Making the Most of a Small Yard 🌿 The Garden of Lisa Bauer 🌿 Talk & Tour with Garden Gate

[Music] okay welcome everybody to garden gates talk and tour today i'm talking to seattle landscape designer lisa bauer she's been designing landscapes there for 12 or 13 years and we were lucky enough to visit her garden in 2019 so i thought we would talk with her about her yard and her garden and it's a beautiful place we profiled it in issue 156 if you have this issue of mega garden gate you can check it out otherwise you can just walk through the tour with us here and maybe lisa we could just um you could give us an idea of uh what the what your garden situation is like the light and the soil kind of thing and how long you've been gardening there definitely so we moved into this house and and basically raised it in 2000 and then in 2003 we had the hardscapes put in and some of the bones plants and so luckily we're on sand here and so it was pretty um not very amended when we moved in but we when we started the garden we just brought a whole bunch of compost in so and we've been putting compost in you know almost every year to every other year since then so it's really good good soil and great drainage which i much rather have sand than clay or glacial till which is what we have a lot of in seattle um so and we're in a residential neighborhood in seattle northeast seattle um it's it's not a super busy street um but it's you know we have traffic and definitely a lot of walkers and yeah i know when we uh drove up to the yard i was like i think this is the place you had the best garden on the street you can tell there are a lot of plants in my yard yes yes but that's fun um and if you have it's it's sort of an average sized lot it seems like for the area and so it's not super big but you've got a lot in there yes uh and it's really it's a challenge to try to make a small garden um you know interesting and you know feel like it's you know a special place there's we also have a lot of trees actually around i didn't mention on the other side of the street there's um like probably six over 100 foot dug furs and so they drop a lot of needles and we actually have quite a bit of shade and because of course i love plants and i've bought so many trees just myself the garden is becoming more and more of a shade garden even though i've got manzanitas here in this first picture and they're doing okay well yeah when one of the cool things i noticed when we drove up which it doesn't show is as much in uh maybe the first photo but then you had these really cool hedges in um that are up near the front but they're not like your typical hedges where it just surrounds the property line can you talk a little bit about those and how you came to put them there and why you put them in the position that they are definitely well i think that especially in a front yard my philosophy is definitely to sort of set the house off and to really create some curb appeal and so my way of doing that in an urban setting when where spaces are really tight is to take plants and create architecture with your plants in the landscape and to me that sort of brings the house like marries it to the landscape and so i really like perimeter hedges they don't have to be really large it's just sort of like bringing in something that's sort of clippable that can create lines and kind of be a buffer to the outside world so there's a small boxwood it's set against the sidewalk on part of the property and then it's jogged back on two other two other sides of the property so that allows for kind of an interesting line not just a straight line all across the front but sort of a jogged line and so within those little spaces you can you know make those little interesting spaces for um people who are walking by your yard and you can plant really cool ground covers put a lot of color there maybe do some perennials in those spaces and then so behind behind that the first hedge which is i think it's about two feet tall now it's um dwarf english boxwood there's another hedge that i started not too long ago probably about three years ago but it's a u hedge it's a hicks hue and that hedge is um stepped back about i would say almost four or four or four to five feet beyond the the shorter hedge and so that creates a good pocket where you can plant a lot of really fun things that you know come up in the some in the spring and summer it also hides perennial dead foliage when you don't want to see it so like a big pet peeve of mine is the tulips you know like i love tulips and i love bulbs but when they die back they're pretty ugly to look at you know especially the the foliage takes a long time for it to die back so it can just be behind the hedge the smaller hedge and you know nice lovely and nobody cares about it yeah yeah because you've got it looks like you've got the black mondo grass and the and the heather i think that was firefly is that right or heath i always get the two confused oh yeah yes in the front part of the short yeah yep there's the black mondo grass and then it's that one's kaloona um so kaluna's our heath's melting chocolate or winter chocolate which is what a great marketing name yes kidding i would buy it just for the name um cool well then as seems like i think as we followed the path the path was really cool i like that how you zigzagged that and it was so interesting another in piece of interest and surprise