L OCAL LIVING
District
9 DC
More plants, less mowing In an established
neighborhood in Silver Spring, Carole Galati had problems with storm water gushing onto her property as it raced down her street to nearby Sligo Creek. At first, she placed blocks of quartz and other stone as a barrier, then she went on to transform her front yard into a series of plant beds dissected by a network of paths edged in stone. The beds are elevated and framed in a variety of rocks. She likes the
effect, and she doesn’t miss the turf. “I didn’t want to do the spraying, the mowing, the watering,” she said. “I was much more interested in plants. I don’t like to look at lawns; they’re boring.” The collapse of a towering
Norway maple eight years ago brought sunlight and space to a quarter of the yard, and she expanded her plantings of specimen trees and shrubs with ground covers and perennials.
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She wanted it to look neat, not meadowlike, and is mindful too of the edges, so that her neighbors aren’t competing with branches as they get in and out of their cars. Galati, though, has set aside a corner to draw pollinators that has a looser feel, planted with butterfly weed, buddleia and joe-pye weed. Nearby she keeps a single strip of grass, out of public view. “I use it to clean my tarps, when I hose them off,” she said.
Wendy Bell’s front garden is also a place to display art such as a spinning sculpture, foreground, and a bottle tree of blue glass.
A neighborly display
In Takoma Park, Wendy Bell’s front garden has a natural, cottage-garden appeal in front of her cozy, 1920s clapboard house. Her collection of perennials and choice shrubs represents a 17-year journey that began with a landscape form all too familiar: azaleas as foundation shrubs, a weedy lawn lined with hostas, and a dense old maple casting more shade than the grass wanted. Bell, a retired EPA
In the shadow of a Southern magnolia, Mike Anderson has turned a weedy front lawn in Southeast Washington into a relaxing place shielded from a busy intersection.
An oasis for wildlife For Mike Anderson, a
professional gardener who lives in Lincoln Park in Southeast Washington, the yard in front of his two-unit apartment building was an obvious candidate for a makeover. An old mower lived in the basement, but the lawn was a blanket of weeds below a towering Southern magnolia. Various things conspired against reviving the grass: the tree, with its shade, leaf litter and roots, and the desire of a gardener to find places for beloved specimens. Eight years later, the front is a plantsman’s mixture of specimen trees and shrubs, shade-loving perennials and plant orphans picked up at local nurseries and sales. The front path is screened by upright hornbeams. Anderson clips them after their spring growth to keep them narrow, and he has removed some of the lower branches of the magnolia.
Water and flowers draw wildlife to Anderson’s garden, now a magnet for birds.
He allows the leaves to drop all summer before assaulting the resulting litter. “I give myself one day when they’re all done, and I carry out 12 bags of leaves,” he said. The plants around the magnolia are just far enough away to get the light and soil they need, and include a dwarf hydrangea named Pia. Its mopheads, now a pleasant wine color, are small and in scale with the overall shrub. Next to it, Anderson has placed a gold
spotted foliar plant named Farfugium japonicum, along with hardy geraniums and a variegated variety of the holly-like osmanthus. On the house side of the magnolia, the tree creates enough screening and shade to have a little patio where Anderson and his partner, Panchi Wilson, can sit and feel part of the neighborhood without it feeling part of them. The whole front garden became an attractive way to provide a visual and aural barrier between the property and Massachusetts Avenue. “Anything that could push the house back from the busy intersection, I was definitely working toward,” Anderson said. His front garden has become an oasis for wildlife, drawing fireflies and butterflies as well as a bird culture. The bird bath “is very well used,” he said.
environmental engineer, began by removing some of the lawn on one side of the front. The death and removal of the tree spurred more garden beds. “I wanted to experiment with different kinds of plants,” she said, “and the grass never looked any good; it was full of weeds.”
Bell went on to study landscape design, and today the garden is a pleasing display of first-rate woody plants rising from drifts of perennials. It provides months of decorative interest. The spike winter hazel blooms in early April, the evergreen loropetalum unfurls its fragrant spidery flowers soon afterward. In July, the summersweet prepares to
present its own scented blossoms, a magnet for butterflies. “Now that the garden has
pretty much evolved,” Bell said, “I add plants I fall in love with. More shrubs.” Weeding, watering, pruning, planting, mulching, moving plants: All these aspects of cultivating plants are more work than running a mower over weedy grass, but that’s what gardening is all about. By placing the homeowner out in a semi-public space, neighbors stop to chat and ask about plants. “It’s a great way to meet people, to talk to people when you’re out in your front yard,” she said. It gives her a chance to talk about how her form of landscaping is better for the Chesapeake Bay than a lawn. One of the most recent
decorative touches is a bottle tree, a pole with pegs for about 30 blue bottles. Blue glass was traditionally used in parts of Africa to chase away evil spirits. In its modern form, the bottle tree is a blue sculpture. When Bell told neighbors about the project, she would come home to find a blue bottle or two left on the porch.
Bell has spent 17 years transforming her Takoma Park front lawn into a garden with woody plants and perennials that provide months of decoration.
THE WASHINGTON POST • THURSDAY, JULY 22, 2010
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