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Drama By Design

To grab attention, think beyond the obvious to color, contrast and surprise

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Richard Hartlage Neon-bright custom-made furniture creates functional drama in the Althoff terrace garden in North Seattle. The design is by Dietz/Hartlage Landscape Architecture. Richard Hartlage An oversized urn lapped with spidery black mondo grass makes for a dramatic entry in the Zielke garden in Tacoma. The design is also by Dietz/Hartlage.

EVER SINCE last year's Northwest Flower & Garden Show I've been thinking about ways to make a garden exciting without the obvious drama of the phormiums, agaves, yuccas and strident boulders that defined many of the show gardens. The aggressiveness of all those spiky plants and vertical stones made me uneasy. How to inject some tension and animation in a garden, yet still create a calm, soothing space? Not that I'm against a well-placed yucca. But I'm afraid we've gotten carried away with these newly hardy, prickly plants, with the result that our gardens are looking about as comfortable as pincushions.

Thomas Hobbs, the Vancouver, B.C., nurseryman whose showy home garden is a trendsetter, writes in his book, "Shocking Beauty," that "understated elegance doesn't work all the time. Some garden situations call for knockout punches delivered to spice up unremarkable areas, mark important features or remind us that we are awake." So how do we make our gardens dynamic and expressive without resorting to cliches or a lot of those spikey plants?

Charles Price and Glenn Withey, Seattle designers who are in demand around the country, say it's not a formula but a context that determines much of the wow factor. Shifting the scale or balance out of whack with big, architectural plants might be one way, says Withey, "or if all the pots are planted calmly, one pot could have a totally different color or design going on." Recently they designed a circular patio edged in rolled steel and covered with tumbled red glass from Bedrock Industries. Now, that's drama you can walk on.

What about heating up the night? "Outlining palm fronds with light is beautiful," suggests Price. "But take note — too much night lighting, unless it's in the heart of a city, creates the opposite effect. You lose drama in the glare." Low-voltage uplights on most any plant create theatrical shadows. I've lit a Cercis canadensis 'Forest Pansy' for a shot of dark purple leaves playing off warm light. A small beam tucked beneath a Hosta 'Sum and Substance' lights up its chartreuse expanse like a glowing circus tent.

Designer Richard Hartlage of Dietz/Hartlage Landscape Architecture advises that high drama is created with high contrast. "Color is an easy way to infuse drama, and the more saturated and intense the color, the more dramatic the statement," he says. To create punchy contrast in a North Seattle terrace garden, Hartlage designed Crayon-box orange and crimson tables set off by a natural cedar fence.

"We all know drama when we see it, but what makes it so?" ruminates award-winning landscape architect David Pfeiffer. "I've distilled it down to the relationship of one object juxtaposed to another. For example, a spare contemporary home with overscale boulders placed in the landscape. Or a field of lavender with the jutting spikes of Italian cypress soaring into the sky, that is dramatic. What I've come to realize is that drama can also be subtle. Sounds contradictory, but has some truth to it."

I couldn't agree more. The elements of surprise and contrast are what strike me as most dramatic, especially when the gesture is small. What a delight to wander a bit and stumble upon garden incidents so suddenly you're struck by beauty. Coming unexpectedly upon fragrant, ripe raspberries in among a planting of agapanthus, finding scarlet runner vines dangling beans-for-the-picking down a back fence, or thrilling to an intense color scheme shimmering in the sun are all little dramas that draw you into the very life of the garden. How about the simple magic of opening up a garden gate and passing through to quite a different world just inside?

When friends and I visited the Little and Lewis sculpture garden on Bainbridge Island recently, we stood awe-struck beneath the largest spread of Tetrapanax 'Steroidal Giant' we'd ever seen. The huge, soft, fingerlike leaves splayed out overhead like serrated umbrellas, dwarfing both the nearby house and our little cluster of humans, making us feel like munchkins. After such immersion in a different perspective we viewed everything a little differently for a while. Maybe just such messing about with our minds for a few minutes is the greatest garden drama of all.

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