Landscaping Gets A Rustic Look Latest Trend Lets Forest Meet The City

The display garden that drew the biggest crowd at February’s Northwest Garden Show featured flagstone paths overgrown with grass and moss, gardens with such ambiguous borders they blended right into the lawn, and an old garage.

Granted, some of the hundreds of showgoers who lined up at the four-day Seattle show to see this garden really just wanted to see the exquisitely restored 1920s Cadillac in the garage.

But those more interested in gardens than classic cars lingered because the garden typified a trend present in all the display gardens at the show: rustic landscaping.

Welcome to gardening Northwest-style. Call it chaotic, unorganized, eclectic or neglected, gardeners in this part of the country are opting out of highmaintenance formal (read fussy) flower gardens with their straight edges and symmetry, and are letting the shrubs and trees grow.

In the new style of gardening, forest meets city in the back yard.

“Gardeners want less maintenance and less finicky plants,” says Christy Ann Hensler, who owns the Rock Garden Nursery near Diamond Lake north of Spokane. “They aren’t doing rustic gardens because they are ecologic-minded, though. What they’re trying to conserve is their own energy.”

Kathy Hutton, manager of Plants of the Wild in Tekoa, agrees. “People are turning to woodland gardens,” she says. “Nobody has the time for maintenance of poodle trees any more. Everybody likes to go to their back yard and feel like they are in the woods away from the city. They want their yard to be a place to go and relax and not have to work at it.”

Indeed, small nurseries specializing in everything from native plants to wildflowers to rock-garden plants are springing up and many are thriving. Plants of the Wild, which is undergoing a major expansion at its Tekoa, Wash., site, now sells much of its stock through a new nursery in the Spokane Valley, Smart Gardens at Argonne Road and Bigelow Gulch.

The Rock Garden Nursery specializes in daylilies to fill a demand for old-fashioned, no-maintenance plants. Tower Gardens in south Spokane touts hostas and hardy perennials.

But it takes more than a row of daylilies bordering the lawn to achieve the look of a rustic garden. In most cases, it involves taking out much if not all of the lawn, and replacing it with a mixture of shrubs, vines, wild grasses, conifers and groundcovers.

“Some people like a small lawn, but the idea is to mow only a small portion of the yard and have the rest covered with bark and wildflowers and grasses,” says Hutton. The lawn area is the only formal element; everything else is left natural. “That way you don’t have to spend a lot of time in maintenance, but you have a green oasis,” she says.

But a rustic garden doesn’t mean no-maintenance. Rather, think lower maintenance.

The winner of the fifth annual Pacific Northwest Gardens contest, run in conjunction with the Seattle show, says his goal is to garden with “whimsy and great stewardship.”

Rob Larson gardens on 1-1/2 acres near Lake Stevens, Wash., and says he’s just as happy gardening with weeds as with Japanese maples. Looks are deceptive, however. He used a mixture of conifers, maples and alders along with native plants such as lamb’s ear and salal, and ajuga (carpet bugle) for groundcover.

And he has a pond, accessed with cobblestone paths.

Hutton says most people who come to Plants in the Wild “have an interest in not pruning a lot.”

“They want their yards to look like they stepped out back into a forest. If you want that look, it helps a lot to have a water feature, which gives you a lot more opportunity to use woodland and native plants,” she says.

Of Larson’s winning garden, judges noted that the natural woodland on his parcel blended right into the gardens he planted.

How can this new rustic Northwest look be achieved?

For those more comfortable with formal plantings - shaped boxwood hedges, rows of tea roses, acres of manicured lawn - it’s an exercise in discipline. Think chaos rather than organized plantings. Think mixtures of textures and green hues. Think downplaying bright floral displays.

Landscape designers agree one of the quickest ways to create a rustic garden is dig up as much of the lawn as you can stand and plant dwarf conifers. Look at the forest and take note of what kinds of plants create that woodland ambience - evergreens, ferns, small shrubs with berries, groundcovers. But rather than wait two decades for a ponderosa pine to grow (and then be left with a tree trunk to look at when the tree grows to 80 feet), opt for a mugo pine, which has the needles, the shape and color of a ponderosa, but is a dwarf version.

Many area nurseries also stock a wide variety of other dwarf conifers - balsam, weeping cedars and larch, hemlock, and blue spruce. Then start to fill in with other native, but widely available bushes like Oregon grape, red-twigged dogwood and hardy rhododendrons. Underneath, plant sword ferns and groundcovers like kinnikinnick. For color spots, plant naturalizing crocus and narcissus, primula and columbine.

Other elements essential to any rustic garden are paths and wildlife attractants (birdbaths, a water feature, birdhouses, or even bushes with plenty of berries). The more formal the path, the more formal the garden, so opt for only the essence of a path if possible - a few well-placed flagstones, cobblestones or a natural material. For example, the famed Herbfarm in Fall City just east of Issaquah uses crushed hazelnut hulls on the paths through its extensive herb and flower gardens.

And unlike more formal landscaping, rustic gardens don’t focus on a season-long, in-your-face floral display. Some almost ignore blooming plants, other than modest flowers on berry-producing bushes, perhaps a few spring-blooming azaleas or a carpet of moss that has blossoms so tiny a magnifying glass is needed to see them.

Those who want brightly blooming flowers near the house can create cottage gardens, which segue easily into a rustic landscape. Cottage gardens, which have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the past few years, rely heavily on perennials - poppies, daisies, coneflower, hollyhock, coral bells, foxglove and many other garden staples.

A landscape built with cottage gardens, evergreens, small private glens, and a comfortable amount of sprawl among the plantings will look, well, like your grandmother’s garden. And, perhaps that’s the reason gardeners flocked to the display garden with the old wooden garage and cottage with windowboxes at the Northwest Garden Show - it reminded them of home.

Maybe not their homes, but perhaps a home in a time and place we’d all like to go back to, where mornings are spent sitting on the porch. Just sitting. Relaxing. That’s what rustic landscaping is all about.