After I left
the open garden at Dulcy Mahar's former home I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. I love the opportunity to size up the local gardening vibe with a little sidewalk peeping...
Such grand old growth roots with nice moss and fern coverage (yes, I'm ignoring the sidewalk damage and the fact the poor tree needs more room).
Most of this garden was hidden by a tall hedge, but from the side I glimpsed a few palms and Fatsia japonica.
As I mentioned yesterday this is a fairly "exclusive" neighborhood and as such I thought the homes would be similar in character and size, I was very wrong in that assumption.
Oh, a rusty metal mariachi band, that's unexpected!
If you'd have asked me if I'd ever been to this neighborhood before I'd have said no, but once I saw this house I had a flashback to a small plant people group gathering I attended when Kelly and Sue of
Far Reaches Farm came to town and gave a talk.
It was here! That was in, maybe, 2011 or 2012? 2013? Wow...how has so much time passed?
Happy blooming Hamamelis (witch hazel).
And another.
More varied home and garden styles...
Their snow drops match the house!
I accidentally cropped the house when I took this photo, I was so in love with the mushroom lights in combination with the ferns and moss—I paid zero attention to the house.
I so need to go back and see these at night!
Love the simple midcentury modern style, but that's a lot of lawn.
Lots of plant maintenance—pruning—happening here.
Nice orbs! I wish I would have got a better shot of the slots in the driveway. It's an interesting treatment.
This is the last house I stopped to photograph that day, and as I was doing so a car coming down the side alleyway slowed and a window came down. I'd been pretty sure multiple alarms were going off as walked around the neighborhood snapping photos (what is she doing!?!), but now I was going to have to actually explain to someone why I was photographing their home and garden. Then the person driving the car yelled my name! Then she told me hers,
Sheryl Williams, a fellow blogger, from Austin, now back in Oregon. She'd been to the same open garden and was heading home when she saw me. Cue "
it's a small world after all"... (hi Sheryl!)
Back to the home though, it was perhaps the largest I'd seen, footprint-wise. With a huge front yard.
I wonder what's under the straw, in the brick planter? Bananas? A gunnera?
The "lawn" surrounding the front pavers was faux.
In case you need proof...
But look! They also had the first agaves I'd seen all day...
I mentioned Far Reaches Farm in this post, so it seems like a good time to point out the extensive Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy Video Presentation Archives available on their website,
here. You can watch presentations on Polygonatum, Trillium, Aplines from Australia and Tasmania, and so much more—dig in!
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Portland really has some incredible neighborhoods. That last house, ooooh-weee I like it. So many possibilities for that front garden. Those mushroom lights are perfect, I haven't seen anything like them! Love your walk about the neighborhood posts.
ReplyDeleteVery cool! Love touring neighborhoods to see what people are planting! Interesting how that last house had fake grass around the path, right next to a large patch of regular or ornamental grass?
ReplyDeleteYour tour reminds me of homes in Brentwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), which I used to walk through periodically when I lived in Santa Monica. The houses were big (albeit positioned fairly close to one another) and highly differentiated. They also had well-maintained gardens, which is something I can't generally say of homes in my own neighborhood. I laughed at your story about the driver that stopped as you were taking photos - that's something I've been wary of doing in my current area. I've never been confronted BUT I've seen posts on the Neighborhood Watch sites warning of people "casing" homes. That's why I do so few neighborhood walks outside my own ;)
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