Trim Hahn’s love of gardening can be traced back to her formative years in London.
Thanks to her grandmother, Margaret Elizabeth Lloyd, Hahn grew up with flowers all around her – from trips to the Royal Botanical Gardens to nature walks where she was encouraged to pick only one of everything for a floral arrangement to Lloyd’s work as a flower painter.
Art was also a big part of growing up as both her parents were painters, with some of her mother’s artwork adorning the walls of her Peterborough home’s dining room – one in particular that includes peonies and roses.
Painting was in her blood, but Hahn never went the same route with art as other members of her family did. Instead, Hahn gravitated toward the focus of their work and has spent many years digging in the dirt with perennials and annuals, and making beautiful arrangements for all kinds of occasions.
“Gardening and flower design is my form of art,” she said. “I just took a different course.”
Growing up as the oldest of four, Hahn saw how the drive to create dominated her parents’ lives and left her with a lot of extra responsibilities.
“While it was a wonderfully creative household to grow up in, it was chaotic,” she said. “Children can get lost in the shuffle sometimes.”
But that passion for plants and flowers never wavered and has been one of the biggest passions in her life – that and her career in education.
Her first experience in New Hampshire came by mistake. Her father had wanted to bring the family to Michigan for a summer, but in the course of inquiring about a summer camp, he mistakenly wrote to New Hampshire and the family ended up traveling to what Hahn described as a UN-style camp.
So for two summers, the family came to New Hampshire. Up to that point, Hahn has really only left England twice for family trips to Switzerland and France, but once she was old enough, Hahn returned at the age of 18 to be a camp counselor.
“It was a really eye opening experience for me,” she said.
That’s where she met her husband Steve. They only spent a brief time together, as Steve was getting ready to lead a trip overseas, but the roots were set for a lasting relationship.
Hahn returned to London after the summer and went to teachers college, but the two stayed in contact, spending about a year going back and forth for visits. Then Steve moved to London, after completing his graduate work at Harvard, and the two spent a year together living and exploring in the place Hahn grew up.
At the end of the year, Steve was offered a job and as someone who was young and adventurous, Hahn decided to come back to the states and has spent the last four-plus decades calling it home.
“It was a really big adjustment for me to live here, especially going from London to rural New Hampshire,” Hahn said. “But I was really young and when you’re young, you’re very adaptable. I was so much in love, I’d do anything.” Plus she hadn’t really established a life in London as an adult.
They were married at the end of the year and landed in Hillsborough. Hahn got her teaching certificate and taught first grade. They both had a love of education and felt strongly about improving the school system in the town they now called home.
They lived in Hillsborough for 10 years, while Steve worked at Derryfield School, but in the early 1980s he was offered the position as head of school at Lawrence Academy. It was not the easiest adjustment being the wife of a head of school because as Hahn put it “the roles of wives in boarding schools hadn’t kept up with the times.”
She taught second grade in Groton and was a language coordinator, but by the mid 1990s, with two young children at home, Hahn had what she described as a midlife crisis. So twice a week she made the drive to the Rhode Island School of Design to take classes in the interior architecture program.
“I loved the work, but then I started missing school,” Hahn said.
She went on to become a writing instructor, but wanted more involvement in guiding a school. It was on a long walk with a friend where she began talking about her aspirations and it led to her enrolling in Antioch to get her masters in organization and management. Her first job in administration was as an assistant elementary school principal in the Sanborn Regional School District before embarking on a four month sabbatical with Steve to Italy and England.
Hahn loved the world of education, working with parents, teachers and students, and went on to become the principal of the elementary schools in the Hamilton Wenham Regional School District. School was her passion and being in a small school district allowed her to wear many hats, from being in the classroom to help teachers to taking over the PE duties for a day. It was also her way of life, calling boarding schools home for more than 20 years.
Even though they didn’t live in Hillsborough full time for many years, she and Steve still had the house they built in the late 1980s.
“It was a great retreat for us and a wonderful reprieve from the distractions that always exist at a boarding school,” Hahn said. “It was a real sanctuary for our family.”
When retirement rolled around, they had a place to be. It was theirs and of course included a lavish garden that Hahn put in herself. But there was something about Peterborough.
Hahn said they started thinking “maybe Peterborough is the kind of place we should retire to in the end.” They were coming to Peterborough to play tennis and go out to dinner, so in 2001 they bought a house. It needed a total renovation, but three days after buying it they rented it out.
Then came the time to follow through on the renovation and it took over a year. At that point they decided they’d spend a winter in Peterborough “and we never went back to the old house,” she said.
“We just loved this town,” Hahn said. “We love the access to everything. It’s just a different quality of life, being able to walk to what you want to do.”
The one downside was there wasn’t nearly the same kind of space for a garden. But Hahn has made it work. She also gets plenty of exposure to other gardens through her membership with the Peterborough Garden Club, where she helps take care of multiple gardens around town.
“One of the things I really love is working with the gardens,” Hahn said. “It’s been a real highlight for me. Gardening is a mindful experience.”
While at Lawrence Academy, Hahn started a floral design business with a friend where she did wedding flowers and events.
“I loved it. It was a creative outlet for me,” she said.
She kept the business name, Posies, and has since revived the it – under Posies by Trim – since retiring and it goes perfectly with her passion for gardening and design.
While Hahn has lived in the U.S. for 46 years, she’s never lost sight of where she came from. And her love of gardens and flowers is a big reason why.
“It’s so much part of the culture I grew up with,” she said. “That’s what I hold on to the most here.”
Her goal nowadays is to go to England for the winters, where the ground doesn’t freeze and daffodils emerge in January and February, and she just so happened to return this year in March before the coronavirus changed travel and life as we know it.
But the downtime means more time in the gardens and “that’s what I do this time of year,” she said. It connects her with nature and as Hahn puts it, “I thrive on it.”
And the same can be said about her time spent in education. She has so many fond memories of her days as an educator, and recently got an email from a former student who said she made a real difference in her life when she was having a hard time.
“You make an impact and don’t always realize,” she said.