Rivers provide backdrop for Garden of the Month

Garden and landscape design is the art of taking advantage of the elements in and around a garden.

Sometimes it’s to highlight a unique tree or a planting of favorite plants. Maybe it’s to provide outdoor entertaining space or privacy. Sometimes, though, a garden’s design is dictated by an element so bold and dramatic that gardener can do nothing more than frame it with equally bold plantings and architecture.

In the garden of Rene and Steve Goebel of Nine Mile Falls, a view from high on a bluff above the confluence of the Spokane and Little Spokane rivers demanded they plan an equally bold garden to frame it. Their efforts won them the July Garden of the Month award from the Inland Empire Gardeners.

The Goebels’ house and garden are only four years old. The house is a lodge style with a wrap-around front porch perfect for taking in the view. A broad lawn flows around the house providing a green frame for the view below. It also provides them with green space in case of wildfire. A sculpture in the garden is made in part from the remains of a construction trailer that melted in a wildfire that occurred during construction of the house.

“I love agastache and gaura,” says Rene. ”We are on this bluff and it’s so windy. They move in the wind so that the garden dances.” She has also created mass plantings of ornamental grasses that move and rustle in the slightest wind. These all tie into the natural plantings of native grasses around the house to create a constantly moving frame for the river valley below. The agastache and gaura also draw hoards of hummingbirds to the garden.

Roses are another of Rene’s favorite plants and she has planted them among other plants in almost all of her beds. A trip to Paris last fall inspired her to plant a bed of roses with French names. Having roses and other tasty deer treats is a challenge, though. “I spray every three days to keep them at bay,” says Rene. “Consistent spraying is the key. They know what blooms and buds have grown since the last spraying.”

The hardscape walks and patios around the house were designed to feel like the flowing river with curves and bends and rounded edges giving them a very natural feel. Several naturalized rock water features add motion and sound around the garden. A short walk down the slope takes you to a fire pit that overlooks the river.

In a sheltered corner of the garden, Rene’s husband and son built her a raised-bed vegetable garden fenced off from the deer. Here Rene grows colorful annuals as well as broccoli, spinach, pumpkins, tomatoes, peas, corn, herbs, beans and squash. It’s a healthy garden; her tomato cages are made of rebar and were holding up 6-foot tall plants. “They get 10 feet tall,” she said.

“It’s a work in progress,” says Rene. “I already see things I want to move.”