Play It Again

From old trucks to glass chips, recycled things add character

GREEN GARDENING is all part of living lightly, consuming less, minimizing your mark on the earth. Where better to respect nature than in our own gardens? This year's display gardens and booths at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show were filled with recycled products and creative ideas for injecting sustainability into home gardens.

A recycled item is defined as a discarded product that is manufactured into something else. There were plenty of recycled objects used in the gardens, but also many things simply reused in clever ways.

Perhaps the most extreme example was the rusty old trucks transformed into garden art in two of the gardens. In the Olympic Nursery display, mahonia and nandina sprouted out the truck windows. Perhaps it wasn't the old-truck-as-backdrop that won Christianson's Nursery its Founders Cup award, but the truck definitely added to the aura of nostalgia that made the garden so enchanting.

Much of the recycling was a little more subtle. Materials like old doors, cobbles, stop signs, fire hydrants and even a satellite disk found a second life in show gardens. Recycled wood and recycled glass chips are looking so good these days that they don't scream "environmentally sensitive" like they used to.

Many gardens were a successful mix of native and ornamental plants that in a real-world garden would cut down on fertilizer and watering. Inside the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, you have to suspend the reality that these gardens last for five days.

A rain barrel was tucked into a corner of a patio, hooked up to be replenished by excess water from the kitchen sink in weeks when there's not enough rain to water the garden. Bins for compost were integrated into garden schemes. What seemed new this year is that these standard, albeit newly attractive, elements of organic gardening weren't just for vegetable or rural gardens, but used forthrightly in the smaller, more urban designs. The message was that organics aren't just for Birkenstock-wearing gardeners growing leeks in a corner of the pasture, but for sophisticated urban and suburban gardeners as well.

I didn't miss all those gushing water features and vast ponds of years past. Instead, several gardens had "pondless" water features, meaning that bubbling stones or dripping pipes flowed into pebbles or recycled glass chips, to be recycled back up and through. I especially liked the three tall galvanized-metal pipes, bound with metal strapping, with water trickling smoothly down their shiny surfaces. This was low water use put to maximum effect.

The market booths were rich in products with an environmental bent, like bamboo fencing (from Bamboo Hardwoods, 206-529-0978) or durable outdoor furniture and planters made of 100 percent recycled milk jugs (Orcaboard, 425-883-2570). I loved the market bags in trendy colors made from recycled water bottles. I plan to set orange and green ones around the garden and use them as planters, if I can part with using them for their original purpose. At $5 each, and with a few holes poked in the bottom for drainage, I can't think of cheaper containers for annuals, plus with handles to move them easily around the garden.

Perhaps the freshest and most influential message of all was the size of the display gardens: At least a third were quite small. Some of these patio-sized spaces were overtly environmentally conscious, like the one by New Leaf Creations featuring zero impermeable surfaces and reclaimed urban artifacts. All these downsized gardens proved that using fewer materials and just less of everything may be the ultimate statement in green style.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.