Secret garden

A walled and plant-filled courtyard is a private sanctuary for a Madison couple.

- KELLI BOZEMAN

The deer love Suzanne Cade’s colorful landscape almost as much as she does.

But these uninvited guests are not greeted with a smile at the Madison home she and her husband Hunter built in the Stonebridge neighborhood three years ago. Even when the couple lived in Jackson for the previous four decades, they had seen what roaming white-tails could do to a bed full of blossoms.

“We have a real deer problem out here,” Cade explains. “I wanted a garden outside my kitchen and breakfast room windows, but I knew I would have to close it in.”

Cade called upon Madison landscape architect Michael Gibson—who has designed gardens for high-profile clients ranging from Lance Bass to Governor Ray Mabus—to bring her vision to life. To merge seamlessly with the style of the house, Gibson surrounded the garden space with a 5-foot-high old brick wall—the same material used along with stucco on the home’s façade— and punctuated the boundary with a garden gate painted in a blue hue that mirrors Cade’s favorite interior color.