Glorious Garden (continued)
Once a month, textile designer Sina Pearson travels cross-country to tend her flourishing garden on an island near Seattle
She's also cultivating and preserving the woodsy feeling of the place. Though she had to clear land to build her house, she finished by restoring the layered native vegetation. Working down from the leafy canopies, she shaped an understory of vine maples, sword ferns, red flowering currants and salal, and, beneath these, a carpet of sweet woodruff and wild strawberries. Her windows all frame pictures of these woods, and the clean lines of her house create a foil for the explosive greens.
What she doesn't see from the house is her cutting garden. Given the shade cast by her trees, she had to locate its sun-loving perennials in the only clearing she had, the patch of ground beside her road. Imagining a field of flowers there, she first planted a backdrop of native shrubs and broadcast a blend of meadow seeds in front of it. When they failed to take, she tried divisions of perennials from her mother's garden: Shasta daisies, asters, daylilies, calendulas. These, she says, became the core of a "fail-safe group that works. Whatever doesn't thrive doesn't belong, since I'm not here enough to baby things."
Happily, she adds, the survivors bloom mostly in her favorite color scheme, complementary blues and oranges with shots of hot pink "for sparkle." Some have aggressive habits she must control: Ethereal blue love-in-a-mist, for instance, engulfs her cherished California poppies if she doesn't thin it. The same goes for Shasta daisies and fireweed, which, because they self-sow lustily, must be selectively weeded and dead-headed before they go to seed.
"I've designed the garden for exactly the amount of maintenance I want to do," says Pearson, whose husband, Art Simmons, joins her here for twice-yearly vacations. In between, Pearson prunes during winter visits ("when I can see the architecture of the plants"), covers beds with organic compost in spring and weeds and turns the soil in summer. Still, she points out, "the garden does what it wants to do, and its growth just bowls me over! I come back and it might be totally changed, the paths and beds overgrown, with no sign of what I did last time."
Click here to see the resources.
Subscribe to ELLE DECOR magazine
MORE METROPOLITAN HOME ARTICLES
