prequel: four jobs of 2006

I wrote about some of these gardens in my 2007 blog, but since I the photos were actually taken in 2006, I will reprise them here.

Suzanne’s Garden

We did not do regular maintenance on the Sahalee garden that Robert and I had created for Suzanne, but she called me in a couple of times a year to weed.  On one of those days in 2006, Allan took these photos:

gate

path

by the porch

along the path

with glass ball

Joanne’s garden

Below:  Joanne ‘s garden in full bloom in summer. She died of cancer in the fall….and now we maintain the garden in her memory.

Joanne’s garden

Linda’s garden

Later in the summer, we were hired by Linda L. to put in a garden at her beach house in Seaview.

Linda’s house

First we made a tiny little pocket garden, all white, with ingredients she already had, in memory of her very special and beloved cat, Whitey. This was sort of a get to know you project, because her real idea was much bigger.

Whitey’s garden

Her dear husband had died several months before, and she wanted a healing and memorial garden on the west side of their beach house.

before:  Allan starting the garden

Here’s the garden from her deck; we chose mostly plants with blue flowers because that had been her husband’s favourite colour:

after

the garden from above in late summer

Because he had liked fishing, we made a river rock dry pond with fish.  You can’t see the fish very well; they were mounted on stakes.

dry creek pool

Linda got a fish bench for the garden.

fish bench

We made a little rock area in the garden, the idea being that anyone who visited could place a little round rock on the bigger rock in memory. They had both loved frogs so Linda added lots of frogs.

frog and the little rocks

Linda herself took this photo of her cat in the garden:

Up on a dune on the path to the beach they had an old boat; their guests had believed the story that it had washed way in from the ocean. I do love planting up a boat…

garden boat

Linda has since moved away (and her life is happy again) and the house is now a vacation rental, but we have the memories.

Marilyn’s Garden

Another meaningful garden project was to create a garden at this new house near Surfside, for Depot Restaurant owner Nancy Gorshe’s mother, Marilyn. It was a blank slate except for the little entry sidewalk.

before

beginning

Marilyn wanted a lawn, so we delegated that, and we made a generous walking path around the house that would be friendly to any friends who used a walker or wheelchair.

garden with path

Below: Marilyn’s garden with the lawn seeded and the gravel path rolled and some new plants already in.

progress

Below: the entry from the driveway to Marilyn’s path.

entry

We put round rocks along the house to make that strip of non-garden advocated by my garden guru Ann Lovejoy.

rocks along house

This garden turned out very well and it is scheduled to be on the Peninsula garden tour in July of this year.

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flashback: vignettes, June-September 2008

The garden we had created for Linda in memory of Rob Linderman had matured by June 2008 into a lovely haze of mostly blue, his favourite colour.  Here it is on June 25th:

Rob’s garden

From the deck of Linda’s beach house it’s an oasis of blue in a backdrop of beach grass and shorepines.

Rob’s blue oasis

To the right you can see the path that Rob and Linda used to take to the beach….

Throughout July we continued to maintain our garden in peak condition….here in sun and in shade.

left, Rosa mutabilis and sunny container; right, a shade planter

On Agust 7th we could declare the usual seasonal success in almost hiding the neighbour’s garage from the view in Marilyn’s garden.

Marilyn’s garden

The view in both directions down Marilyn’s path had me completely satisified.

Marilyn’s path

Marilyn’s daughter Nancy named it “The Healing Garden” because watching it helped her mom recuperate from a health crisis.  Here’s proof that a garden that two deer fawns nested and grew up in could still be beautiful and lush with deer resistant flowers.

August in Marilyn’s garden

As you can see, we did go from job to job rather than spend the summer lounging in our perfect garden.  Here, on August 18th, Laurie’s clump of Persicaria ‘Firetail’ arcs prettily behind her purple ceramic birdbath (from The Basket Case Greenhouse).

in Laurie’s garden

The gardens at Klipsan Beach Cottages looked luscious in pink and blue…sometimes a hard palette to achieve in late summer when flowers often run to oranges and yellows.

hydrangea, dahlia, sanguisorba

In September my friend Jeannine and I went on the Cannon Beach Cottage tour.  I had talked extensively about how wonderful it had been the previous year and how marvelous to get inside the historic cottages.  But the 2008 tour featured mostly rather plain, newer cottages on the east side of the highway and I was left with only three photos of details I wanted to recall.

geraniums

I loved this little inset of geraniums (pelargoniums) in a wall.  Annual geraniums always remind me of my grandmother.

And this wall of shelves in a cottage made the whole trip worthwhile even though the rest of the cottage interiors were too plain and modern for my taste.

a satisfying cottage wall

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