Gardening is something I’ve done for much of my life. Fortunately, when I moved into my house in 2015 there was lots of room to work with. I’ve been stubborn about adopting formal design rules, but I’m very much influenced by the ideas of a garden having “rooms”, as popularized by British gardens in the mid-20th century. My garden now has several rooms, including a desert corner, a forest corner, a shade garden, a flower bed, and a bamboo garden, among others.
I definitely have some friends who are “plant friends”. Otherwise, I’m very careful who I try to talk to about gardening. I understand if someone has no interest, and realize it’s as boring as dirt if this is the case. One of my plant friends sparked my interest in plants native to Oregon. Most of the plants in the forest corner are native, and there are many other native plants scattered around. We still talk about the best greenhouses, legendary plant collectors, and gardening swaps. This is a picture of the forest corner:
The desert corner has been expanded significantly, in stages. My favorite thing about it is the Pacific Madrone.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that working with dirt and digging holes are beneficial to my mental health. I’ve heard from my therapist that there are things in the dirt that improve our mood. She also recommended that I give up coffee though, so who knows what to think. Why I enjoy digging so much is a mystery to everybody.
The bamboo corner is the latest corner I attempted to redesign. It even has a roof.
It’s taken me awhile to accept that gardening is part of my artistic practice. When I was growing up, my parents had a house mostly surrounded by forest, except on one side where there was a mid-sized brick industrial building in disrepair. The building infuriated them, and it wasn’t on their land. They tried planting many things to grow and block it, but the climate was harsh, and things grew slowly, and had a low rate of survival. As I grew somewhat older, I joined in the effort, which spanned decades. While I learned quite a bit about plants, the dominant aesthetic was “block the shit out” which was more functional than beautiful. You can currently see this aesthetic on display in Oregon quite frequently when someone has a hedge of English Laurel.
My house has a very large picture window. It also has a history as a drug den, which ended shortly before i moved in, unawares. Cars would slow down and people would look in my window. They were not people I wanted to talk to. Sometimes people still stop by (always after dark) and ask if I was in this house in 2013. Well, three times anyway.
So when I first started gardening here, it was very much in the “block the shit out” mindset. Then I started paying attention to other gardens around here. Definitely some people had moved into more refined ideas. It was time to take advice from other people who knew more about garden design than I did.
Tom, the friend who introduced me to the idea of gardening with native plants, works in visual design. It was almost disheartening when I saw what he’d done to his front yard. He’d made a little scene on a pile of rocks with a Sitka spruce and a couple other things. It made my approach seem primitive and out-of-date. I was consulting garden design books I’d found at the library. My approach suddenly seemed to me to be a bit bland.
Hanging out with Tom in his garden and asking him about plants taught me a lot. He was strictly into native plants though. He seemed to think of the fifty-year-old camellia in the back yard as a personal nemesis. When we’d hang out on his back porch at night we’d hear the rats run up it to the roof. I’d have taken it out too.
I liked natives as well, and Tom had got me wound up to plant a bunch of them. Then one day I looked around my garden and thought, what’s with all the white flowers? This is how white flowers were banned from the backyard. By default, this eliminated most native shrubs. So, while I plant native plants quite often, it just wasn’t interesting to me to be strict about it.
The other organizing force was Laurel, who was my wife for a period of time. Her parents ran a greenhouse, and she had grown up with some organizing principles that had to be followed for harmony. I mean, had to. My random planting approach to block my view of the street wasn’t going to fly. So after some resistance, and the beginning of the end of the marriage, I started following them.
All of one species of plant should be grouped together. The grouping should always be an odd number. Design elements should feature a tall plant in back, a medium plant in front, and a ground cover underneath. Different types of textures and shapes should be intermixed so plants stand out and look more interesting. The guiding principles have resulted in a better looking garden for me.
Laurel also said that as a garden matures, you aren’t just a planter, but an editor. I’ve moved some of my plants around three or four times. It’s fairly easy to get away with this in Portland, if you are working in the fall or spring. Even so, there’s always a small risk of killing the plant. For me, this has been a rare exception. I’d like to think that my garden is complete after I move things around in the fall, but it seems during the summer I make plans to move about half my plants around again.
The other organizing principle for me has been the idea of garden “rooms” (the bamboo room, the desert corner, the forest corner, etc). This is something that one can see in Washington Park. There is the Japanese Garden, the Rose Test Garden, and the Shakespeare Garden. Within those gardens, there’s even smaller micro-areas with different animating principles. While each of these gardens follows different traditions and approaches, it was perhaps in the back of my mind while I worked in my yard. The “rooms” in my yard were as much of a function of the climate of Portland as anything else. Some parts would be blazing hot in the summer, while some were almost always shaded. Some would alternate between the extreme of no direct sun for months and then blazing mid-day sun in the summer. Each micro-climate had to be accounted for, and this took awhile to account for. For instance, the desert corner and the shade garden are only about 30 feet from each other. Learning where these transitions happened in the yard were important for ensuring the survival of what was planted.
I later learned that the idea of garden “rooms” was popularized by British gardeners in the 19th and 20th century. So those ideas seemed to have filtered down to me
I hope you’ve enjoyed this wander through my garden with no real destination. Here’s some more pictures ->
The Shade Garden
The Front Yard
This tall Oregon grape is the best plant I’ve found for attracting hummingbirds. It blooms in December, when there isn’t much for them to eat. Hummingbirds will literally camp out on a bush next to this bush and sit there all day.
When I showed Tom a camellia I had planted, I was met with stony silence. This plant took about 9 years to bloom properly, which was its own form of silence.