for your yard how how did you come up with the zigzag idea and also if you can talk a little bit about its size and i had at the time that we moved into the house i had a newborn and an 18 month old and so i actually i hired a landscape designer to put that pathway in because i had the the contractor had put a pathway and it was all wrong for the house it was very curvy and sort of traditional but it didn't really fit the architecture of the house so that is the point where i realized wow it's really important to get professional help when you know you just can't do the job or you just don't know what to do and at that time i had no training so um she just did a lovely job getting that path in but um what i really learned um from her uh philosophy is that um the slower you can get to your front door the better and what it does is it sort of causes you when you have to jog left and right um just causes you to sort of slow down and notice the plants and it makes the journey a little bit longer but a little bit sort of more pleasant too so and then also in that way too as you like as you come in from the sidewalk there's a stop and we have i put a strawberry tree right there and that not only creates a block for our privacy but it's also you know quite a nice little enticement to come in because it's a really pretty tree and we have lots of birds in it so you know when you have stops like that then you can put a focal plant so that's another reason anyway as you take that little journey you get up to your front porch which i think when we talked about the story initially you said you think about porches as kind of like a waiting room and i thought that was a fun analogy and maybe you can share with us how you chose the colors for the for the porch and just a little bit about the containers as well because there's some really nice looking containers there i think yeah well thank you well when we built the house i you know i've always had a preference for warm colors and i think it's because i grew up living in seattle and it's very dark gray for a lot of the year so just by virtue of having to survive in this dark climate i tend to pick a warm palette for in the inside of my house too is all based on yellows so um and i also wanted a dark color for the plants to show up so i went with a dark green on the bottom and then a slightly lighter green on top and then during down the middle of the house we did this sort of mustard yellow and it reads a little bit orange here but um it's kind of like a mustardy earthy yellow and then i really didn't want a fun door too so i just you know red goes really well with yellow and yeah so and in my palette too my plant palette too there's mostly oranges yellows um and reds and a lot of white flowers because i love white flowers but there's not a ton of pink or purple and i think it's because i'm just naturally drawn toward those sort of warm colors yeah that makes sense i think um and i seem to remember on the porch you had some really neat containers and i well i can't remember what they were made of they were very very modern and sleek and um you had them positioned really well too so that it kind of made it into a little room adding to that waiting room feel yeah um those are they're made a company called pot inc out of cal canada makes them and they're powder coated aluminum so they weigh almost nothing they would be great for like a deck if you had you know wanted really big pots anyway i mean you can pick it up with one hand i could pick them up and move them around um they're just have a beautiful finish on them too they're very very nice and they're super clean just like straight cylinders straight squares with the rolled edge so yeah i really think that as many rooms as you can make in your yard especially in a small garden and people are always perplexed about that how do i room off a small garden and you know my garden is like i think 3 400 square feet if i take the house out of it um and so every time you come through a threshold like as you enter my garden there's the portal between the hedges and then it opens up into this lawn space and that's one room but then as you go toward the door you can see there's a constriction again and i brought the bed across the front of the house so that and put a big tree right there and so that actually creates another space and so there's a landing pad there because i feel like you know every inch counts and so we sit out there and when our friends come to especially during covet we've just had little you know short meetings with our neighbors and our friends that come to visit and oh yeah use that and it's just kind of a way to pause i think it's nice to have a little bit of space in front of your doorway so people can sort of gather themselves before they make sense yeah really and then i think as you if you go to the left i think if i if i remember correctly if you go to the left you have this beautiful fountain in a circular kind of like a little patio but i think it's also where two paths come together but i thought that was really cool that you instead of just joining them they were a certain it was a circle so how did you come up with what made you think of the circle and yeah um well i just i love strong forms and so and i and i love fire pits and i love water features and so here i mean the space just sort of called out for a circle and so and my husband actually really