Garden tour opens doors to creativity
Garden touring is all about imagin- ation. Tours are a chance to see how other people have solved just the same problem you’ve been having in your yard. Or discover a nifty way to arrange plants or get ideas on how to use spaces differently. Or realize that extraordinary gardens can be created by ordinary people.
This Sunday, the Associate Garden Clubs of Spokane will open six distinctive gardens on Spokane’s South Hill for you to explore and get your creative juices flowing.
When Harry and Liz Boyd bought their classic 1911 house 11 years ago, the basalt rock walls and wrought iron fence weren’t there. Neither was the formal front yard with its rock pillars and statuary. Today, it looks like the four year-old walls, fence and landscaping have always been there. Behind the house, the Boyds have built a playful and colorful garden filled with impatiens, marigolds and zinnias, a water feature with both a rustic waterfall and a formal Romanesque figure.
Colorful containers of flowers bloom everywhere including along the alley. Whimsical ceramic mushrooms and tin can sculptures looking like the Tin Man from the “Wizard of Oz” are tucked here and there.
Kevin and Dina Jones learned to garden from a little old Southern lady neighbor in Atlanta. Their neighbor said they needed more color and introduced them to perennials.
So when the Jones stumbled onto their house while on an evening walk six years ago, they knew just what to do. They filled the rock border with all kinds of perennials, roses, hostas and Anna Belle hydrangeas.
In the back yard they created a more formal arrangement with room for their two children to play.
Check out the playhouse and the birdhouse collection hanging over the rabbit hutch.
In the hutch Max, Ruby and Leo, the mini rex rabbits, happily scuffle around in the straw. Check out Ruby’s progress on her latest digging project. The Jones’ two enterprising children will have flower petal potpourri and plant starts available for sale.
David Dominick and Pat Holmstead’s yard is another example of how quickly you can become hooked on gardening. When they moved into their house six years ago, it too was a bare space.
They had never gardened before. They began experimenting. The first water feature they built was a disaster.
Undaunted, they called in the professional pond builders and tried it again. The result was a wonderful cozy backyard centered on the water falls and a small pool. Clematis, heliopsis, sedum, evergreens, blackberries, large clumps of blue oat grass, golden Carex, more than 1,000 bulbs and foxtail lilies spill out onto the paver patio and walks. The whole garden is watered with 5,000 feet of drip irrigation hose.
They recycle all their yard trimmings and turn out a fresh batch of compost every two weeks. A vendor will be offering tasty iced lattes for sale here.
Fifteen years ago, Dr. Matthew Jones moved into his house and began experimenting. Not by choice though. He had lived in the Portland Oregon area for a time and had grown to enjoy the green forests and the exuberant style of gardening Portland’s mild climate allowed.
Jones quickly found out that he had to work with his site. The result is a garden filled with beautiful plant combinations that uses Japanese forest grass, hostas, heuchera and Scotch moss to add color to the shade. He filled the few sunny spots with several kinds of colorful plants.
A climbing hydrangea scrambles across a trellis. This garden will be a cool spot to get out of the sun if it’s hot on Sunday.
The last two gardens are right across the street from each other. Helen Dennis had only watched her husband garden before moving to her present house three years ago. But she dove in, began studying gardening books and experimenting.
Her front yard is now filled with a rose garden along the front walk. Blue lobelia and a host of other plants fill beds that line the path past a dry stream bed, and then into the back yard. The dominating feature here is a steep rocky slope at the back of the yard.
Dennis has planted 300 bulbs among the rocks and plans to plant native and drought tolerant plants on the slope. At the base of the slope Dennis has built a series of raised beds and incorporated some small water features into the base of the slope.
She has tucked small sculptures and figures into spots around the garden.
Across the street, Liz Welty took her small space, with its rocky clay soil and poor drainage, and created a little gem of a garden. She has incorporated wildlife-friendly plants such as monarda, mountain ash, and yarrow into the landscape.
A simple, woodsy country-look back border is the perfect fore garden for the natural area behind the house. Quail and other small birds are regular visitors to the garden.
Welty has designed the garden so she has blooms from tulip time to the first snow.