Giant snowflakes are coming to repose on needles and branches out my office window but I know gardeners are starting their springtime rituals – placing catalogue orders, sprouting seeds, cleaning and sharpening diggers and clippers.
One of my rites of spring is attending the Northwest Flower and Garden show in Seattle. It’s a mid-winter illusion to accompany the reality of waxing daylight, cleanse the overwrought holiday spirit, and awaken that passion for living, growing things.
Western Washington Spring
This year the most inspiring garden I found at the show was called ‘Nature’s Studio’. Designed by the consummate plantswoman Kirsten Lints and created by a host of volunteers in the Washington Association of Landscape Professionals and the Washington State Nursery and Landscape Association,
this garden was a verdant paradise of stone, weathered wood and giant rusted sculpture nestled in a vegetal comforter of salal, ferns, cyclamen, hellebores, cushion moss, and mushrooms. There was a sparkling natural stream flowing from a central cedar snag, settling in a granite pool edged with broad boulders. A journal and pair of readers set on one stone as if I had walked through the moon gate and left it there myself before curling up in a nurse log for a summer’s nap.
Moongate to Nature’s Studio
Vegetal delights
Another impressive design, Darwin’s Muse by Karen Stefonic was built around a 12’ glass and metal orchid encased in a towering glass and concrete garden house, a modern juxtaposition of bold architecture, art and stone softened with green, transitory plantings.
Glass pitcher plants and looming orchid
Whimsy and intimacy worked together in Art-itecture for Urban Wildlife with a round deck floating in a sea of lacy foliage surrounded by birdhouses perched on bright red poles. An oversized pyramid of carved eggs guarded by a maternal avian rises from a potted nest of ferns to dispel any doubt that nature is a force to be reckoned with.
Urban Wildlife
Don’t miss our little garden shows here in Spokane – the first one is coming up the last weekend of February at the Spokane Fairgrounds. I have the pleasure this year of designing for Greenscape an Asian inspired garden which you will find at the entry to the Expo building. I hope you’ll be entranced, revived, and
inspired to start dreaming and planning for your 2014 landscape.
Mid-winter illusions
