casual cottage garden

(This is a 2016 garden description. Gardens for this year’s tour can be found here.)

From the foliage and flower explosion on the parking strip to a dragon-clipped boxwood hedge guarding the front porch, this unique garden exudes a casual and nostalgic cottage garden feel. Twenty years ago, this 1904 bungalow was surrounded with lawn and skinny planting beds around its perimeter. The owner, a life time gardener and professional photographer, says, “I’ll be honest…there was no master plan here. It’s nothing perfect; there’s nothing perfect about it.” But, this small, so-called “imperfect” garden somehow manages to supply constant fodder for this professional photographer to celebrate and record.

The front parking strip is its own little garden, rich in purple barberries, willowy foxgloves, iris, and shrub roses. A mini-me birdhouse (a tiny version of the main house) sits high atop a welded rebar platform, providing lattice for a climbing rose. Around back, the barbecue deck is shaded by a rose-draped arbor. There’s a big barrel in bronze fennel with blue bottles sticking out all over, an art piece that Perry calls his “$10 Chihuly.” Found and salvaged items create focal points throughout this personal and detailed little garden.

The corners of the garden are rich in food crops, from a raspberry patch at the back to a sunny spot planted in tomatoes and lettuces at the top of the rockery. A mound of strawberries grows in a salvaged wheelbarrow.

The back door will be a familiar scene for Perry’s Facebook friends and blog readers. Every week he arranges flowers from the garden in a vase on the door and photographs them. 

Not wheelchair/stroller accessible.