As summer sets in, gardeners across Middle Tennessee are planting flowers, vegetables, herbs, shrubs and trees. But some gardens stand out in their significance, including at Franklin’s historic Wyatt Hall, where an English-style garden serves as both an homage to the home’s history and a blossoming sign of new life.
Wyatt Hall, a late-Federal-style home built in 1800, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The home is named for Margaret Early Wyatt and her husband, Hubert Wyatt, who lived there from 1946 to 1982. About 15 years ago, Dr. Benny Woody, a veterinarian, and his wife, Alix, moved into the estate that encompasses some 11 acres of land.
While the historic home has long featured a garden, the Woodys have expanded and elevated the space, creating living art hidden in the heart of Franklin. Throughout 2024, they allowed Nfocus to visit regularly to document the garden.
Finding Balance
The bountiful garden of a little more than 1 acre surrounds the home, growing upward and outward, creating layers of differing textures and tones. It’s a breathing tapestry, with some plants seeking the shade of others that ascend towards the sun — an ever-evolving world somewhere between the manicured and the wild.
“When you’re in an old garden, you don’t want it perfect,” Alix says. So she tries to strike a balance, trimming things “a bit, but not too much.” “A lot of people would walk in here and think, oh my gosh, this is a mess,” she says. “But I want it to look like it just kind of happened. To me, that’s … harder to do than having everything just all manicured perfectly.”
For the Woodys, the garden is a series of natural rooms, decorated with antique cast iron benches depicting snakes or dogs; dozens of statues made of lead, zinc and bronze; and two stone Chinese foo dog statues dating back to the 1600s.
An octagonal library, simply called the Octagon, built by Benny over the course of a decade, sits near the rear of the garden and features antique windows from Chicago dating back to the 1910s and 1920s.
Much of Benny’s work is focused on the “hardscape” of the garden. He procures and restores antique statues and benches — fixtures dating to the 1800s and early 1900s — and even installed bricks that once lined the streets of Nashville.
“It anchors a garden and stuff that is going to be there,” Benny says. “And the benches, they always give me a place to sit down.”
Everlasting Evolution
From spring to fall 2024, the garden continued to change with the seasons, with the Woodys working daily to tend to the flowers and greenery — watering, pulling weeds, planting and trimming. In the process, they created new spaces, transforming grass into pebbled patches with a new seating area, or connecting the outdoor “rooms” by adding new pathways.
For the Woodys, there is no master plan. “A lot of it’s just trial and error and just seeing what looks good to my eye,” Alix says. “It just kind of evolves. I don’t have that gift of going to a drawing board and drawing it all out.”
Benny agrees: “We’re more the type who will come into a place and keep what’s there, but modify, rather than feeling like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to strip that out, we’ve got to take all that out.’”
And the work is ongoing. “You’re never done with a garden,” Alix says. “You keep modifying it, and then things die.”
Spiritual Serenity
Both the exterior and interior of Wyatt Hall are inspired by Alix’s love of English gardens and homes.
“From the time I was a teenager, that was just what I liked,” she says. “I rarely looked at anything American. It was always basically the British country houses … that’s just what felt good to me.”
The garden is flooded with the scent of blossoming flowers, and the sound of birds and a pack of barking Shih Tzus, lovingly referred to as the Woodys’ “children.” Handcrafted and personalized wind chimes hang from trees throughout the space, whispering in the wind in memory of dogs once loved in life.
“That’s the spirit speaking to us through the wind, and the wind chime is the instrument of the soul that’s gone,” Alix says. “There is a magical quality to these chimes. Sometimes, it can be windy and they don’t sing. Other times, they’re singing and there’s no wind. … They make me cry, and they make me smile as well.”
For the Woodys, that magic is reflected throughout the garden, which, despite being sandwiched between Franklin Road and a railroad, often feels like it’s secluded in a dream.
“It’s my spirituality,” Alix says. “You will never see me going in a church door or anything — that’s not me. It’s out here. It’s seeing the birds. It’s seeing the chipmunks running around. That’s what I love. And I just feel when I’m in sync with nature.”
The garden sees its share of animals — deer, chipmunks, butterflies and, in 2024, screaming cicadas. “You have to think of them,” Alix says. “I’m just kind of a visitor in their world.”
Old and New
Some of the greenery Margaret Wyatt planted during her residence in the house survives to this day — peonies, boxwoods, toad lilies, magnolias, yucca plants and a variety of hydrangeas.
Those historic plants are mixed in with newer additions brought in by the Woodys: elephant ears, banana trees, roses and more.
The uncertainty and impact of climate change means adaptation is required for survival, with Alix already moving toward more climate-resistant plants, like abelia.
“Elephant ears take a ton of water,” Alix says, adding that they may soon need to plant other tropical plants too. “With the boxwoods, I don’t know how long we’ll get to have them. … I look around at the beautiful hollies in the field, and I think, how many other people are going to get to see this?”
With each season comes some predictability, new challenges and wonder blossoming from the earth, with the Woodys serving not as masters of nature, but as part of the life of the garden itself.
“We’re just caretakers,” Alix says. “This is just my little world I’ve made, and it just makes me feel secure and it makes me happy. Otherwise I wouldn’t go through the drudgery of being hot and dirty and sweaty. … It’s just what we love to do. It just satisfies something in me.”
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