Growing passion

Juan Juan Moses had a deal with a local coffee shop: She’d trade bouquets of her fresh flowers for coffee grounds for her garden.

She would bring the flowers in a simple, white stoneware pitcher. You know – the kind your grandmother had in her kitchen.

And that’s where this story takes an interesting twist, because it could be about a lady who went nuts making the first real garden of her life and then winning the July Garden of the Month contest of the Inland Empire Gardeners.

Or it could be a story about the pitcher, which really did belong to someone’s grandmother: Moses’ husband David’s great-grandmother, Anna Mary Robertson Moses.

Most of us know her simply as Grandma Moses, the American folk artist whose paintings told the story of American life in the early 1900s.

The Moses family, including sons Alexander, 8, and Hunter, 6, moved to Spokane from Anchorage, Alaska, four years ago. They settled on a 10-acre plot above the confluence of the Little Spokane and the Spokane River.

Once the house construction was finished, Moses finally was free to create gardens where she actually could grow something.

“The growing season is very short in Alaska, and it was hard to grow flowers and very frustrating,” she said. “We always had a vegetable garden.

“I was ready to garden big time, but I really didn’t know how. The first year my knowledge grew explosively.”

Her garden exploded, too. She began haunting garden stores for bargains.

If it was the right price, it was in the garden.

She got seedlings from a friend and planted them everywhere. Dogwoods and Japanese maples were planted.

Together, she and David built a raised planting bed and filled it with tulips, black-eyed susans, lilies and lavender.

Around the house she planted monarda, Russian sage, coreopsis, rudbeckia, lavender, roses, policemen’s helmet, “Autumn Joy” sedum, purple coneflower, Maltese cross, lilies, cosmos and gardenia.

Scattered through all the perennials are 194 rose bushes in dozens of varieties. Behind the house, David and the boys manage the vegetable garden and a big play lawn.

“I don’t own a gardening book,” said Moses. “I like colors, very strong, very bold colors.

“I just throw colors together and hope it turns out.”

Well, it did and that’s why Moses won the Garden of the Month contest for July.

The judges for the garden contest called it a hidden jewel, a flamboyant riot of color in the middle of the woods and a triumph of the human spirit.

“A lot of people keep saying this is an English cottage garden, but I didn’t set out to be this way,” says Moses. “I don’t have any particular concept (for the garden) except that I want it to be comfortable and casual.

“Living in this environment, a formal garden would absolutely not work. I want it to blend into the environment.”

Moses has her challenges growing in the open without any kind of fence. In fact, her first encounter with deer eating her rosebuds sent her husband looking for help in the phone book.

They didn’t have deer in Alaska. She quickly learned about deer repellents.

The next challenge was wild turkeys that thought the garden was a wonderful place to scratch up a meal or two. They now have a water bowl at the very back of the yard – away from the garden.

Hummingbirds and lots of other birds now frequent the garden seeking nectar, insects and drinks from the birdbath.

Moses likened growing a garden to raising a child, yet it’s a rather demanding child.

“When I’m pruning and deadheading, sometimes I think I’m braiding a little girl’s hair,” she says. “I see two roses touch one another, and it’s like two children fighting.

“Pulling weeds is handing out discipline to the errant child.”