Lessons from a Low-Water Landscape and a Garden Evening with Friends

Last week’s Seattle visit included quite a bit of garden touring, and I feasted my eyes on some gorgeous places. One of my stops was to see fab designer Stacie Crooks, whose work has set a standard for sustainable beauty. Stacie and our friend Tina Dixon, also a widely published designer who specializes in container gardens, hosted a Garden Soiree for some of their gal pals. They were sweet to arrange the dinner around my time in town, ensuring that I got to see some of my very favorite women, including those shown here: 

My article about Stacie and her husband Jon’s vibrant, textural garden appeared in the May 2008 issue of Seattle Homes and Lifestyles, accompanied by some pretty awesome photography by Allan Mandell. I have included the full text of that story below – it explains Stacie’s inspiring design philosophy and tells the story of how she created this very special place. I snapped a few photos at the party, to share with you here:

 

Stepping stones make it easy for Stacie to garden and lure visitors through the sea of foliage, blades and blooms. She uses punches of orange to brighten the scheme (Epilobium californicum 'Dublin' and Calluna vulgaris 'Firefly' are favorites)

 

A shady path in the back garden leads to an inviting fire pit and seating area

Debra in green, on the path

Colorful Adirondack benches, each painted a different color to match the foliage

 

A perfect end to an unforgettable evening with my garden friends

 

Water-Wise & Wonderful: Lessons from a lush, low-water landscape

Written by Debra Prinzing | Photographs by Allan Mandell

(May 2008, Seattle Homes & Lifestyles)

The rich palette of golden, green, burgundy and silver foliage plants thriving in Stacie and Jon Crooks’ Shoreline garden north of Seattle suggests that theirs is a well-pampered landscape.

But the opposite is true.

Stacie, owner of Crooks Garden Design, has transformed a sloping half acre into a harmonious tapestry of beds and islands that explodes with interest in every season. The design features trees, shrubs, ornamental grasses, succulents and perennials that are adapted to harsh conditions: western exposure, maritime gusts, poor soil and no irrigation.

That it’s also gorgeous offers an inspiring lesson to countless young designers and students who have taken Stacie’s classes through the Saving Water Partnership, a consortium of local water districts.

“Among our focus groups, there is a misconception that a water-wise garden is a bunch of unattractive natives, cactus and gravel, that it can’t be beautiful,” says Elizabeth Fikejs of Seattle Public Utilities, organizer of the Savvy Gardener workshops. “Stacie allows people to truly experience the water-wise garden in three dimensions,” rather than just seeing plants in photographs, she raves.

Having trained with painter William Cumming at Seattle’s Burnley School for Professional Art, Stacie spent several years working as a commercial artist before embracing horticulture as her preferred medium in the early 1990s. Her passion included founding a neighborhood garden club and joining the executive board of the E. B. Dunn Historic Garden Trust, an Olmsted-designed landscape where Stacie developed the education and docent program.

In 1991, Jon, Stacie (pregnant at the time with her second son, Trevor) and four-year-old Dylan, moved to a 1950s rambler in Innis Arden, a neighborhood overlooking Puget Sound. The half-acre lot and sweeping views were the property’s best features. “Because of its age and architecture, this house had teardown potential, but we worked with it,” Stacie says. Although overgrown rhododendrons and shrubs dominated the property, they saw the potential for creating a vibrant, new garden here

Stacie and Jon wanted to work within their resources and abilities. “We haven’t spent a lot of money and we’ve built the whole garden ourselves,” she says.

The landscape’s transformation has paralleled the growth of Stacie’s business, which designs residential gardens large and small. She tests plants and design ideas here before suggesting them for her clients’ gardens.

One hundred percent organic in her practices, Stacie challenged herself to transform the playground-like front yard into a textural tapestry. She did so, despite the vast lawn, western exposure, rocky soil, and almost twenty-percent grade change.

“I faced a lot of limitations with this project,” she admits. “But after one high water bill, I chose drought-tolerant gardening as a solution.”  Choosing tough-as-nails plants solved another challenge, as well: “There’s nothing planted here that can’t handle two boys, soccer balls, a Frisbee and a Jack Russell terrier named Rita. This isn’t a fussy garden.”

