flashback: 28 June 2008 — our garden on tour day

The day had arrived for our stint on the Music in the Gardens tour…and absolute perfection had been attained in our garden, or so I hoped.

upstairs window view

Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose (upper left, above) had blessed the garden with its one week of peak bloom.

The beds and pots around the pond were weeded, even the difficult hill in back.

by the pond

Of course as I walked down to the lower gate putting out the final touches (pillows on the middle patio and some last minute printed signage) I found a few more strands of bindweed to pull.

The Akebia vine and roses had started growing back around the Tangly Cottage sign after the massive pruning of 2007.

My Beverly Nichols book cover had been copied, laminated, and hung near the entryway

“Garden Open Today”

The entry with tour guides and signs and a white balloon to mark this as a tour garden.

interpretive signs

On some plants I placed photos of what they would do later on; in this case, the berries of Hypericum ‘Glacier’.  Along a shady walk, I wrote garden quotations on cards and hung them from the tree-like hardy fuchias.

The sunny day was not wonderful for photo taking but made the tour-goers happy.  My lower garden looked like it always enjoyed this sort of weather.

sunny lower garden

 The stepping stone stream walk through the lower garden arbour had never looked more inviting.

walk through the stream

Barely had I pulled a few more strands of bindweed (which must have sprouted overnight) than the hordes of people came.  I found it overwhelming and exciting and did not once think to take photos of women in their garden hats wandering through….except for my mother who sat for awhile on the pond patio.  She said that she could now understand why Allan and I did not want to leave this garden and move to her place even though that was a possibility that we still often discussed.

my mom by the pond, overhung with Fuchsias

This would have been her view across the pond bridge toward Rose ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’.

view from pond island

(We called that sit spot an island, but the back border was a seasonal damp ditch rather than water.)

squeeze effect

Just before you got to the pond island bridge, after walking past the spruce tree from Lower Garden, you’d get this enticing view of our cottage.  Ann Lovejoy would call passing through this willow arbour “a squeeze effect”.

approaching the cottage

We’d planted up containers on the stone steps going up to the house with cool annuals we’d acquired on recent plant shopping trips….an expense we had never gone to just for ourselves.

Below, I’m looking back from the base of those steps toward the willow arch. “Before” pictures of the garden placed there caused quite a sensation regarding how blank (just lawn and a spruce tree!) it was in 1994.

looking back, with before and after pictures posted at the right

These were the before pictures that astonished people, taken in 1994 from around the same spot.

befores

Now the old trailer was still there but painted hunter green and covered with roses.  The silver shed and the old trailer formed an L shaped roofed nook and in it was a water feature with a working flower pot water wheel made by Allan.  The water gave the illusion of having come from the pond because it was at about the same level.  Behind the roofed and shady patio I’d put big pillows on the trailer porch and some people sat and hung out there for awhile.

Allan’s water wheel

Allan’s garden

We guided people through the half-greenhouse/half pergola on the downhill side of the house and around through Allan’s garden shade garden. One of my happiest moments of the tour is when two women stopped in the greenhouse and read aloud to her mother a gardening poem I had posted there.*   Allan had achieved perfection in his backyard garden that used to be nothing but a weedy, muddy dog yard.

As she left the garden from the upper patio a friend took this photo looking back to the house.  This has remained one of my favourite images of the old Tangly Cottage.

from the upper gate

During a midafternoon lull in touring I found myself missing the praise and compliments and said “I want more people!  More people! ”  (And some more came through at the end, folks who had begun the tour at the north end of the Peninsula.)  Therefore I was not at all averse when a member of a garden club from Vancouver asked if she could bring her group back through the garden on August 12nd.  That would be an inspiration to keep it perfect.

Meanwhile, we would check out more tour gardens in Astoria and Gearhart, Oregon and try to catch up on our rather neglected work.

*The poem which was read aloud in the greenhouse:

Portrait of a Neighbour by Edna St. Vincent Millay

PORTRAIT BY A NEIGHBOR

BEFORE she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you’ll find her
A-sunning in the sun!

It’s long after midnight
Her key’s in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Till past ten o’clock!

She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.

She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream,

She forgets she borrowed butter

And pays you back cream!

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne’s lace!

The local paper had these wonderful words to say about our garden on tour day:

“We headed for Ilwaco and entered into an uber-planetary oasis called Tangly Cottage, Skyler Walker and Allan Fritz’s gnomish Eden.* Teacups adorned curly willow.** Quotes were clothes-pinned along the pathways. A small water wheel of tiny clay pots graced the patio of an abandoned single-wide***, the first structure on the property. 

Everywhere we looked, there was a fascinating plant we had never seen before and Skyler would appear, as if from nowhere, to give us the name of it.

Strategically placed here and there were gardening reference books, in case anyone wanted to look at pictures instead of the real thing. No way!

‘The main purpose of a garden is to give its owner the best and highest kind of earthly pleasure,’ wrote Gertrude Jekyll, influential British garden designer, writer, and artist.****

We couldn’t have agreed more.”

Cate Gable, Chinook Observer newspaper, July 2, 2008

*We don’t have any garden gnomes, though.

** contorted filbert (Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick’), not curly willow

***actually a small travel trailer

****one of the quotations I put up in the garden.