wanted one of these basalt pillars they were very popular at the time and he hand-picked this uh basalt pillar out so it just was you know it was round and so i i really feel like if you've got a theme going you just keep increasing the importance of that theme with the same theme and so you know these concentric circles um kind of came about and the contractor actually was the one who said why don't we just make this into a huge path because he wanted a really big reservoir so that we wouldn't have to um keep filling it up during the summer time yeah so yeah that whole um outer ring where the white crushed granite is is a reservoir underneath oh wow that's really cool yes it's pretty big we don't have to fill it very often but um yeah and so uh yeah it makes a really good focal point not only from our kitchen which is just to the left of that slide but it also it just works really well it's on access to that patio that's in the front at the front door and that another path goes straight back toward the other side of the house so i really like formal layouts i just feel like even if it's done in a kind of fresh modern way i mean it's just the whole idea of putting things on axis it really sort of grounds things and it makes things feel really permanent and calm yeah can you explain a little bit what you mean by on axis just in case somebody doesn't yeah so if you take a straight line um from this uh water feature and you draw a straight line from the center of that and go directly south it will go through the pathways that are there and at the other end of it i on axis i put so on that straight line i put another little pot underneath a a hydrangea so i didn't really even think about that at the time but i thought you know what every time you turn up a corner it's really nice to see at the end of where you're going something to walk toward something significant just to kind of like encourage you to go down there so um sure draws you along the path there and yeah and there's lots of that in my yard as far as just um i use french doors if there's any kind of view out from from inside the house out i will like a lot of times just draw a line and then whatever's out there through the double doors or through the window it's really nice to have some kind of a focal point or something to anchor that view nice yeah well that i can see how that fountain would really do that one another thing i really noticed is that you have a lot of evergreens evergreen shrubs and plants in your garden and you know going back to what you said about a gray climate winter in i'm sure winter in seattle is pretty gray as well not just in the midwest where i am but um how do you um i think you had sort of a rule of thumb it seems like about having evergreens and evergreen perennials even for you especially evergreen perennials and shrubs yes um well whenever i design a yard i always i i always use at least i would say thirds to three quarters evergreen to deciduous so whether that's an evergreen tree or a shrub or on down the line you know small shrub to large ground cover to the very tightest ground cover just three quarters to two-thirds and that's just so that it looks good all year round oh yeah and then you can always plug in you know perennials or ephemeral things that come and go but it'll just sort of make the garden feel great and so that kind of like really um segues into the whole idea of foliage is to me more important than flowers and i love flowers i think everybody does but um really i pick my plants for the foliage first oh okay because they're taking up so much room in the garden those evergreens but even in deciduous plants i really want to think about leaf texture and what's next to each other it's not just the plant find the individual plant but what pairings of plants look good together oh yeah that makes sense do you have a are there certain shapes and i guess shapes textures that really kind of are sort of uh what's the word i'm trying to think of like sure things sure bats for well definitely i definitely like um some grasses in a garden and i was trying to go why do i love the grasses so much and it's great to have some low grasses number one because they can sort of soften the edge of pathways and i think to use ground covers on really close to a pathway edge is great for softening it because i tend to go really hard and bold with the hardscape shapes and whenever i show a client that too they'll go oh this is so literally geometric and it's so harsh and then i'll throw the planting plant on top of it and they can immediately see how it's softened so i love grasses because they look great on a pathway edge and also they add movement and they're very fine texture um they're probably the most finest texture you can find in your garden really um but i also like ferns and i like some of the bolder shapes i love hearty tropical which i have in my background um because i i had visited hawaii when i was pretty young and i remember just being blown away and thinking this is this feels so good to me i would love to live in a tropical garden and so that has sort of stayed with me my whole life so um you know again big foliage so i love going getting going down to the very mining grasses and then the giant leaves of a gunnera or a banana plant are great but um really the contrast for sure just creating that contrast and in color too like using dark dark green as a background