When Ed Castro was in high school, he took a part-time job at his cousin’s nursery in Barrington. “My job was to plant shrubs. In the fall, I would take cuttings and propagate them in a greenhouse: dip them in root tone powder, stick them in the sand. You could create a cloned version of what you took the cutting from. Beautiful azaleas and rhododendron, all created from a single stick.

“I guess I didn’t get excited about it at the time –– it was a job. But, in hindsight, I reflect on that and realize that’s where this all began.”

Ed and his wife, Rachel, lived with her parents, Luis and Mary Oliveira, in Bristol after marrying in 1963. Ed’s father-in-law was always out in their small garden. Over the years, that small garden, now Ed’s, expanded to about an acre, comprising four neighboring parcels, bought one by one.

“My father-in-law had no interest in landscaping. He grew food to eat because that’s what he did in the Azores.” Back then Ed would plant roses and trees and shrubs but no vegetables. “We worked together but doing different things. I finally wanted to learn what he was doing.”

Ed graduated from Bryant College with a degree in management. He worked at Raytheon, in Portsmouth, for 40 years. “When I got home, I took my tie off and would head outside to the garden to release all the stress of the day.” And on Saturdays, he would be in his garden from morning until night.

“I never took any classes in landscape design. I just stood back, thought it through and sketched it out. Tall things in back, short in front. What needs shade, what needs full sun? And then I thought about color. Eventually I had it all laid out nicely.

“The first big project I did was the fish pond. I wanted that to be a focus point –– water is like a magnet. Then I built the fireplace.

“And the sidewalk. A curved brick sidewalk. I built it because I couldn’t get a contractor to build it for me — each brick in the curve had to be cut by hand. “I wanted neat plants — umbrella pine and Japanese dogwood, peanuts and saffron. I wanted people to come in and say, ‘I’ve never seen that.’

“And I wanted the garden to reflect the way my father-in-law did it in the Azores. He would line his paths with stones that he picked up.” So when Ed was in the country or walking along the shore, he would collect stones to line his pathways. Ed’s father-in-law died three years ago. “Sometimes I still hear him out there.”

Rachel’s mother, now 93, still lives with Ed and Rachel. She walks through the garden with her son-in-law every day. “She always stops to smell the fennel.”

Ed taught children’s gardening classes in his backyard for 15 years. “Essentially I taught them how to start their own gardens: how to plant north to south, keeping their rows straight, how to water, how to harvest. I had different stations set up throughout the yard –– basic stuff that first and second graders could understand.

“Four or five weeks before class I would plant radishes. I would say, ‘Everybody down on your knees, grab the leaves in two hands, and when I count to three I want you to pull that out of the ground.’ They were always so excited when they saw a radish come out of the ground.

“I had flip charts to teach them about which vegetables grow above the ground, which ones below. We talked about good and bad insects. How important the ladybug is to control the aphid population: ‘If a ladybug ever comes into your house, you carefully carry her outside again –– they eat lots of aphid eggs.’ ”More than 2,000 children came through Ed’s garden over the course of those 15 years. “Then they go home and bug their fathers and mothers to start their own gardens! Isn’t that neat?

“I can’t let this go. I have to cut the grass every three days so I can leave the clippings and don’t have to rake. I’m constantly monitoring for disease and insects, watching for fungus on my phlox, algae in the fish pond. If I don’t do that, everything will get consumed by Mother Nature. I’m not a totally organic gardener, but I do try to keep it all as natural as possible –– semi-organic –– because I do use some fertilizers but no insecticides.

“The reward for me is to walk out there and see all this beauty, to see something coming out of the ground from something I put into the ground three weeks ago. That’s satisfaction.

“And that’s the story of my gardening life.”

cgrosch@projo.com