One small plot serves as home, shop and town stopping spot

FARM TO MARKET Road winds through Skagit Valley potato fields, dairy farms and wetlands thick with migratory birds on its way to the little town of Edison. A fragrant bakery, a couple of bars, the Lucky Dumpster salvage shop and a handful of galleries make for a quiet destination. Farmers, artists and bikers populate the place, creating a distinct mixture of rural and hip. And nowhere more than in the old Farmers and Merchants Bank building on the main corner does this unique vibe coalesce. Shop Curator is the gallery, home and garden of David Blakesley and Charles Atkinson, a pair of hardworking originals who may by themselves be reviving the tradition of living behind the store.

Edison's downtown, if it can be called that, is zoned to encourage live-work situations, and as you'd expect, the businesses are locally owned. Still, Shop Curator must be the poster business for local ownership: it's retail, home and garden all on one small and very public plot. Passers-by stop to admire the garbage-can planter at the front door of the shop, step inside to peruse items from bones to bracelets, then, on their way out the door, admire Blakesley and Atkinson's updated take on a casual cottage garden.

"The natural world isn't about symmetry," says Atkinson, a garden designer who practices on his own garden. "I wanted the garden to have a loose feel, with different heights and textures but not many flowers."

The couple moved from a shady Bellingham garden to this sunny corner. They began work on the garden by removing a big tree, lawn and a rickety kid's play set. "Last year this was all unkempt grass," says Atkinson of the gravel paths that wind between beds of shrubs, vegetables and perennials. He stripped out sod, laid down cardboard to kill the roots and brought in good soil. All that's left of the original garden is a double white lilac, a scrap of aged rose, and the diseased old apple tree that serves as scaffold for a climbing David Austin rose.

In the sunniest part of the garden, Atkinson has planted heirloom corn, yellow squash and purple beans. Along the street, he put in a casual medley of California poppies, lavenders and grasses in soil that used to be saturated with oil from parked cars. "I salvaged the soil with alpaca manure," he says matter-of-factly.

Blakesley, a jeweler and sculptor who has a passion for found objects and discards, sells his own and other artists' work at Shop Curator. He brings his aesthetic out into the garden with an antique stove, piles of round rocks he's collected and a big metal frog on the roof overlooking the festivities below.

The renewed little garden is the town's living room, the place everyone peeks in to see what's blooming, then stops to chat. "The garden enriches our lives," concludes Blakesley. "It shows that Edison is alive, and we get to see our neighbors every morning."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "A Pattern Garden." Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.

The information in this story, originally published July 5, 2009, was corrected July 7, 2009. David Blakesley is a sculptor and jewelry designer in Edison, Wash. A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the artist as Michael Blakesly.