Welcome Home!

I used to admire the beautiful Mediterranean-style home that sat on the corner. It had been built in the 1920s for the daughter of a wealthy city founder. She’d married a sculptor and the rambling house was their love-nest. The house sat on two lots, one of which had been a beautiful formal garden.

As such things happen, the couple grew old, the artist died and the house fell into disrepair. By the time I moved into the neighborhood, it was faded, shabby and overgrown.

One day there was a “for sale” sign in the yard. And just as quickly, it was gone.

The woman who’d purchased the house was also an artist. Her husband was a photographer. Together they set about bringing the place back to its glory.

Fresh paint, in a soft shell-pink color, perked up the exterior. The interior was washed in white; white walls, white curtains and white furniture.

The gardens were another matter. The artist and her husband mowed the lawn, trimmed the roses and rebuilt crumbling walls. But there were still oddly shaped mounds of ivy scattered across the lot.

One day, photographing the artist for promotional photos for her new show, the photographer placed her in front of a mass of ivy. He bent over his tripod and looked through the lens but then straightened before snapping a picture.

“It’s a lion,” he said.

“What is?” the artist asked.

“The ivy is a lion.”

What the photographer had seen through his camera, what they hadn’t noticed before, was that the large clumps of ivy were actually topiaries that had lost their shape.

For some reason, when he’d looked through the lens he’d been able to discern the vague outline of what had been a carefully tended living ornament.

One by one, after their eyes were opened, the couple brought back the menagerie of creatures that had danced across the lawn more than 70 years ago.

And their hard work became a gift to the entire community. Once again, it was a joy to walk by the house that had come back to life.

This week in Home

The destruction left behind a devastating ice storm was the catalyst for a wonderful discovery on a hillside overlooking Spokane. In the wreckage, the traces of a beautiful century-old garden were discovered.

This weekend, the Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens, newly refurbished and once again a place of beauty and tranquility will open to the public. The story of the transformation is this week’s cover story.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. All that’s asked of any of us is to be open to the moment. To stop what we’re doing and take a second look.