Before they bought this house, in the late 1970s, Carol and David Delaney were not gardeners. Neither was their new yard much of an inspiration. “It was nothing,” Carol says. “Just a house with a small yard around it . . . a lawn, a few bushes, that was it.”
The pretty Victorian is a two-story Second Empire cottage with a bell-shaped roof and a delightful wraparound porch with fancy sawn balusters. It was built around 1890 just a stone’s throw from the sea in Rockport, Massachusetts, the Cape Ann town once famous for its granite quarries. The lot includes a barn that predates the house; local lore has it that lumber once was milled here for the neighborhood. The rectangular lot, which also has two sheds, is sandwiched between a narrow village street and a small lane. The Delaneys are the third owners of the house, which had been slightly enlarged with a kitchen addition sometime before Carol and David moved here.
It was sailing that brought them to this ocean town on Boston’s North Shore. “We moved from Cambridge so that we would be able to sail our boat on summer evenings after work, instead of just on the weekends,” David explains. The two were attracted to Rockport’s village center, with its collection of tightly clustered 18th- and 19th-century frame houses. They bought this charmer on impulse, and for years they tended to their children and their careers. Increasingly at home in the quiet neighborhood, the couple began to see possibilities for their smallish lot.