Do you like gardening? the poet said. We were sitting last spring in a workshop, bundled in sweaters. Do I like gardening? is a complicated question for me. Every spring I hack away at the margins of wilderness around my home, then watch the tangle creep back through the summer. I like gardens, I told her. This wasn’t a quiz. The poet, Kathryn Weld, wanted to know if I’d like to drive up to Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring with her. She knew someone there who was interested in collaborating with creative writers for an exhibit.

On a chilly, windy day last March, in the Hudson Highlands, I walked over a footbridge into a space I might have dreamed up, a wild rocky place that was once the home of Anne and Frank Cabot, the founder of the Garden Conservancy, whose obsessive work of planting and landscaping began here in the 1950s.

It took me two or three visits with a map to figure out how Stonecrop’s gardens flow and connect. The high point, the starting point, is an English-style house called the Bothy, an old-fashioned word for a shelter for gardeners; here are the offices and an airy gallery for exhibits, surrounded by a terrace with tables and chairs.

The slopes behind the Bothy feature a series of ponds nestled among large rocks, fed by a cascade and ending in a pool in front of a bamboo thicket, a magical space called the Himalayan Slope.

On the other side of the Bothy, woodlands gardens, raised stone beds, and a gravel garden lead to a glass Conservatory that seems to float in a large pond framed by silvery birches.

Across the path from the Conservatory are a network of greenhouses, neat potting sheds, and an enclosed English-style flower garden.

On the far side of the potting sheds, below the greenhouses and lichen-covered frames for the alpine plants that are the signature of Stonecrop, we found flower beds organized by plant-family and laid out around a long pergola.

That first day, the pergola was covered with the snarled winter-brown branches of wisteria.

You like it? Weld asked. I loved it. She proposed we separate, find good places to sit, and write privately for an hour or so at one of benches or rocks in the gardens. I climbed back to a rock shelf on a pond presided over by the spooky bare branches of a Katsura tree that overlooked the purple hills and valleys of the Hudson Highlands and began my first poem at Stonecrop.

I came frequently after that. You didn’t have to be a poet to be enthralled by the way the gardens grew and changed–it was like watching a baby turn into a teenager in stop time.

The bleakly stunning Conservatory and its pond were, soon after my first visit, ringed by yellow irises, its rock island covered with turtles and a lethargic mass of black snakes (turns out they were mating).

The sound of the pond’s bullfrogs is the soundtrack of summer. I came with a writer friend who loved birds and pointed out orioles, bluebirds, and a song sparrow who accompanied us down a lane of ferns and into a colorful garden presided over by a buxom scarecrow named for the British gardener Gertrude Jekyll.

If there’s a British flavor to Stonecrop, it’s no doubt the work of its director, Caroline Burgess, an Englishwoman who came to the gardens forty years ago from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Eight poets from Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester County and one from New Jersey accepted the invitation to write in the gardens this season. Curator Kathy Weld and Karen Rattazzi-Stein, Stonecrop’s Director of Special Projects and the force behind this exhibit, were inspired by The Bond of Live Things Everywhere installation at the New York Botanical Garden, which featured poems by Lucille Clifton and other Black poets embedded throughout the grounds.

They decided to plant the poems in the gardens at Stonecrop. Weld chose two or three poems from each poet, then she and Rattazzi-Stein printed signs with a pertinent line and a QR code that links to an audiofile of the full poem.

Finding all twenty or so of these posts is a treasure hunt. Someone wandering through the gardens with a cellphone can hear “The Sunken Greenhouse”, a poem by B.K. Fischer, the first Poet Laureate of Westchester County, by the foot of the pit house– “a room dug/waist deep in the ground…. a dim place/somehow both burrow and garret.”

Weld’s poem about Eve, the original gardener of Eden, can be heard while gazing out of the Wisteria Pavilion on the slope behind the Bothy.

H.E. Fisher will break your heart by the roses. As you leave Stonecrop via the footbridge, you can cue my voice hoping the garden’s beauty follows us home.

This fall, in the gallery in the Bothy, several notebooks display the collected poems we wrote this season, accompanied by an exhibit of striking photographs by 6 photographers, curated by Lori Adams and Rob Zuckerberg; the photographs, along with books by the poets, are for sale. Anyone can come and see our work, until the season ends on October 30th.

Anyone could come and write something beautiful in these gardens.

Stonecrop Gardens, Stonecrop.org, 81 Stonecrop Lane (off Route 301), Cold Spring, NY 10516. Open hours: Mon, Wed, Fri 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sat 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., please register online for Saturday and Sunday visits. The Gardens are also open Sun, Oct. 13, register online. Admission $10; members free