Spokane in Bloom tour likely to be showy
In some ways, this long cool spring has been great for gardens, even with the late frosts. Now the soaking rains of the last couple of weeks have set us up for great shows in the June gardens.
Just in time for the Inland Empire Gardeners’ annual Spokane in Bloom garden tour Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. This year’s tour theme is Best in the West, and it will feature six gardens on Spokane’s South Hill.
The tour starts with three gardens above the Perry Street neighborhood. Theodora Sallee’s lawnless garden is an eclectic mix of unusual plants and trees all tied together with Sallee’s talents with found-object art. Sarah Kirkpatrick’s one-acre garden a few blocks away is a classic example of what happens when an old garden meets a new plant lover and how old features and basalt outcrops can be woven into a beautiful garden. Kirkpatrick admits her theme here is making lemonade out of the lemons she inherited.
Mark and Diana Graham have been lovingly restoring their 1916 American Arts and Crafts estate for the past 15 years. The property is on the National Registry of Historic Places as the Ralston and Sarah Wilbur House. The landscape was originally designed by E. Charles Balzer, who worked on early designs for Manito Park. All the stonework on the property was done by Domenico Peirone, an Italian stone craftsman who came to Spokane in the early 1900s.
Farther up on the South Hill, two more modern gardens feature the talents of master gardener Nancy Biggerstaff and Idaho transplants Sharon and Randy Micek. Biggerstaff’s is a mature 26-year-old garden gone immature with the loss of five trees in three winters. Not to be deterred, she has completely redone several areas and blogged about it at digalot.blogspot.com. The Miceks traded Priest Lake for Spokane six years ago and began ripping out ivy and a sport court to create an Asian themed garden with a teahouse, peonies, Japanese maples, hostas and evergreens. They created several outdoor living spaces filled with garden art influenced by their travels.
The last garden on the tour is not far from Manito Park and owned by Dennis and Carol Anderson. The Craftsman-style house on a very visible corner lot was built in 1926. Shade rules in most of the garden and they have taken advantage of it by ripping out what was left of the lawn and planting a collection of elegant Japanese maples and shade-tolerant perennials, including original plantings of hellebores and alliums.