History lives behind us in the past and it surrounds us. If we live in an ‘old’ place we inherited some history and we can point to it in the layers of wallpaper or the split stone that supports the house. We look out at the landscape that surrounds the house and see remnants of other people’s lives.

When we build a new house we bring some history with us.

Perhaps because I have been a professional storyteller half of my life or because I am interested in history, my work as a landscape designer inspires me to imagine histories into the new landscapes I design. Or maybe I design histories into the gardens I imagine. It works both ways. Before I provide some examples I’ll point to these historic relics that we take for granted.

A ‘Sentinel’ tree, an old apple gnarled and hollow, the last maple tree from a stand of venerable sugar maples, an oak or a pasture pine standing apart from the wooded hillside; all these are relics.

Foundation perimeters, holes, paddock walls where a barn used to be; these are what are left of a farm’s history.

A stone wall that runs off into the woods or divides a meadow, fences and gates left after the cows have been sold provide a connection to history.

A stand of overgrown lilacs, a rose bush gone wild, even a farm pond filled with cattails give us a clue to the past.

Matching the historic element to the new house can be easy. The new house may be a reproduction of an old style such as a Cape Cod, a Colonial, or a saltbox. These come with their own suggestions of accompanying history.

The neighborhood may also provide clues often allowing you to carry over an element such as a boundary marker, wall, or style of walkway brickwork.

And then there is the homeowner’s story itself. Weaving your personality into the stone wall, fence, gate, and even the choice of plants adds an important layer of authenticity to the re-storying. Most old homesteads carry the personality mark of the original builders in the placement of buildings and accompanying objects.

For one new cape in an old neighborhood, I built a fieldstone wall along the road which contains a very vibrant garden-no lawn. For a rural colonial, I moved the driveway away from the house by twenty feet and designed a formal walled herb garden close to the house. On a country property where I was fortunate to be brought in before the house was built and we preserved a group of large white birches that are within eight feet of the porch. One year, I had access to some large apple trees and moved ten of them to create an orchard on what had been a stretch of expressionless lawn. In each case the element also matched the personal history and interests of the owners. The result in each case was a landscape project that appeared, once the dust has settled, to have always been there. It also worked to give the landscape and the house the same visual purpose.

A large example is at the Bridgton Academy. I designed and built the walls and plantings, geographically at the center of the campus, so that they might have been there before all the rest of the buildings went up. The thirty-two foot round outdoor classroom set high on the crest of a bowl of land was envisioned as the base of a bygone tower or silo. There is a breach in the wall out of which spills a dry stream bed. Boulders continue sinuously down the hillside akin to what we see in the natural settings of steep hillside. The diameter of the round stonework is the same as the portico on the new Humanities Building. In a few years the plantings of shrubs and trees that compliment the stonework will override any memory of what was there before. I would hope that someone asks, “Was that always there?”

Newer houses, hybrids exhibiting no immediate clue relating to history are more challenging. In many cases it helps to have an encyclopedic memory for architectural styles so that the ancestor of each ‘modern’ house may be recognized.

When a house is so generic or so today that a connection to its history can’t be found there is still hope. If we imagine that every house has been built on old inhabited land then we need only find the best form left from that imagined former life that will fulfill both that landscape need and our own need.

The suggestion that we might be living on someone else’s ancestral home can be as subtle as one piece of stone that bears the mark of human labor or as extravagant as a stone ruins sitting on the edge of the farther field.

If we have the chance to select trees that will remain after construction, we can leave them in a farm-like row along the driveway or select the grandest and allow it to take its place as the guardian of our new home.

If we do the work of imagining well, we will convince even ourselves that the history we planted was always there. Indeed it was, inside that great vault we call our mind.

David Neufeld designs and builds real-time dream landscapes. He owns North Star Garden Design and North Star Stoneworks.