Alloway joined the Master Gardeners, but the program fell by the wayside several years later when the horticultural educator in charge of it left CCE. In 1996, the program was revived and after taking the courses again, Alloway once again became a Master Gardener in the class of 1997.
At that time, she was employed as an office manager by Kingston CPA firm Kimball & O’Brien. As a Master Gardener, says Alloway, people would come to her with requests for help on various garden projects, and so over time, on that extra day off she had during the week she would take on projects and do gardening for people. “I was lucky enough to have flexible employers who allowed me to keep that one day a week off,” she says.
During tax season about seven years ago, she decided to start her own gardening business. “I just felt I didn’t want to sit at a desk and look out the window anymore, so I talked to my husband and said, ‘I think I have to try this, because if I don’t, I’ll go through the rest of my life saying why didn’t I.’”
Alloway Garden Design does a bit of everything, with the focus on deer-proof gardening and water-wise practices. She designs new gardens and does renovations on old ones in addition to coaching and consulting. “If somebody doesn’t know how to do something and they want to learn, I can show them how or work alongside them in their garden,” Alloway says.
She and husband Dick have one son, Toller, who’ll be 25 this year and attends the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. When she was expecting, Alloway says, her husband liked the name of Canadian Olympic ice skater Toller Cranston, but she wasn’t so sure at the time. “I’m a very short person!” she laughs. “I came to like it, though, and it’s been a good name.” Toller was her “right-hand guy,” she says, before he went off to school, working with her on strenuous jobs and always there with an extra set of hands.
For fun, she likes to create hypertufa. “It’s one of the things I’ve taught classes on with Marge Bonner, one of my Master Gardener friends,” says Alloway. Hypertufa are planting containers made from a mixture of cement, sand or peat moss and perlite or vermiculite mixed to the consistency of cottage cheese and then molded using the inside or outside of existing containers. After it cures, hypertufa has the advantage of being weatherproof in the winter, unlike terra cotta which is subject to shifts in temperature and can crack if left outdoors year-round.
Alloway’s own garden has evolved as her business has grown, she says. “I love English cottage gardens – the whimsy and the controlled chaos – but for the most part that look is hard to achieve with little maintenance.” So several years ago, she did some research and decided what flowering shrubs she liked and changed her garden from being full of perennials to instead featuring things like Hydrangeas, Daphne Flower and Nine Bud Flower that she says have a lot of impact, but don’t require as much maintenance. “There’s no such thing as low maintenance [in a garden], but with the right planning, you can make the garden fit the time that you do have.”
