BREAKING NEWS :

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.

I’ve been trying to get to the garden club lately in an effort to meet more gardeners and discover what the club has to offer. So before I reveal at length this year’s winners of their annual awards, let me just announce:

2009 Garden Club Award Winners

Len & Nancy Wolff , Mike McKelvey & Bea Johnson, and  John & Colleen James, whose garden is featured below. I’ll interview the other gardeners in the weeks ahead.    

The James Garden

This garden is on the Burton Loop; the property slopes down to the front of the yellow Victorian house, which faces south.  John & Colleen James moved here from Gig Harbor in September, 2005. “It was a blank canvas, kinda nice because it was just grass, mostly dead by then.”

They stripped away all of the grass on the slope leading down to the house and smothered what remained over the following winter with layers of cardboard and compost mulch. Later, they brought in several truckloads of compost plus more loads of 3-way Mix (compost, sand, and manure) to add to their sandy soil. 

What’s really impressive here is the depth of the beds—but that’s what you’ll get when you replace a lawn with perennials. Here’s a view across the house front, looking from east to west.

 Standing tall above the perennials is a grafted salix integra (dappled willow), which she said “isn’t too happy: it wants more moisture.” Calendula have scattered themselves throughout the garden; she makes a medicinal salve from it and sells it at the Farmer’s Market.

Here’s the view from the opposite side, looking back east: note that dappled willow and flax in the upper-left corner, and the plentitude of plantings: calendula, hardy geranium, lilies, poppies, dahlias, mexican hair grass, lavender, echinacea—even, I believe, a eucalyptus in the background.

 Surprisingly, despite the slope’s 10-15 foot drop from the road, the only terracing is at the bottom, where a 2′ cobblestone wall holds the toe of hill up off a front patio.

Because this slope leans toward the north, larger plants overshadow smaller ones. So, Colleen has come to specialize in shade plants for her market offerings. One of her favorite plantings is this shade-happy arrangement of erigeron, pulmonaria, spurge, and royal fern in the dappled sunlight. Beautiful!

She also knows a lot about deerproof plants, recommending “ligularias, hostas, japanese forest grass, some really wonderful ferns like Royal Fern and Japanese painted fern, also sweet box (sarcococca). Below is such a pairing in a pot, demonstrating her penchant for high-contrast plantings: a towering, deep-burgundy ligularia underplanted with japanese forest grass. They’re happy together because both like moisture and shade.

And here’s more color play, this time with black-eyed susans against blues and silvers, the purple of smoke tree and the silver architecture of a cardoon.

Colleen uses pots frequently; here a massive, robin’s egg blue pot studs the flowery haze with something sold, substantial.

The foreground alliums are actually garlics: “I bought them at the grocery, plugged them in during fall, and they are wonderful. They last longer than allium globemasters: it’s December and they’re still standing.” Butter-yellow Cape Fuchsia glows on the right.

She accesses her deep beds with meanders of stepping-stone paths surrounded by ajuga (bugle) seen here in the foreground below the calendula. She cuts the bugle back in high summer to keep the stones in view. 

Colleen James spends a lot of time in her garden. And she’s become a Master Gardener, a plant vendor on Saturdays, and does some garden design consultant “to help people create something wonderful.” 

Here’s her front entrance pergola, which directs visitors toward the “real” front door (there was some confusion!) and provide some privacy when she wants it. John James laid the flagstone walkway and stairs.

And finally, a last look across the front yard of this talented plantswoman, Colleen James.