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Starting Over

This time, I made a garden more contained and less needy

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Jacqueline Koch Before Valerie Easton remade it, her new yard on Whidbey Island was flat and featureless. Jacqueline Koch A paver by Clare Dohna. Jacqueline Koch A fountain, metal troughs and other manmade features help give the new garden structure while allowing for playfulness and plenty of color. At left, a paver by Clare Dohna.

"It will be personal, and it will be fascinating, because there is no such thing as dullness when the gardener is going full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes."

— Henry Mitchell in "The Essential Earthman"

I'M NOT AT ALL sure it's fascinating to anyone but me, but I've definitely been going full steam on a new garden. Obsession probably isn't too strong a word for my intense, half-year preoccupation with creating a garden that's new, different and, most elusive, low maintenance.

I made my last garden in my early 30s when I had all the energy and time in the world (or so I thought), and it was naturalistic, rewarding and so much work it wore me out. So what a difference 20 years makes. This time I started with a small, flat and featureless yard around a little house in Langley on Whidbey Island. I wanted to inject some architecture and cool design in a space for people more than plants. And it needed to be accomplished at reasonable cost and in time for me to plant in spring, because I certainly couldn't go through a summer without a garden.

But mostly I knew what I didn't want, which was naturalism, lawn and a garden crying for attention so loudly that I never had a minute I didn't feel its need. I wanted a garden just for spring and summer, so I could enjoy the city in winter. I wanted raised beds for berries, herbs, lettuces and flowers, and plenty of terracing for dining and chaises. I wanted the garden to feel spacious and open despite its small size. But how to achieve a garden so dissimilar to any I'd made before?

Reading this in Gardens Illustrated helped: "Conceptualist gardens . . . are all about ideas rather than plants . . . The challenging and defiantly modern tone of this approach is characterized by exuberant use of colour and artificial materials." I thought about the warm, walled area around many English houses, used for sitting and dining outside, for growing food and flowers. Outside these sheltering walls lay the rest of the estate. I'd skip the estate part and emulate the intimate garden closely connected to the house, using modern materials rather than old brick walls.

The concept firmly in mind, I needed help with geometry and architecture. Designer Richard Hartlage looked around, listened thoughtfully, and sketched out the diamond-shaped main terrace, arced screen and diagonal grid of raised beds that define the finished garden. My architect daughter worked out the proportions and did the schematic, to-scale drawings.

Of course, I had to choose colors first, so I commissioned Vashon mosaic wizard Clare Dohna to make pavers. I wanted her art to be part of the very fabric of the garden. The plum, marigold, leaf green and soft yellow in her designs set the color palette for all that followed. Instead of the pond I had in my last garden (which I loved madly, but regretted in almost equal proportion), I bought a sandstone fountain from Ravenna Gardens that needed only to be filled and plugged in. I knew I'd love the sound and movement, but hadn't realized the birds and bees would be equally attracted to such a small volume of water.

I was lucky enough to team up with landscapers Byron and Dana Moffett of The Cottage Garden and Shawn Ogle of Coastal Soul Construction, all on Whidbey Island, who worked with me to determine materials and get the job done. The garden is built and paved with concrete, gravel, wood and metal — all humble materials that suit the little house and agrarian surroundings (pastures across the street), as well as my budget. The screens are built of hogwire framed in pressure-treated lumber wrapped with cedar. Raised beds are a combination of round galvanized-metal feed troughs and rectangular split-faced concrete block. All the gray creates a calm oasis for art and the explosion of carefully contained, exuberant plantings.

How in the world to choose just three trees, squeeze in vital plantings for privacy, food and fragrance, like the sweet peas, strawberries, hydrangeas and lilies I couldn't do without? Stay tuned for that story soon.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Jacqueline Koch is a writer and photographer living on Whidbey Island.