Glorious Garden (continued)
Once a month, textile designer Sina Pearson travels cross-country to tend her flourishing garden on an island near Seattle
Wreathed in 100-year-old firs, her quarter-acre is really more of an edited woods than a formal landscape. It's full of shrubs and trees used to fending for themselves. "I've tried to keep this place as native and 'non-landscaped' as possible," she says -- an approach both practical and aesthetic. She doesn't irrigate, despite the fact that the region's trademark rains dry up in summer, and she plants, weeds and prunes everything herself during the first two days of each monthly visit.
After that, she just enjoys the resulting tapestry, which erupts in different colors with the seasons: winter's red-twig dogwoods, spring daffodils and rhododendrons, summer lavender and ocean spray.
One especially vivid spot is the 60-foot-long perennial bed that runs along her driveway and the street. It's the property's welcoming, public face, where magenta fireweed, orange poppies and blue catmint combine in a mix reminiscent of her fabrics.
The connection is no coincidence. Her textiles and planting schemes inspire each other, with sparkly colors and touch-me textures. Then, too, both depend on the element of surprise. "A fabric pattern may look more controlled than a naturalistic garden," Pearson allows, "but the path to creating it is more random than you would think. You weave a sample, and colors cross in directions you don't anticipate -- and turn out better sometimes than what you planned."
The same is true on the piece of land she started planting seven years ago on Fidalgo Island. Throughout her Seattle childhood, her family summered here, where her grandfather built a cabin in 1910 and her mother, a professional garden designer and Pearson's landscape mentor, built another in the '60s. "I grew up walking through these woods," says Pearson. "At 15, I stood on a stump facing the water and said, 'This is where I'll build my house.'"
In 2002, after owning the lot -- which is next door to her mother's -- for 25 years, she finally did, siting her house more or less where she had envisioned it. A simple wood-and-glass structure, it's clad in cedar and trimmed in fir, so it tucks comfortably among the trees, its walls the purple-brown of fir trunks, its trim the ruddy orange of peeling madrona bark. Two lofty madronas rise beside it, and five more grow elsewhere in the garden, all started from seeds from one of her grandfather's trees. "I'm honoring memories here," she explains.
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