is great um and you can put some variegated things in front of it not too much variegation but a little is good yeah cool um well that is excellent i that is very helpful i think um now maybe we could move along to your backyard because that path kind of leads to the back okay no well we better go to the backyard because we'll run out of time okay okay let's go to the backyard and then your patio i think that was that's kind of what one of the first things you see is the patio back there and um i think it goes like between your house and your garage and how what were you thinking or how were you thinking of using your patio what were kind of the things you wanted from that space yeah it's not a really wide space and we knew that we wanted a water feature that was against the garage so opposite these double french doors that's our dining room and our kitchen's just beyond that and our living room is just to the left and so the views out this side of the house are pretty important so um and also our garage we had to get to our garage so i just kind of knew that um this would be our kind of outdoor eating area and it's just really sandwiched between the house and the garage but this deck was perfect and i i didn't want it to be too high because a lot of people come out they want to come straight out from their living spaces and go right onto their deck for eating but i felt like if i could sink it down a little bit then you're not in everybody's view and you just feel a little cozier so i i really like the idea of creating a big enough landing that you can stop and sort of gather yourself so you don't fall down the stairs and then make your way down to the deck and so that's how that why that deck is also um down let's see one two three rises um and then the the water features just opposite that and then our garage door goes off to the north side oh yeah so but yeah it makes a really closing cozy uh living area and to me the sound of water too is just the best i mean it's it just sort of drowns out any city noise you have or you know neighbor noise um and then i you know was working with this architect to create this water feature and i knew i wanted it to have a seat edge on it so and i knew i wanted to have a spillover too so we sort of came up with this design that's used for seating and for enjoying that nice yeah and the special piece of artwork there on the wall isn't there yes and so that my father he passed away um 23 years ago but i did get to inherit this piece and at the time i didn't know what i would do with it but like it came pretty quick i was like okay i want to put that over the over the fountain because we had nothing there and that is on axes with those french doors that go into our dining room area yeah that's no yeah and it's up lit from the fountain so we can see it at night so that's another thing i think that's really helpful in the landscape is to if you can have um some night lighting it will completely expand your living area at night because you can look out your window and you can see your garden otherwise you know it's just black and you can't see anything so it really increases the whole enjoyment of all the work that you do in your garden all day yeah so um yes we really enjoy that piece i kind of remember too you talking about when we first talked about your garden you talking about like having a balance between people places and plant places and that was always like the challenge especially for plant nerds like us but for everybody too but do you have any kind of a like how do you how do you work that through and figure out what is the what's the good what's the best balance for that that is such a good question and i've been talking about that a lot lately to people um i really think that there i run into a lot of um gardens where the hardscape is is as big as people i mean just too big and the hardscapes are up against fences so you have hardscape on hardscape and what i really believe even in a small garden is make your hardscape as small as you need it as you want to have the function first but figure out what those minimum dimensions are and and just go a little bit past it but don't um think more is better with hardscape because if you don't leave enough room for a garden bed and kind of my minimum would be four feet wide four feet deep um then you're not going to be able to get the plant layers in there and if you can't get the plant layers in there then you can't soften it and it won't feel like a garden so yeah um i i say yeah leave as much planting bed space as possible and also float your people spaces inside the plant beds so if you can surround your people's living spaces like on all sides almost with garden beds then you can really feel like you're living in it and i think people are so much happier that way and getting your plants up high too like if you're on a patio i see a lot of patios that are right up against surrounded by lawn and there's no planting beds around and maybe some a couple little pots but really if you can get um carve out planting beds around your patio or your dining area and then get the plants up big enough so that when you're sitting there right in your view i think that's the best feeling oh it turns it completely it's even more than that but in a small garden i think it's even more important to get the plants to be tall and it's because it obscures all of the the perimeter yeah it