was a budget-friendlier option than traditional landscaping quotes that topped $5,000. The designer’s plan detailed plant species and the wildlife that each would attract and support.

“I think our real estate agent was a little apprehensive about it,” she said.

But buyers responded enthusiastically to the climate-resilient, lower-maintenance plantings, aided by renderings of how the garden would look once further established. The four-bedroom, three-bathroom house sold for nearly 11 percent over its asking price, and the agent attributed part of that success to the garden.

Finding the right buyer for a longtime garden is just a matter of matching tastes, like any home feature, said Judy Chauvin, a Realtor with Cape Landing Real Estate. She said she isn’t seeing sellers do much to modify yards such as these.

“I think when you are a gardener … you take pride in that garden and you just leave it as is and hope somebody will come along that loves it and admires it as much as you have,” she said.

For instance, Chauvin is currently representing 7 Cranberry Road in Plymouth, which is nestled among blueberry bushes in a coastal setting.

“There’s a lot of natural plantings there that kind of just mix in with the environment,” she said. “It’s kind of like ‘my little secret garden.’”

Since 1986, writer Suzanne Strempek Shea has lived near Springfield in Palmer, where she’s grown flowers so tall you can wander through corridors among them. But after many seasons hosting writing workshops in Ireland, she and her husband have decided the time is right to try living abroad full time. She has placed the three-bedroom home for sale, and, she said, she can’t take the plants.

Forty years ago, the garden was all grass. Now, Shea said, the winding avenues and places to sit are a wildlife haven.

“If we’re going to do anything in life, it’s to leave something better than we found it,” she said. “And I think, at least with this garden, that we’ve done this.”

“People who are familiar with our yard here have said, ‘I hope it’s not someone who’s just going to plow it over,’ and I would hope that too,” she said. “But you know, you really have to just let that go.”

Billie Jean Petrie is the realtor tasked with selling the home. She said that for her, it’s a chance to emphasize the retreat-like atmosphere in her marketing. A garden of this scale is an anomaly, she said.

“It’s just beautiful everywhere you look all the time,” she said.

Ariana Lymberopoulos grew up in her father’s Needham home, where he transformed the yard into an abundant mirror for his earlier years gardening in Greece, lush with flowers and edible plantings.

“My relationship to that garden was very entrenched in my parents’ identity, which became my identity, and it was something that I saw my dad just pour his time into all summer,” she said.

The garden nurtured her own sense of patience, discipline, and responsibility.

(Ariana Lymberopoulos’ father transformed his Needham home’s yard into a lush garden of flowers and vegetables. Photos: Ariana Lymberopoulos)

“It was also a dramatic, massive garden,” she said.

Drivers would slow down to marvel at tall plumes of flowers spilling down the driveway wall, and a hill of giant tomato plants rose each summer.

As her father aged, Ariana and her brother took the house over legally, but when she moved to Hingham, and her father came to live with her, it was time to pass the house on to a new owner.

“I almost wanted to make sure that the next people that came in were green thumb people,” she said. She received pressure from her agent to trim things back, and remove some of her father’s fencing.

“They were like, ‘Is there any way you can bring some landscapers in here to kind of clean this up?’” she recalled. “And we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t think that’s necessary …’”

An interested family emerged, moving from the Midwest, who added a letter to their offer explaining that the garden reminded them of home. In 2023, they closed on the house.

Lymberopoulos has driven by to peek at what became of the garden. At last look, it was smaller, but still there.

“Like an altar,” she said.