About the only time I yearn for a larger garden is in late January and February when my witch hazel, Hamamelis ‘Arnold Promise’ blooms.  It is my favorite small tree–right now the branches are studded with clusters of bright yellow  spidery petals–instant sunshine even on the darkest day.   But it is the fragrance that makes my heart sing–a citrus infusion that permeates the garden. I want more but have no place to put them.  Knowing that I can’t add any to the garden I grab the Gossler Farms Catalog and dream.  Roger and family carry a vast array of cultivars in colors ranging from buttery yellow to carmine red.  Now is a time to take a road trip to the nursery in Springfield  and see their collection in full bloom.

When you visit your local nursery be on the look out for counter displays with $2.00 off coupons for tickets to the Yard, Garden and Patio Show at the Oregon Convention Center.  The show runs Friday through Sunday, February 18, 19 and 20.

New York Times best selling author and blogger Amy Stewart and award winning writer and designer C. Colston Burrell highlight the seminar schedule featuring 45 speakers on topics ranging from gardening in the shade to keeping chickens in your back yard.   Check out the Yard, Garden and Patio Show website for the schedule and biographies of the speakers.

Around the corner in the wall garden the earliest of my Helleborus x hybridus to bloom beckons — demure, upfacing flowers of white rimmed in pink — lord-it-over their brethren whose buds are just breaking ground.  The hellebore version catch-me-if-you-can is in full force.  A number of Helleborus x hybridus are gathered in this area of the wall garden where their blooms are visible at eye level showcasing an array of flowers including double, anemone and picotee forms.

Tall and stately, Mahonia x media ‘Charity’ reigns over the east border in the back garden.  Anna hummingbirds pay obeisance to a winter food source and I watch in amazement as they cavort and dive anticipating a sip from the upright, golden racemes in full flower.  The sharply toothed evergreen leaflets whirl around the stems on a shrub that always incites comment and interest — the perfect focal point.

Messy sketches and concepts evolved into plans that guided the build out. With drawings in hand we delighted and despaired as the outlines of the new space appeared during construction.  Heavy spring rains and mud dominated the project.  Sheets of plywood overlaid the lawn so that the workers could move from one place to another.

Gone the lawn--down to bare earth.

Work halted when it poured but we knew that the end result was worth the disruption in our lives.  My friend and landscape contractor dealt with the good days and the bad days in stride–searching and finding solutions for all the thorny challenges.

Fred imprinted himself in a novel way in the garden with his ‘folly’.  The new terrace affords us more space to relax and entertain while the new pathways beckon us to stroll through the garden.  They are wide enough for a wheelbarrow this time.  Oh the things we learn over time.  Crisp geometric lines define the lawn and walkways visually linking the front entry to the back garden more cohesively.

Hundreds of plants spent the spring on tarps on the terrace alongside the house–hoping that they would win the lottery and end up back in the garden.  Those that didn’t were donated and given away–don’t worry none of them we aggressive or invasive– all were gifts that keep on giving in a good way.  Five major structural plants were damaged beyond redemption and removed.  Several have been replaced but the biggest hurdle for me has been deciding what plants I want and how I want to use them.  Annuals were the stars in late summer and autumn filling spaces with abundant foliage and floral effects. May use some of them again this season–undecided still.  Once plant sale season is upon us am sure that plant lust coupled with common sense will guide me to good choices.

The goods news is that we love our new garden.  Timing was terrible but once committed to the project we embraced the opportunity to create a space that marries the old and new. Letting the garden speak in a fresh way about who we are and how we live is exciting for us.

Seminars, vendors and informal demonstrations are all part of Molbak’s Spring Celebration Weekend, April 10 and 11.  At 10-11 am Saturday  I’ll present Voluptuous Vignettes: The Art of Perennial Plant Combinations focusing on creating expressive, artistic and culturally compatible plant combinations.

From 1-2 Willi Evans Galloway, west coast editor of Organic Gardening Magazine discusses Gardening Gifts: Family, Friends and Community.  She’ll share ideas for creating inspired gifts from the garden, gardening activities for children and ideas for community- building projects.

Lorene Edwards Forkner speaks from 11-12 on Sunday offering 10 Tips for a Delicious and Productive Veggie Garden.  Her years of experience as a food enthusiast, gardener and writer come to the fore as she discusses which home- grown vegetables are the most easily canned and preserved.

How to Create a Healing Herb Garden is the subject of Jenny Perez’s presentation from 1-2.  She is adjunct faculty in the Botanical Medical Department at Bastyr University where she is also the garden manager.  She discusses new medicinal plants and ways to use familiar herbs for great therapeutic benefit.