kind of makes it a little harder to tell where the end of the garden is and maybe gives you a little bit feeling of more space and exactly exactly so i think if you also leave areas of like lawn is really great for a resting space for your eyes so if you can leave patches of lawn it doesn't have to be big um and then tight ground covers also will sort of give you some relief but then don't be afraid to grow your trees and your shrubs up tall and then arborize them so that you can plant more interesting things sort of at ground level and then at eye level so by arborized you mean maybe limb them up a little bit or correct yep just um take some pruning classes or read a little bit about printing online so you do really good job and just kind of limb up your plants and then you get to put more in so my garden is completely limbed up yeah it's always my agenda it's like okay i can arborize this plant when it grows older and a lot of gardens too if you do that your garden will sort of grow with you and the bases of those big shrubs won't just keep getting bigger and bigger you can kind of um get some space underneath and put some smaller scale things in so that things like grow elegantly and oh yeah don't just clobber cover the ground well i think is that your garden behind you it is that is that is a picture of my garden that i think i'm not sure if that was maybe around the same time that you were here although i don't see the lilies back there yeah but yeah this is sort of my dream when i we moved into this house i told my husband you know i really of course i wanted to try to do some hearty tropicals in the backyard and um he was all for it we had visited a friend who's an artist who has an amazing hearty tropical garden and seattle we can definitely you know do palm trees certain types of palm trees there's only two that really grow well here but um but yeah my husband was all excited for it and so yeah it's a it's packed with sort of big leaf things and got a lot of specimens too well yeah if you can look in the there's a photo of the that you can kind of look down the the water feature and then see the edge of the patio and you can see sort of your first step and the lilies blooming in your first step off the deck and into the yard and it shows uh some i think layering was something that you kind of briefly mentioned that uh that you use in your beds there and um with maybe ground covers at the bottom but then how else do you do you have any ideas about you know combining plants into layers and what that might how somebody might approach that definitely so um it's it is really a full garden but really it's the so if you look at the trees those are the the bones and the there's a tree there that's next to a a pot with a yellow flower in it and that um that tree is called a franklinia uh exordonia and it's evergreen and it flowers late and it's next to a deciduous tree so there we've got the deciduous and then and the evergreen um but that tree is really bones for all year and then behind that there's another deciduous tree it's so hard to break them apart and then there's a hardy shaflora that's sort of underneath that that taller one in the back so that one's evergreen so there's just a really good mix of evergreen and the palm tree is um evergreen and then under you can see underneath it i have some things on the ground there it's hard to see underneath that palm tree but there's some really tall ferns and then there's some hearty orchids under there that are hard to see from here but i usually put the little stuff you know in the front of the border and then try to fill in in the back with some bigger things yeah there's another shot too a couple um that has that oh now i can't remember what it is but it's that big sort of it's um all the round the big round foliage um and then you can see the um i think it was a chorus and iconic low it's looking back up the path from that raised bed area okay so is this in the back then sherry like where that metal um container is yes if you get back like with your back to that okay let me get there okay oh yes okay that's pedocytes and so that's real a really good fun perennial that does disappear during the winter time it comes it's actually blooming now with the flowers are incredible they look like little martians coming out of the ground um but that the um a chorus grass there um on the lawn edge that little yellow thing peeking over the the edging yeah that's there all year round and then just beyond it going a little further there's a dark green shiny leaf thing that's besia del tofila that's there all year round it blooms multiple times um underneath the big pedocytes with the big brown leaves under the bananas is hosta which is again a perennial that grows most places in this country which is a great perennial um and then the bananas they do die back and i i wrapped them it's the only thing in my garden i really have to kind of pamper but they will live it just they will die they will melt to the ground if it freezes and it does freeze a lot in seattle so i just wrap them so that they have a higher starting point when they start to grow in the summer in the spring they'll just start wrap around them and then i put burlap and i actually put some faces on them because they become our winter focal point we put christmas lights at the base and um anyway and they change every year because we cut them off at different