Stacie and Jon rented a sod-cutter, and removed and gave away the turf in their expansive front yard. They tilled up rocks and roots and incorporated 30 yards of organic planting mix to improve the native soil. Stacie borrowed extension cords from neighbors, laying out the shapes of her new planting beds to create a sinuous wraparound border that encompasses a 70-by-40 foot irregularly shaped island at the center (grassy strolling paths link the beds, allowing for people and pets to navigate the “circuit”).

Her artist’s eye looked beyond northwest native varieties to include plants adaptable to similar dry summer-wet winter growing conditions, regions considered “Mediterranean”: Australia, Chile, South Africa and countries on the Mediterranean Basin.

Sophisticated in its palette and overall composition, the garden uses a surprisingly ordinary selection of plants. Mostly evergreen varieties appear  and are often repeated, including wine-colored barberries, Viburnum ‘Davidii’, Osmanthus burkwoodii, dwarf golden false cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Mops’), winter-blooming heathers, Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald n Gold’, New Zealand flaxes, golden carex and Cotoneaster glaucophyllus.

“I choose colors I like – golds and burgundies,” Stacie says, likening her saturated palette to the medieval tapestries she loved seeing in Europe both as a student and later in the mid-1990s. “Plus, I am the texture queen.” As a designer, she is drawn to strong plant shapes that play off of each other. “I like to alternate spiked, round, lacy and layered forms. It’s like a puzzle that has to fit together.”

The garden gains architectural height and fluid movement from ornamental grasses like Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’ and blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens). Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum ‘Gateway’), a long-blooming perennial, soars overhead. While foliage delivers volumes of color, flowers are strong accents. Planted en masse, low-water perennials punctuate the design, including purple coneflower, fire tail persicaria and show-stopping ‘Pikes Peak Purple’ and ‘Sour Grapes’ penstemon.

Last summer, this garden existed on minimal watering, Stacie says. “When temperatures hit 85-degrees, I finally turned on the water for a couple of hours at night and gave the roots a deep soaking.” But she resorted to this method only four times between May and October.

In addition to saving natural resources, the easy-care plants are compatible with Stacie’s busy schedule. Like many baby-boomers, she wants to enjoy, but not constantly tend to, her garden. “I’m choosing plants that can care for themselves and accommodating the space they require to reduce the need for any pruning.”

This philosophy has led to judicious editing out of a few perennials that require extra attention like deadheading and dividing. “As this garden matures, I’m using only low-maintenance perennials that have seasonal interest and great fragrance,” she adds.

Stacie takes comfort in knowing that her pioneering design philosophy is beginning to inspire some to try a different way of gardening. Dwindling water supplies and global warming may influence others. “Eventually, everyone will have to garden the way I do – they won’t have a choice,” she says.

Lucky for us, she proves sustainable can be beautiful too.

A dining pavilion with presence – who wouldn’t want to eat here? Photo by William Wright

Several years ago, Bill Wright and I created an article for Seattle Homes & Lifestyles about dining pavilions. The story centered around one incredible structure, designed by Seattle architect Susan Miller for a client in her neighborhood. What we loved about the design, the materials, the placement and the pure heft of the finished pavilion was its intent. It was designed for a purpose, not just plunked down in the backyard as an afterthought.

The race is on to capture our unfulfilled outdoor spaces for a higher — and better purpose. It’s a crowded field of excellent and inspiring ideas. More than ever we want to define and thoughtfully use the land on which we live (large or small or in between). I note this, not just because I’m living in LA. This phenomenon is all over the west and everywhere summer occurs.

I’ve had the word “Pavilion” in my shed glossary for quite some time and somehow the link was broken. I finally dug into the problem and am reviving the page with new photography. Here is the Pavilion entry.

Here’s an excerpt from my story about dining pavilions, which appeared in May 2002, entitled:

Dining Out: There’s nothing like a backyard pavilion to enhance alfresco entertaining:

Green Lake resident Heidi Hackett wanted to bring her meals into the garden – with more than a picnic table and umbrella. “I wanted something that I could use outside for more days than I would use a deck,” she recalls.

Susan Miller and Amy Gorman of Gardentile Inc. met the challenge, designing Heidi’s garden and its central showpiece: a fanciful dining pavilion that’s a scaled-down version of Heidi’s 1908 farmhouse. The 11-foot-square structure incorporates elements borrowed from the home’s architecture: boxed columns, a shake roof, beveled trim and a cupola.