Fred, my long suffering partner and AV specialist, can handle only so much nursery time.  If the weather relents I expect to see his golf clubs in the car when we load up.  He is busy researching golf courses near the nursery –something for everyone is our motto.

Building one in our garden was a no-brainer.  We live in a Victorian house and have a shady, dark corner that is my gardening nemesis as nothing thrives in that area.  Stumperies are considered a Victorian oddity so it made perfect sense for us to build one in our crazy garden.

Throughout the morning we rolled logs into place, pushing them this way and that looking for the perfect arrangement. Mud flew as Richie and Fred dug holes and regraded the area so that the wood could be placed in natural looking configurations.  They used a pry bar to leverage the large logs into place–it’s all about the fulcrum.   We carved out the tops of several logs that sit upright creating planting pockets. A large rhodie slatted for demolition in our garden redo received a reprieve and is now planted behind the stumpery creating scale and context.

A stumpery in the making.

Now it’s time for me to have fun with plants.  The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon Plant Sale is next weekend.  I’ll be there early, list in hand, singing my springtime plant sale shopping song.  The advent of an irrigation system with drip emitters raises the odds that this corner can actually sustain plant life.

Tired, wet, cold and muddy we stood back at the end of the day marveling that a pile of logs and stumps morphed into a beautiful stucture in an area that for years was a horticultural wasteland.  Since the space is small think that it is more appropriate to call our new feature a stumpette.

Richie is a fernophile with a artistic eye for creating stump based configurations based on his years observing nature.

As a long time show goer I was surprised by an encounter with a proprietary and snippy vendor  who only shared info about her product with folks willing to commission her to create an artwork.  Never before have I encountered any one at a show, garden tour or event that wasn’t willing to share what they were doing and why.  I wanted to stomp on her posies and chastise her for being an unnatural  and churlish gardener.

Two of the more decorated (meaning those with the most medals) display gardens were conceptual and very esoteric.  Both gardens were apocalyptic in nature–revealing a vision of native plants reclaiming the site in the absence of human kind.  Gardens by definition are a human construct and for me are part of the social fabric of our culture.  Interesting and provocative ideas.  The most arresting garden visually was a room sized cube sided in succulents.  The structure seemingly floated over a shallow pond.

Succulent cube at the San Francisco Flower Show

Thursday was spent photographing gardens in Palo Alto followed by a marvelous dinner at an Italian restaurant in Half Moon Bay.  Home again, home again on Friday.

Removing the bricks

Started digging and transplanting snowdrops this week.  A large colony is located right in the way of one of the new pathways.  The plump noses of oriental lilies are breaching the soil in the same area and need to be moved asap.  I’ll have help moving a huge  Hydrangea ‘Ayesha’.  Cutting it back to facilitate its trip across the garden means that it won’t bloom this summer but will live to flower again next year.

The rendering of the design for the back garden shows the location of the new terrace and walkways.   The paths are wider and more graphic repeating the lines in the front entry and lawn shape which is staying the same.   Fred is working on a plan for an over-the-top Victorian structure complete with roof to be situated along the fence line at the back of the new terrace.  Today we wandered around Woodcrafters, a haven for anyone who is a woodworker, looking for turned posts and period molding.  Can’t wait for him to begin building.

Space plan for the renovated back garden

The presence of 25 Cracked Pots vendors created a buzz.  The aisle dedicated to this not-for-profit group of artists who create art for home and garden from recycled and re-purposed materials was jammed with shoppers and looky-loos.  Objects fashioned of metal, from large, dramatic pieces to smaller fanciful bouquets of steel flowers attracted attention.  Garden divas Linda Beutler and Nancy Goldman succumbed to temptation purchasing birdhouses crafted from recycled wooded and decorated with a whimsical  and sometimes nonsensical objects.  I looked for colorful art pieces that might work in what will be my newly renovated back garden.  Clear dishes painted in a eye-catching colors affixed to rebar stakes caught my attention.

The Remarkable Green Market vendors stocked a tempting array of plants.  Xera Plants and Cistus Nursery beckoned with a selection of drought tolerant shrubs and perennials perfect for filling the holes in my gravel and wall gardens.  Burl Mostul, proprietor of Rare Plant Research, offered a number species and hybrid Eucomis otherwise known as pineapple lilies.  The bulbs were huge–I bought a number of them from him at least years show –each producing several bloom stalks the first year.

