photo credit: Rebecca Teagarden

There’s a theme of appropriateness running through the garden of Nancy & Len Wolff on the north end.

By the street, a lush perennial border is studded with arbors, pots, tall plants to block out distractions from the road. Near the house, plantings in the cottage style match the old/new style of the house. And out front with the view, a design meant not to interfere: low natives and trimmed-up trees elegantly frame a panoramic view of the Southworth Ferry Terminal.

photo: Len Wolff

Even the grandest of perennial borders would be dwarfed in front of this Big View. So Nancy’s garden border is out front—or as Wolffs say, out “back.”

The perennial border begins at what the Wolffs think of as their back door, which faces east toward Palisades Road. The plantings start at the foot of the steps, wrapping both tightly around the house and in a wide loop out the walkway, along the road, and back along the southern border of the lawn. 

photo: Len Wolff

“In starting, I really didn’t have any grand plan,” other than wanting a garden style in keeping with the house’s architecture, she told me.  ”I love cottage gardens, and I thought a cottage garden would look good with the house’s casual style.”

“I’m a novice at gardening, and it was an intimidating lot because it’s very big. So I talked to a LOT of friends, looked at other gardens, and the most valuable advice I got was ‘just start.’”

She began with a very narrow bed along the side, “then a wonderful woman came by and said ‘I want to tell you about composting’. So I ordered ten yards of compost from Vashon Bark & Soil, gathered every box I could find, and expanded the narrow beds by layering out with cardboard and compost layers up to 10″ thick.”

It’s interesting that both Nancy Wolff and Colleen James, the garden winner covered in my last blog entry, used the lasagna-layering technique over the course of a winter to create a good soil base for spring plantings. “I didn’t dig up the soil: the native grasses under the cardboard died over the winter.” 

The garden, now four years old, is at its height from April through mid-June and has an incredible variety of perennials: dayliles, delphiniums, lupine, crocosmia, mallows, poppies, lilies, agastache, to name only a few—and so many poppies, her neighbor joked he’d seen a DEA agent eyeing the garden. Sub-shrubs include box, lavender, the bush form of St. John’s Wort, phormium, hydrangeas, and an airy blue aster she got from a friend.

In the SE corner, cool colors dominate: hostas, “Tasmanian Tiger” spurge, and a white “Limelight” hydrangea grows next to a shrubby aster with tiny blue flowers, backed by an 8′-tall himalyan honeysuckle (Leycesteria formosa) with blood-red pendant flowers.

photos Len Wolff

Later in summer, coneflowers, cannas, lilies, white echinacea, dahlias, and rudbeckias complement tall ornamental grasses—inspired, she said, by the planting at Courthouse Square.

Son Christopher Koering helped Len build a stout cedar pergola as an entrance off the street; a cedar gateway with a metal crow perched on top leads visitors from the steps into the garden area. A lovely stone wall built by Per-Lars Blomgren terraces the slight slope and helps mark the separate zones of sunny east/shady west.

Nancy is an occupational therapist by day, so she doesn’t have a lot of time. She does have plenty of ideas, though: she wants to create a low box hedge along the walkway, a vegetable garden somewhere, “more and deeper” beds. “The idea was I wanted people to walk around, see what’s on the next side,” she told me.

One suspects there will be plenty of “next sides” for Nancy’s visitors to explore in the future.