LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT JUDY CONNECTICUT FARM NURSERY Quit the rat race, move to the country, fix up an old farmhouse, and spend your days outdoors, running your own nursery and garden design business. One designer's story. It is commonly said that landscape architects are pros with structure and amateurs when it comes to plants. The about horticulturists and nurserymen is that so busy focusing on individual species, they lose sight of the big picture. Judy Murphy, though, is that rare garden professional who sees it both ways. Trained as a landscape architect, she can whip up a site plan for even the slipperiest slope. But also a seasoned nurserywoman who waxes poetic about the latest cultivars and declares chartreuse foliage the ultimate neutral. home garden which shares 25 acres in Lakeville, Connecticut, with her business, Old Farm Nursery is living proof of her wide-ranging talents. Photo: Matthew Benson Like a design portfolio spread out across the land, it shows her mastery of the sunny flower border and the soothing shade garden, her talent with a loose grassy island and a formal potager. a swimming pool near the house, a naturalistic pond farther out. Murphy seems to have it all. Every gardener knows the fantasy: Quit the rat race, move to the country, fix up an old farmhouse, and spend your days outdoors, running your own nursery and garden design business. Get back to the land, simplify, relax ... ''Yeah, sure,'' laughs Murphy. ''You think relaxing to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, from March to December? Talk about stress. Imagine the 93rd day without rain, when everything ever planted is INDEX dying. And forget about escaping in a small town. If you go out to dinner, surrounded by clients. 'This about getting away from it all. I am always, totally and completely, surrounded by it all. Of course,'' she adds sheepishly, ''I really know what like to work in an The thought never crossed her mind. When Murphy went off to Cornell University, she like many undergrads in the early 1970s gave little thought to conventional, deskbound success. ''I want to study calculus in a windowless classroom,'' she says. ''I took beekeeping and art history and botany and agronomy, whatever I liked. Together, it all began to look like landscape architecture.'' After college, Murphy left the Northeast to help plant the gardens at the famed Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where she was the only woman on an all-male landscape crew. ''It was the hardest thing in the world,'' she recalls. ''I was making the same $2.20 an hour as the men, so I had to prove I could earn it the same way. I almost killed myself digging holes in the ground. But I learned that an amazing choreography to how