Seminar speakers captivated audiences with their expertise, practical advice and humor.  Dan Hinkley, sponsored by Monrovia, highlighted his favorite trees, shrubs,vines and perennials for year-round interest as well as presenting a lecture chronicling the development of Windcliff–his new garden situated on a  sunny, wind swept bluff high above the sound–the antithesis of Heronswood–a garden carved out of a woodland understory. Dulcy Mahar, Barbara Blossom and Robb Rosser provided poignant, joyful and hysterical insights into their gardening careers via a discussion of their worst garden bloopers–imagine Robb bleating like a goat.  What a treat! Vegetable gardeners, from novice to accomplished, garnered advice from the experts.  Bill Thorness shared insights into growing heirloom veggies while Rose Marie Nichols McGee illustrated techniques for growing food in containers.  Richie Steffen, curator for the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanic Garden in Seattle amazed his audience as he created a fern table–a wondrous composition of ferns, wood and moss.

Fabulous fern table created by Richie Steffen in his demonstration workshop at YGP Show.

Sean Hogan and the crew from Cistus Design Nursery created a stunning display garden featuring many of Sean’s favorite evergreens–plants that breeze through our wet winters and thrive in our dry summers.  Silver and gray foliage predominated providing a foil for bronze grasses.  Show stalwart, Eammon Hughes of  Hughes Water Gardens, designed a beautiful pond with an elegant planting of red twig dogwoods–simple and elegant.

I love the garden shows–for me they are a way to connect with other gardeners, writers, lecturers and passionate plantsmen and women that I might not see all that regularly. We are all members of the same horticulture tribe–and we were out in full force–from the young, neophyte veggie gardener to the wise and witty Roger Swain who for years hosted The Victory Garden.  A group of stellar speakers headlined the seminars from Fergus Garrett, head gardener at  Englands’ Great Dixter to well known Oregon nursery owners Roger Gossler, of Gossler Farms Nursery in Springfield and Maurice Horn from Joy Creek Nursery in Scappoose.  My lectures were packed with folks excited about the prospect of getting their hands back in the dirt. We are ready for the renewal of spring and anxious to leave the stress and trials of the last year behind.

The show floor hummed as shoppers checked out new products, purchased plants and wandered through the display gardens.  The display gardens, a dichotomy of fantasy and reality, were fun–filled with ideas for home gardeners.  Sustainability and ecological design prevailed in several displays.  My fave featured an urban farmette with raised beds, a chicken tractor, rain barrels, composting, repurposed building materials and goats.  Yes, goats–their antics, including standing on the roof of a small shed–delighted and entertained.

Goat surveying her domain.

This Friday is opening day for the Yard, Garden and Patio Show–Portland’s own garden show.  It runs from Friday, Feb. 12 through Sunday, Feb. 14 at the Oregon Convention Center.  Expect great gardens, vendors and seminars.  The planning committee is excited about showcasing the best of gardening and horticulture in our region.

Dan Hinkley, world renowned horticulturalist and plant explorer, is headlining the seminar series, speaking on Friday and Saturday.  The three day schedule of lectures and demonstrations covers all aspects of gardening from pruning to seed starting, design and decor, new plants and heirloom vegetables.  Each day offers a range of experts sharing their insights and information.  Join us as Kym Pokorny, garden writer for the Oregonian and dean of the airwaves Mike Darcy discuss their favorite plants–think debate.  An esteemed panel of writers and gardeners, Dulcy Mahar, columnist for the Oregonian, Barbara Blossom of the Tribune and Rob Rosser who writes for the Columbian, bare it all sharing their worst garden bloopers.

Cracked Pots, the non-profit group of artists who create home and garden accessories out of recyled materials, is going to have a large presence at the show with 25 artists in attendance.  What could be more fun than shopping for garden art.  Visit the Remarkable Green Market where many of the regions best specialty nurseries will be selling their wares.   This is an event not to be missed.

Before we can fully embrace the excitement, thrill and trepidation that are part of any project we must say farewell to the arbor on the north side of the lawn.  Lo, those many years ago, Fred designed and constructed this structure that has been the hallmark and focal point for the garden.  It has borne witness to events of all sorts–those that elicit joy and great sadness. Many blushing brides and their grooms have said their vows under the comforting canopy of  this stalwart and decorative Victorian arch.  In 2008 our daughter, Melissa and her love, Rich, were married in the company of family and friends in the garden.   She is now in the process of cutting down the two large Rosa ‘New Dawn’ who willing draped themselves over the arbor for many summers.  Melissa reminded me that I needed to go outside and take pics of the rose coming down.  We feel sad that we are losing this elegant part of the garden but Fred is planning his next building project–not replacement but a new structure for a new garden.

On the north end of the garden Hamamelis ‘Arnold Promise’ wreathed in gold is holding court watching the rest of the garden proceedings with a jaundiced eye.  She knows that she is the queen of the garden in her colorful garb exuding the her heavenly citrus infused scent.  Her perfection moves us forward.

Off to the NW Flower and Garden Show–can’t wait to see old friends and make new acquaintances.  I’ll report in this weekend.