heights so sort of like this you know working sort of performance art piece that happens every year i take another photograph and they they're all different shapes and sizes depending on what we're keeping and what we're not keeping um but yeah you can there's just lots of layers in there and you know i always tell people too that really make sure that you sight your woody plants and your big trees and shrubs site them with a ruler make sure you have a tape measure and go to the center of it and know what the mature growth rate of that is and and plant those within tension because you don't want you can't move those later so all my big woody plants are i really figured out where they should be over the long term but then all of this stuff that i fill in underneath that's even even the pedocytes with the big leaves um that runs a little bit so i'm always kind of taking some out and putting i can transplant and put put it somewhere else but everything else can really be moved so um if you're kind of like me and you want to try new things and you're going to experiment with making another ribbon of you know iconocloa someplace then um the little things definitely that's your fun area to um to play with so all those ground covers and everything underneath those big shrubs and trees is is the experimental place yeah that makes sense you don't have to be so careful about what you do down there i do believe in ribbons of things though because i have such a collector's garden and a lot of my clients love to buy plants and so sometimes they have a lot of existing things and so one way to contain them to contain the plants is to put edges of one ground cover like along a certain bed edge and that will sort of make things feel more calm so i always do that um in my own garden just so i can so it feels sane otherwise i mean i like being in a jungle but it just sort of unifies things a little bit that makes total sense okay okay so then when you turn around from that area we were just looking at there's your big raised bed area that's kind of sleeping a little bit and that was a really neat area there's you know you can sit you can enjoy all the beautiful plants how did that area come about that's a great question and we didn't develop it for a while it was just a lower area in the garden so we stepped it down to make it level just just so we could utilize the space better and then that raised bed around the edge was created and it just was this oval shape and so we originally had something a low kind of um edging around the bottom and everybody that would walk into the space thought oh that's a fire pit when are you gonna put the actual fire pit in there but it was a really big space because that that space is about seven feet long um so in any case i you know we we have a fire pit somewhere else so we um i just wanted more planting space of course um my husband used to also have this as our vegetable garden area and um sadly i kept putting more plants in there and they kind of got choked out so it became more uh tropical garden space for lisa so um at one point i realized i needed to you know this was just the perfect focal area from our living room so we have a big long bank of windows and just of course again off on axis through those windows um there's this this oval and so i knew that i wanted to get a focal piece in there and that was in the shape of a giant gigantic planter and i really do tell people that the bigger planter you can have and the biggest planter you can afford you should get it so um this one's like seven by i think four wide but it was you know kind of in line with there's a you can't see it in this photograph but there's a big arbor in the back a chunky arbor with a double date and then yeah fencing on both sides to enclose it um and so just within this planter i put the focal plant is this boutia palm which kind of it has sort of a little bit of a blue cast to it and a lot of light it's just a it's a real specialty poem and i feel so lucky that i i have it that it's doing fine there um and then and then beyond that on an arbor uh on the top of the arbor i put these birdhouses that i had created for this garden show and i kind of thought well maybe that's too much you know maybe i'm just like building this up too much but i really do feel like if you're gonna have a focal point and i think every garden should have many um build it up just go for it try it out i i was thinking okay maybe i can take them down if it's just too much but i actually like it because it kind of brings the flower colors up and it brings your eye up into the sky it just makes it that more dramatic now do you plant it differently every year or is it pretty much like that good question and i do kind of plant it because of course people give me plants and i'll just try like there's a that's an orinjium agave folium that's in there it's the spiky plant um it looks like a test a v in it it has little little blooms uh remnants uh left on there but anyway so that was a plant that somebody gave me and so i do use this as you know if i have any space i will you know try something that's kind of exotic looking in there i do plant coleus if we have a hard freeze and the coils don't make it which they usually don't those are those orange plants i usually put perennials those back in and then there's the sweet potato vine too which i usually i'll use that or something else those trailers