While she’s designed a fair number of open arbors, Miller says there is an advantage to a covered place in the yard. “This is a great way to extend how you use the garden,” she points out. “The structure is tied to the house, but it stands out in the garden.”

Thoughtful finishes make Heidi’s pavilion an unforgettable destination for entertaining. Dry-set Pennsylvania bluestone pavers cover the patio floor; the ceiling is lined in the same beadboard as the home’s wraparound porch. A copper cap completes the cupola roof.

Borrowing the pattern from the home’s leaded-glass windows, the designers added bands of decorative metalwork between the pavilion’s columns and repeated the detail in an adjacent fence.

As she walks through her kitchen’s French doors, Heidi pauses on the porch to enjoy the view of her charming pavilion. She loves stepping across the whimsical checkerboard pavers that lure her visitors out to the structure.

“I use it all year long,” she says. “I’ll even go out on a rainy afternoon. And last winter, I hung lights there so we could enjoy hot cocoa outside in the evenings.”

Garden writers often dread the perennial assignment that happens around August or early September when an editor summons us to say: “It’s time to do that round-up story on holiday gifts for gardeners.” 

For as many of these puff-pieces that I’ve written over the years, I guess people really do read them. I’ve witnessed first-hand how such stories influence the behavior of desperate gift-givers with the calendar racing toward December 25th.

One year, when I was “The Weedy Reader” newsletter editor at Emery’s Garden nursery in Lynnwood, Washington, we sent around gift ideas to local columnists. We had this rather funny non-gardening item ~ a paper-mache pig with wings. It was about the size of a piggy bank. We had them hanging from the ceiling of the cashier-checkout area and someone (probably Amy Tullis, our genius marketing manager), put up a sign that read: When Pigs Fly.

The famous and widely-followed Ann Lovejoy picked up on the pun and mentioned Emery’s pig-figures in her column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. We couldn’t keep those pigs in stock. They really did fly — straight out the door! There were piles of fine hand tools, lovely leather gloves, and beautiful plant books. But everyone wanted a pig. Who knew?

This year, a few really good ideas just plopped in my lap from the gift gods. I’m sending up thanks to them this very moment (I should actually call this unseen, heavenly entity “The Patron Saint of Deadlines,” because he/she has so often appeared just when I so desperately need an idea while on deadline!).

I met a few people at the Garden Writers Association annual symposium who suggested ideas; I received some other tips unsolicited by mail. Editors and their market scouts even did some of the legwork for me. Yay! Oh, I did find one great gift all by myself – an ExOfficio hat that I purchased at SeaTac Airport. It’s probably designed for people who go fly-fishing, but I think it’s an excellent gardening hat.

I wrote two December stories – one for Seattle Homes & Lifestyles and one for 805 Living Magazine. Isn’t that funny? The former periodical is published in my prior environs – Seattle; the latter is circulated here in Southern Cal’s Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, where I now reside. Is it possible to be contributing garden editor for both? I really do have two lives!

Before I run Debra’s list of great gifts for gardeners, I want to tell you what I’m giving my gardening pals this year. The idea is part of the Alternative Christmas Market that my parish is hosting this Sunday. I’ve already perused the fine catalog of gifts with meaning for worthy causes in Haiti, Kenya, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and our own country.

One program in the catalog really stood out to me. It’s run by FLORESTA, a non-profit Christian agency that “plants hope” in communities through environmental restoration, community development, micro lending and more. 

Floresta’s programs enable farmers to make the best possible use of the resources available to them. Programs teach agroforestry, reforestation, soil conservation, and a host of other sustainable techniques. One way to support Floresta includes funding the planting of trees to restore deforested areas ($10 pays for an orchard of 10 trees; $100 pays for a forest of 100 trees). You can also finance a small farm loan ($25 pays for a vegetable garden; $100 pays for an agroforestry loan). I like the idea of giving a gift on behalf of one of my gardening friends to truly help a person in need change their life for the better. Imagine: giving up lattes for a week could transform the lives of a family in need? Gardening is truly a powerful source for change around the world

Read on for OTHER HOLIDAY GIFTS GARDENERS WILL LOVE:

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