Helen Wisdom's love affair with Maine began more than two decades ago, when she and some friends fled steamy New Orleans for a week at Mosquito Head near Port Clyde. Wooed and won, Wisdom immediately began looking for her own piece of the Maine coast. She ended up one peninsula west, at the tip of Pleasant Point in Cushing, where she found a site wrapped in the glinting watery hug of Davis Cove. But there was the rub: The glorious setting seemed to magnify the colorlessness of the suburban-style lawn and boxy house.A local landscaper told Wisdom, "You need Gregory Moore."

Moore was just thirty, but even then he could have handed out business cards reading Renaissance Man. A recent graduate of the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding school in nearby Rockland, he had gardened for neighbors in his native southern California since the age of ten. By sixteen, he had his own landscaping business, managing a crew of high schoolers and advocating organic management practices, which were unconventional at the time. He also was a woodworker who built decks, fences, and hot tubs for his clients. So while he'd come to Maine to build boats, it wasn't long before he was tending gardens and renovating houses, too.

Wisdom told Moore she yearned for an English cottage garden. Moore has given her that, and the cottage, too. The bland box that once resembled, in Wisdom's words, "a Holiday Inn," has become a virtual garden element. Its cedar-shingled fa?ade is alive with climbing roses and hydrangea reaching almost to the eaves. Curving border gardens sprinkled with delphiniums, yarrow, and foxglove frame the pathway that leads to the windowed front door, where pink geraniums bloom. A second-story deck built by Moore, who also renovated the house's interior, offers a bird's-eye view of the more formal main garden, a Celtic cross formed by four crescent-shaped beds. A long stairway lands directly opposite one of the two grass paths that intersect at the garden's center, which is marked by an armillary, a skeletal astronomical sphere pierced by an arrow pointing skyward in the direction of nearby Gay Island. Edged with the airy chartreuse flowers of lady's mantle, this circular outdoor room is furnished with pink shrub roses, Shasta daisies, clary sage, and the wild corkscrewing form of a Harry Lauder's walking stick.

The transformation from homely property to a lush retreat that is worthy of its backdrop - the island-dotted confluence of the Meduncook and St. George rivers and the Atlantic Ocean - did not happen overnight. "We've done a little every year," says Wisdom, whose relationship with Moore is in its twentieth summer. "Now the bushes are tall and beautiful." Homeowner and gardener are still hard at it, moving and adding plants, digging new borders, and planning with both immediate and distant rewards in mind. Along the way they've learned much about the unique qualities of this sun-drenched one-acre paradise and about each other.

People will do a lot of living in twenty years. A widow when she met Gregory Moore, Helen Wisdom later married Jack Zoller, a retired physician. She became a grandmother. She retired from teaching and took up photography. Last summer she battled cancer. This summer she arrives in Cushing cancer-free. During those same years, Gregory Moore married, too. His wife, Kathleen Starrs, quit her job as a nurse-social worker to work alongside him as the designer and crew leader of Hands and Knees Gardens. They raised two daughters; the eldest is off to college this fall. They lost their farm to fire. Now Moore, who has added restoration carpenter to his resume, is remodeling their eighteenth-century Cape and creating a new farm in the meadow out back.

The couple's lives intersect in the garden at Merry Wisdom Cottage, whose milestones they have planned and carried out together. Moore and Starrs, who have seven other clients, have tended this property the longest and they say it is unique. "In the winter, when the wind is howling, it feels like the Arctic," Moore says. "It's ten degrees colder than it is at our house five miles away. But come spring, Helen's garden is the first to grow and bloom, and it's the last to die off in the fall. Climbing roses that would be dead at other waterfront properties thrive here. It is a very special microclimate. Davis Cove, the Meduncook River, and Pleasant Point Gut act like a little reflecting oven." A bank of 350 rugosa roses along the lot's shoreline border cut ocean breezes and contribute to the sheltered environment.

The couple and their crew are at Wisdom's house one or two days a week to edge, weed, prune, and mow. They can't possibly tidy everything in that time, which is perfect for Wisdom, who likes getting her own hands dirty (not so Zoller; his gardening duties are limited to viewing). She prefers to garden in solitude. "I like to plant a lettuce border in the front," she says. "It's sweet to look at and fun to have. Alongside it, I plant herbs - rosemary, sage, and tarragon."

Gardeners and client enjoy an intuitive relationship. Wisdom sets the budget, but rarely makes a shopping list. "They pretty much know what I like at this point," she says. What she likes are large swaths of color, tree peonies with blossoms "the size of dinner plates," the unexpected beauty in a combination of orange, purple, and magenta poppies and, if you haven't already guessed, roses. Her favorite is the Margaret Fleming variety, a shrub rose prized for its large, deep pink blooms.

Moore typically designs the shape of the new beds, then digs them out two feet deep, amending the soil with loam and compost. Wisdom and Starrs, meanwhile, collaborate on the plantings. There is, naturally, some give and take. Wisdom will ask for changes if she doesn't care for a grouping of plants, while Moore and Starrs will steer their friend from plants likely to be problematic. "What has been great about our relationship from the get-go is that while Helen has strong ideas about what she wants, it's been a mutual, cooperative process," Moore says. "We discuss everything thoroughly and she totally respects our experience and ability. We are able to argue with each other and come out with good results. We have a great time doing it together."

Wisdom says she has learned to be a better gardener through working with Moore and Starrs. Her garden, she says, is a testament to their emphasis on soil health as the secret to strong, long-lived plants. "It is totally organic," she says with pride. "We had a butterfly bush that grew so big people couldn't believe that's what it was. It was because of the composting and soil amendments."

There is another secret. "What makes a good garden is attention to detail," Moore says. "The best fertilizer is the footstep of the gardener. It's all about being in the garden and looking at what works and what doesn't. We have developed a group of plantings that are hardy and reliable to what we're trying to create. I don't try many plants that are questionable. I don't go to a lot of heroics to make a plant grow in an environment for which it is not suited."

Last year when she was ill, Wisdom stayed at the cottage through the entire gardening season for the first time. Sapped of energy, she was unable to work the soil, but the garden was good therapy as she watched pink peonies and white Icelandic poppies give way to orange daylilies, red bee balm, and yellow yarrow. "It was wonderful to be there for that long sweep of time," she says. "Something was always blooming. The rugosa roses were there all summer, and their aroma was just glorious. They make the air seem like velvet."

Hands and Knees Gardens designed and tends two commercial clients' gardens that are in public view. They are at Lie-Nelson Toolworks in Warren and McKean & Charles Wine Merchants in Waldoboro.