Garden On, Vashon

It’s still raining, but more lightly, when I take the right-hand fork toward to Jonathan Morse’s cottage. In this wide Cedarhurst ravine, my eyes meet dark shadows, greens of apple and lime, silvery light. Yes, those are the colors of this moist May rainday—but also the colors caught in a strange obstacle I can see through: a gateway wall studded with fifteen windows, stood up with steel, painted in multi-green stripes of wood siding, its top implanted with—is that hair sedge?
      ”Yes, that’s Carex Comans ‘Frosted Curls,” Jonathan tells me. He’s a tall brunette in his 30s, cheeks red from being outdoors in cool weather, hands deep in pockets of a gortex jacket. “I thought about this project for over a year. My granddad—he was a civil engineer—had these steel i-beams laying around, and I wanted to do something with them, to put a barrier here to keep the eye from traveling straight down to the water. Then, when I visited my sister in Chicago, she took me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Oak Park. I was inspired by this stained glass window there called “Forest Canopy” that picked up the way colors play in the forest. So that helped me figure out where to go with this project.”

 There’s certainly a forest canopy frame to this property: the usual firs, cedars, and alders seem even taller than usual.There’s a seasonal creek that runs invisibly along one driveway, completely covered by salmonberry and ferns. 

Against this tall green dominance, Jonathan has spent twelve years building a garden of Color and Contrast, framed by strongly-shaped beds. Foliage seems more important to the design than flowers. There’s a small example in the entrance space, where a tall Oregon grape, Mahonia x media ‘Charity’, towers over a purple persicaria and golden wood millet. Shapes and foliage colors contrast with each other and with the surfaces—gravel, mulch, lawn—that underlay them.

As we walk down to the shoreline, we walk past a line-up of shrubs. Purple smoke-bush rubs shoulders with a fluffy golden Cryptomeria japonica ‘Sekkan-Sugi’ next to a dark ninebark, followed by a “butterfly” magnolia and, finally, a blue-gray alpine eucalyptus. Here, plants stand in contrast to each other in form and color: this is a “Look at THIS!” garden. 

His azara is variegated. His hop-vine is ‘golden.’ His little holly isn’t just prickly: it’s a ” silver hedgehog” holly (Ilex Aquifolium ‘Ferox Argentea’). Uncommon plants are abundant here, planted in uncommon associations: a spiderwort ‘blue and gold’ in a wine barrel with an alpine fir, a shade-loving brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ growing with some sun-loving heathers and an olearia bush in a shoreline bed. 

Jonathan has been working on this landscape for the last twelve years. He really seems to know his plants: turns out he’s a fellow Fairhaven grad with a self-designed degree in “Organic Plant Cultivation.” He’s worked at Island Lumber’s gardening center for the last three years, but he’s gardened since he was a kid. I ask his dad, Bill, if he’s got a role in all this: “I’m only the grunt labor,” he says with a smile.

We wind around his parents’ house (the narrow west alley was his first garden project here) and come to the Alpine Garden. “This used to be a parking lot, but what a waste,” Jonathan says, “it’s the best place on the property for sitting because it’s higher and gets more sun.”  The area’s sandy soil is topped with an inch or two of decomposed granite that mulches alpines, hens-n-chicks and other sedums planted around lowbush blueberries, alpine firs, and weeping Alaskan cedars.  Another wonderful design of his, the Cedar Entry (top photo), is made from logs left from a take-down project of the power company. Note its sedum-filled roof.

Between the Cedar Post Gate and the greenhouse, a path winds downhill upon heavy rock walls. These Jonathan built in 2001 and 2004 to protect this hillside against runoff pouring down the ravine. The terraces originally held vegetables, but now only dahlias and onions remain. His mother Betty presents me with a bag of “walking onion” sets. In the greenhouse, Jonathan is growing his garden’s next generation: I see plenty of tiny hellebores. “When I’m tired of something or it’s exhausted, I like to have new plants on hand to plug in.” 

We move to the “new” vegetable garden and yet another amazing project, just completed: an entrance wall made with wood rounds and “windows” of rusted conduit pipe, all of it mortared together with mud. The dark green, wooden door is grid-punched with 3″ holes, all 240 of them coated lime-green for—of course—color contrast. “I was worried the door was going to be too heavy, so the holes became a way to lighten it up.” 

The vegetable garden started just as individual orchard-tree fences, joined up as a corridor as the trees grew, then Jonathan realized “with just a little more fencing”, he could enclose an entire meadow. So food production moved inside the fence, as did many perennials that deer love. 

 The vegetable garden is circular and divided like a pie (another plant pun?) And in the shady area south, look for the bed completely devoted to purple-leafed ligularia, hopefully sparkling with yellow flowers, the apricot heucheras ‘Tiramisu’, and the darkly splotched podophyllum (May Apple) against the shed.

Folks, take this garden in early, while your eyeballs are still refreshed. It’s more than a feast for the eyes: as we used to say in high school, it’s a “pig-out.”

I’ll be previewing the other gardens of the VAA Garden Tour in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

For tickets to the VAA Garden Tour on June 26-27, visit here: http://vashonalliedarts.org/specialevents/gardentour/gardentour.htm