are all considered annuals um i use abutalon which is flowering maple and those those are wintering over now in seattle um there's just more and more hearty varieties that they used to just be animals but now they're you know pretty much perennial we just had a hard you know a freeze and a 15 inches of snow and they're still there so those um i try to keep in there and then i if the cane is don't make it i will replant them but sometimes they will come again the next year nice um but yeah anything that looks tropical i put in here last year i did put pineapple sage in which was it just died after our snow but i mean that's a great plant yeah so for hummingbirds and so yeah i think this this bed tends to change a little yeah a lot more i would say i've i forgot what zone are you guys there we're like zone seven seven b but it can really vary too um i think i feel like some parts of seattle i'm almost in i almost feel like it's a zone eight where i am but we have pockets for sure that have more uh some people have more wind or more they're more exposed because we have a lot of hills yeah so yeah usually seven to eight in there someplace but yeah it seems like your yard was it felt sort of protected and um it felt cozy yeah thank you that's my aim for sure um yeah this this is definitely the like uh i wanted it to be the sort of showstopper so i do have i even do echo barriers in here oh yeah so i get some of those tropical california succulents and they look great too and sometimes they winter over and other times they don't that's okay because most most of the rest of my garden is just a lot of perennials so well i know when we talked when i was there we were kind of going on a little plant safari because we both love plants what are what are maybe a few of your favorites that you have there in the yard [Music] good point that's hard to pick um well i've been into gardenias for the last couple of years because i've been trialing them because i was didn't used to be so into fragrant plants but the more older i get the more i really like the subtleties of fragrant plants and so um my i think that the best one for my area is um gardenia climbs hardy which is at my front door i also have gardenia double mint in the back um but that climbs already tends to like profusely bloom it just keeps going all you know summer through kind of you know fall time so i love that plant um it's a little bit of a maintenance thing it looks a little funny sometimes you have to pick off the blooms and fertilize it a little here and there but i like that one and i also like another plant called pristanthra kuniata which is not so well known it's alpine bush mint and that one has the foliage's um fragrance so you can just run your hand along it and it's right by my car door and so i i have several out on the parking strip and it's just great because i just get a good hit of mint every time i get in my car it always looks good yeah yeah it's evergreen also love it nice but there's there's a lot of them though so i know yeah yeah and i love the loquat tree too that's um behind the the focal pot there's a little quack tree that's in the areo batria japonica it's in the back corner on the right that tree is really neat too i bought it as a little tiny stick and it's it's it's going to be i think it matures at 30 30 but but those the leaves are just beautiful they're just very very tropical i can use them to make tea which is really wonderful nice good for immune system yeah yeah i could go on and on well there's one other thing that was so fun about your yard and that were your win that was your window wells and i thought they were so creative and so fun i wonder if you could just tell us you know little stories about the the window wells that are around your house because i mean talk about taking advantage of all the space you can that was very clever and they they're just really fun yeah so i was getting my garden ready for two garden tours and i had never really done i had done small garden tours with like students and you know smaller groups but i had never done you know the whatever 500 people type of garden tour and so i was going around my yard and i was looking at all the spaces and i just kept going down the side yards and just grimacing at the 5 8 inch minus compacted gravel that was in the window wells that everyone has and i just thought why don't i just there's no avoiding seeing these spaces why don't i put something just interesting in there and the one of the window whales already had um had seated with the baby tears and so that was already in there and i thought okay well that looks so much better i'm just gonna um and i had remember my mother's a fine artist and she had some arms that were uh broken from a firing and she actually had them in her garden at one point but she couldn't remember where they were but i remembered where they were so we actually excavated them and took them out of the ground and they were all covered in mud and she didn't even know they were there but anyway i cleaned them off a little bit and put them in one of the window wells and i thought okay i should have this little sort of wand in one hand so that's just a red stick that i painted so that was the first one and then the second one was alongside that that same side of the house and it was had nothing in it and i just thought you know what materials and so it came from the materials that's