A Yard Goes From Dirt Patch to Perennial Paradise

To help celebrate her garden's most floriferous days of the year, in mid-July, Joyce invites in about 80 guests. They enter near a series of flat, brownish-red stepping stones crowned by one bearing the inscription SUSAN'S WAY. Susan was a close friend of Joyce's, and the two women had collected the stones in Franconia during one of their last trips together. After Susan died of ovarian cancer, in 2005, Joyce set aside this area as a memorial.