A Gardener’s Palette | Growing and gardening is a passion at Three Feathers

Text by Christine Stimac, photos © Elise Prudhomme

A Gardener’s Palette is how I would like to present my work at Three Feathers. All my life I have enjoyed gardening. As a child we lived on acreage and we raised our own meat and vegetables. There was always a flower garden, a place of tranquility.

When we moved to Oregon in 1991 we chose to live here because everything grows here (read our article about Oregon Rainfall and you will understand!). Long before we ever had a vineyard we started planting the gardens. The original house on the property, now a guest house, was the site of our first flower beds and a 20 x 20 vegetable garden. Not large, but enough to feed Victor and myself. We planted blueberries, raspberries, currents, gooseberries and rhubarb. There was an apple orchard but we added cherry and plum trees.

Architect’s Private Residence by Frank Lloyd Wright Student of Architecture, Victor Stimac

Victor, in the meantime, was designing and doing the working drawings for our primary residence that forms a rectangle with the original house.

In the space created by the two homes we planned a formal French parterre garden with boxwood beds and a pleached arbor of ornamental pear trees. The concept of the bermed bed on the north side was copied from the gardens at Luxembourg in Paris. This created a definition between the wild uncultivated field to the north and the formal design of the house. It also acts as a wind break.

A Gardener’s Palette | Color in the Formal Gardens

The formal beds have evolved over the years with trial and error. The trees in the back two parterre were originally contorted filberts. These are native trees but the contortion is, I believe, a disease and they are no longer sold here as they create a hazard to the commercial filbert crop. Eventually the trees died out and we replaced them with curly willow. They are flourishing. One really nice aspect to these trees is that in winter the bark becomes pink and in the winter light they are lovely focal points.

The center of the formal garden is a knot garden composed of lavender and germander arranged in intersecting circles. The hardest part of this bed is keeping it pruned tightly so it has definition. With the advent of the vineyards it has been hard to stay on top of it.

Sculpture and Topiary

The butterfly sculpture in the knot garden was made by a good friend in Philadelphia, Margaret Wasserman Levy. The sculpture was commissioned by my mother and was in her garden in Philadelphia for many years.

The topiaries in the parterre have grown a lot in thirty years and we now have someone professionally prune them.

Garden Design

As I look back over the past almost thirty years that I have been gardening here I realize how much plant material has evolved in the gardening world. Of course in Oregon one of the main industries is nursery stock so we have all the latest hybrids available. Garden design and color used to come solely from flowers but over the past thirty years there has been an explosion of leaf color variations in shrubs and trees as well. It is possible to design a year round display using those elements in addition to flowering plants.

After the formal garden was completed I kept putting in new flower beds and landscaping.  I added a shady garden with anemone, monkshood, shasta daisies, clematis Montana and cranesbill.

Beyond the fences I tried gardening in gravel for perennials that did not like too much rain. I have had a lot of success with purple verbena, lavenders, helianthemum, red geum and white tansy.

Below the house on the west side, we created what I call the Sunset Garden. As the name implies, it is the last garden to get sun in the afternoon and is also a shady garden the rest of the day. In the large grove of Oregon big leaf maples we built a tree house for visiting grandchildren. If it is very hot I will sleep in the tree house or sit there and enjoy the breeze and the view of Torio Vineyard.

The gardens have brought me a lot of pleasure. The plants attract bees, butterflies and birds. There is creativity in planting; exercise in maintaining; therapy, enjoyment and occasionally solace in their contemplation.