where it originated i thought okay what pretty thing could i put in there and then i thought of the glass and i thought of the water i thought okay the blue glass can be water and then i thought this is like a lap pool and so then i got the the people off the internet you know it was fantastic swimmers yeah so i was like okay that's that's good i got two down and then there were a couple more to go and there's actually five total and i've got um two more on the other side of the house so the third one was this window well that um it faces into our tv room downstairs and it's an egress window so it's pretty big and so there i always knew i wanted to put um some kind of a hanging planter so i went to the same company pot inc out of canada and had them send me some hanging planters and then i just rigged it up with some some drip tubing and i put some really kind of fun plants in there there's coleus there's um plastic neoblatum which is uh asian saber fern which is a lovely plant that's there all year and then some euannomous fortunai is also another year-round plant and then begonias and coleus which are great so that's um just hanging in facing our window and then uh for the last window well it had this really funny looking vent on it and it said hot i just was like what do i this is my hardest window well and i just thought okay i got i'm gonna put some interesting rocks in there and so i went all over and i thought okay i'm just going to put these little white rocks in there i'm not sure what is going to happen in there yet and then my my friend came over and i said what does this look like to you and she said it looks like rice yes it's going to be a bento box my husband was a little queasy about me painting the inside of the well shiny black so i just left it but sure enough and i as she said bento box too i said oh yeah how am i going to find some really good big chopsticks and she said well lisa just make them i thought i don't have time to make them but if sure enough the internet there's a site i think it's called something like um everything big oh my goodness and so they had these giant chopsticks they're like i think over five feet and so i just put them in there and i thought what can survive in a desolate you know window well with no irrigation and a hot you know vent heat vent in there and so i i put rosemary in there and to this day it's still surviving just fine that is amazing oh that looks like it could be like a seaweed salad in there so anyway but i think people get a kick out of it it's you know it was just like a sort of a me in desperation i have to make this look somewhat appealing and then it became a fun project really oh yeah oh we did a great job it was excellent thank you sherry oh my gosh well gosh i guess we got we pretty much got through your garden that's yeah did we miss anything that we need to hear about your garden but nothing to you know i think i've been thinking about gardens because i'm getting together another presentation i kept thinking one thing i've really learned over the past year and that is that i think you know it's it's focal points to me are becoming more and more important just as far as they don't have to be fancy but also to sort of create the idea of the heart of your garden like for people to ask where where is the heart of your garden because there's usually going to be one place and it could be where you have you know seating and dining and entertaining um could be like in that general this india but it could be somewhere else i have a client who has a like a focal piece like a statue that's in memory of of his mother and so they have some really beautiful stones that live up to lead up to this statue um so it could be something like that um i think it's important to find out where you feel like the heart of your garden is and to sort of really um focus on it and play it up yeah the focus of my garden is definitely and i didn't think about it consciously but it's really my father's mural uh yeah that's kind of what we look at and it's sort of this our it is our living area so we spend a lot of time on it and it just is sort of always there looking kind of across at us yeah i think that people should think in terms of that and it won't be sometimes you won't figure it out for a we while but space sure well that is an excellent thought to end with i think we can all think about where the heart of our garden is so yeah excellent thank you so much for sharing your time and your uh garden ideas and your garden with us it was it was a great tour and thank you oh thank you sherry thanks a lot for having me this is really fun it was fun because yeah it was really good to see you again and good to talk about your garden hi i'm jack from garden gate magazine i hope you enjoyed our video be sure to check out our youtube channel and press the bell to get notified each time we upload a new video you'll get content with useful gardening tips design ideas and how-to help for all levels of gardeners i especially enjoy the garden tours and talks with fellow gardeners across the country be sure to follow us on all of our social platforms you can see the list below thanks for watching

Channel: Garden Gate Magazine

Views: 60,419

Keywords: garden design, garden, gardening, plants, flowers, landscape, landscape design

Id: 8-xGhUrxb8k

Length: 46min 35sec (2795 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021