Ashley has been gardening in New Hampshire since childhood, helping her dad with seeds in the greenhouse and watching her mom tend to beautiful perennial gardens every year. As a one-woman operation (but often with help from family and dogs), Ashley is primarily a garden hobbyist with a passion for spreading joy through her flowers.
The Woodhill Farm property sits elevated in zone 6a in New Hampshire where winters are cold and summers are hot! Garden operations begin in January when we start dividing dahlias that were dug from the previous season (though some years we start as early as December). Next in February comes seed-starting in the basement of our 1830s farmhouse, which serves as both a cool storage for dahlia tubers and also a great environment for seedlings! We grow mostly flowers for the gardens but also some vegetables like tomatoes and peppers.
Our frost-free date is early May, which is when we get the perennial gardens cleaned up and dahlias planted. We are finding that with the milder winters lately, more and more cool annuals are surviving the winter or self-seeding, making the gardens fuller every year! Our first frost in the winter is generally around Halloween, but sometimes we can extend the growing season by using blankets, tarps and Christmas lights!
Garden History at Woodhill Farm
The home we purchased in 2017 had a few perennial gardens — a cottage garden near the driveway, a landscaped garden off the porch, and a small perennial bed with some peonies, poppies, hydrangea and Shasta daisies. There was a 10×15 ft garden inside a rock border (maybe an old foundation) that was mostly mint, oregano and some blackberries, and there was a flat spot in the grass that looked like it may have been a garden at one point, but was mowed as part of the lawn. This 15×30 foot space would become what is now the dahlia garden.
That first year, we tilled the grass in the 15×30 foot space with an old rototiller that leaked gas and spewed black smoke as it tilled, but it (mostly) got the job done. That grass stuck around for a LONG time! This garden became an all-purpose garden with everything from zinnias, snapdragons, broccoli, tomatoes, peonies, roses, and even a Japanese maple — all in one 15-30 foot space. The deer devastated most of the garden that year, so we put up a fence the following year and grew peas, dahlias, and zinnias of course.
The introduction of our second dog in 2019 has kept the deer out of the yard, so we have been able to expand the perennial gardens each year. In 2020 we added a second garden, specifically for cut flowers and dahlias, while the main garden bed remained multi-purpose. Eventually, the cut-flower garden would become a formal garden with a path in 2023, when the all-purpose garden became a dedicated dahlia garden. 2023 also saw the addition of a gate to the fenced-in dahlia garden, so visitors did not have to climb over the fence!
In 2024-2025, we added several fountains to the gardens to encourage more wildlife visitation and even more perennials to the formal garden path garden.
… more to come…
ashley polson 