An old Seattle garden comes to life with new color
LIKE MANY other midcentury gardens in her Broadview neighborhood, Ann Ormsby’s property is large, shady and rhododendron-rich. But this energetic gardener wasn’t content with the overgrown shrubs and towering fir trees that typify so many Northwest gardens planted 60 years ago.
“I haven’t changed the pathways or the big trees; the structure was already in place,” says Ormsby. But over the years she’s thinned it out and updated with foliage plants in various colors and textures to play off the bark of the big trees. the effect is tranquil yet colorful, well-established yet fresh.
There’s nothing stodgy about this old garden; pathways are lined with inspired combinations like black mondo grass and white-blooming, ground-hugging dogwood (Cornus canadensis). the dinner-plate-sized brunette leaves of Ligularia ‘Britt Marie Crawford’ create drama around the backyard pond.
Local landscape architect Roberta Wightman designed the original garden in the 1950s, when it was published in Sunset magazine. the low-slung house, by William Bain, has an entire wall of glass visually linking indoors and out. Ormsby has made the most of the home’s transparency with terraces that extend out into the garden. She’s added art, water features and bold plantings you can see from inside the house.
Ormsby is a longtime docent, board member and part-time weeder at the nearby Dunn Gardens, where she’s been inspired by the work of curators Glenn Withey and Charles Price. her shady front garden with its woodland walks and leafy Japanese maples is reminiscent of the Dunn Gardens’ graciousness. the back garden is more open, with lawn, pond, terraces and a droughty area planted in non-thirsty catmint, thyme and euphorbia.
When Ormsby moved into the house in 1988 she was a weekend gardener who worked full time for the city of Seattle. But before too long she was replacing diseased azaleas with hardy fuchsias. And when she retired in 1999, she began introducing year-round color. she replaced ‘Unique’ rhododendrons with winter-blooming Azara microphylla. bright Monterey cypress and the big, soft leaves of Hydrangea aspera modernize the garden. “I really love chartreuse,” says Ormsby, who winds this light-reflecting color through the garden in broad ribbons of Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’).
Ormsby mostly takes care of the garden herself, even though its acre-plus is all cultivated except where it slips away into a wooded ravine at the back. she hires In Harmony Sustainable Landscapes to deal with what’s left of the lawn after she dug it up to plant more tomatoes.
Ormsby shares the harvest with a friend who helps in the vegetable garden. Raised beds cascade down a slope that used to be all salal. here they grow potatoes, chard, beans, broccoli, onions, asparagus, carrots and raspberries. Old-fashioned flowers grow happily down the hillside, too. up by the house, Ormsby keeps a little vegetable patch she calls her barometer, which she watches to determine when things are ripe below in the beds.
It takes courage to update a venerable old garden, and Ormsby seems to thoroughly enjoy the challenge. her sense of fun and inquiry shows in the piles of colorful glass spheres by the front door, the bright red umbrella on the terrace, the mix of new and old plants.
“I had a whole wagon of variegated plants once years ago at Wells,” she recalls, referring to Wells-Medina Nursery. Founder Ned Wells came up to her and asked, “You aren’t going to plant them together are you?”
And the answer occurred to her: “Why not?”
Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of “The New Low-Maintenance Garden.” Check out her blog at valeaston.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.
