The Rose Festival. Comic Con. Pickathon. The Waterfront Blues Festival (Marcia: The McMinnville UFO Festival!).
It seems like every major event people look forward to each summer has been canceled or postponed.
But I can virtually guarantee you that this year’s edition of the Association of Northwest Landscape Designers’ garden tour is a virtual guarantee to be held. Virtually.
Note the use of the word virtual. And virtually. Because this year’s tour, which will include a look at nine gardens, is being done exclusively online, including an Oregonian/OregonLive Facebook Live video of a garden in Northeast Portland. Unfortunately, if you can imagine this in Oregon, it rained on the originally scheduled day for the shooting and it’s now planned for Tuesday of next week.
This means — eventually, in theory, fingers crossed — you can enjoy the beauty of these exquisitely designed gardens from the comfort of, well, where you’ve probably been spending much of every day for the last 10 weeks.
Full disclaimer here: Marcia was involved in the very first ANLD tour (for perspective, this year was to be the 15th). Full disclaimer II: I was not. Well, except that a much different version of our garden was part of it.
This year, the featured gardens are all in either Southeast or Northeast Portland. And one, the Robbins garden in Northeast designed by Linda Meyer of LMeyerDesign, is the subject of the video you can find on The Oregonian Facebook page and below.
We were treated to a walk through the garden with Meyer and owner Marlene Robbins, which was quite eye-opening. The garden features one of the biggest boulders I’ve seen in a landscape (it’s Montana rainbow, picked out at Smith Rock), more than 300 varieties of plants and contributions from glass/metal artist Katy LaReau, woodwork from Patrick Blakeslee of Natural Encounters LLC and a bed frame turned trellis found at Metalwood Salvage. It features a beautiful stone labyrinth, vegetable beds, a basalt column water feature, spa, dry creek bed and not a blade of grass to be seen. But it also served as a sobering reminder that we won’t be walking through the other eight gardens this year.
On the plus side, in a year where seemingly everything has been pushed into next year (and, let’s be honest, the gardening-boots-on-the-ground tour is no exception), you still get the visual inspiration of seeing beautiful gardens and hardscape and plants without having to pick a single weed yourself. On the down side, of course, you do miss out on the smells of the garden and the direct interaction with the always-proud garden owners and designers, who inevitably love sharing.
But on another plus side, you don’t need to obsess over the weather forecast to see if it’s going to rain the day of the tour (as it has in the past) or if temperatures are going to skyrocket (which also has happened).
So, while we all will dearly miss walking through this year’s gardens, at least you have that going for you.
Linda Meyer, LMeyerDesign (landscapesforyourlifestyle.com): The Ruff and Robbins gardensDoreenWynja.com photography
Marcia:
I so look forward to ANLD’s annual garden tour every year. It always inspires me to get out in the garden and create something, which seems especially important at this stressful time.
And while we can’t actually tour the gardens in person this year, we can still sneak a peek at the gardens, thanks to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s digital team, which filmed a Facebook Live Q&A segment featuring designer Linda Meyer in the Robbins garden. If you missed it live on May 18, you can still watch it here.
The live team is only able to feature one designer and one garden because of the logistics of a live event. But there were six other talented designers and eight more gardens slated for the 2020 tour. You can see more photos at anld.com/2020-Garden-Tour.
The gardens are all so beautiful, we decided to share them photographically with you here in our column.
So grab the cocktail of your choice, your newspaper and laptop and head outside to your patio to enjoy the tour virtually, in print with us, or both! Welcome to the new normal!
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
— Somebody on the internet
Rebecca Smith, Blessing Landscapes (Blessindland.com): The Hainsey gardenDoreenWynja.com photography
The designers and gardens
Linda Meyer, LMeyerDesign (landscapesforyourlifestyle.com): The Ruff and Robbins gardens
Marina Wynton, OLIVINE Land, LLC (olivineland.com): The Stafford garden
David West, Structures in Landscape (structuresinland.com): The Peterson, Farm and Silva & Cartwright gardens
Rebecca Smith, Blessing Landscapes (Blessindland.com): The Hainsey garden
Carol Lindsay, Landscape Design in A Day (Landscape-design-in-day.com): The Pettit garden
Amy Whitworth and Lora Price, Plan-it Earth Design (plan-it-earthdesign.com): The Cochran and Courts garden
Donations
If you’re in the giving spirit, ANLD invites people to make a donation to Growing Gardens in lieu of the tour ticket price (which this year would have been $20 before Mother’s Day, $25 after). Growing Gardens’ home garden program (check it out at growing-gardens.org) is a great non-profit that provides vegetable garden installation, seeds and starts, compost, tools and educational workshops for people with limited resources. To donate, go to the Growing Gardens donation page.
Marcia Westcott Peck is a landscape designer (mwplandscape.com or find her on Instagram at @pecklandscape or on Facebook by searching for “The Pecks”), and Dennis Peck is a senior editor at The Oregonian/OregonLive.
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Though Portland’s 2020 ANLD tour is off, the gardens are still a beauty to behold - oregonlive.com
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