Valerie Easton - The New Low-Maintenance Garden: How to Have a Beautiful, Productive Garden and the Time to Enjoy It

The New Low-Maintenance Garden

How to Have a
Beautiful, Productive
Garden and the
Time to Enjoy It

Valerie Easton
PhoToGraPhy by Jacqueline M. Koch

Frontispiece: This starkly modern terrace is softened with one big pot stuffed with rosettes of Canary Island aeonium (Aeonium canariense) that play beautifully off the fluffy leaves of the African fern pine (Afrocarpus gracilior). These two plants make a striking statement yet are easy to care for because both require the same conditions of sun and drought. Sekhri garden, Jeong Hyeon Lee design, San Francisco, CA.

Copyright 2009 by Valerie Easton and Jacqueline M. Koch.

Published in 2009 by Timber Press, Inc.

The Haseltine Building
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450
Portland, Oregon 97204-3527
www.timberpress.com

2 The Quadrant
135 Salusbury Road
London NW6 6RJ
www.timberpress.co.uk

Mention of trademark, proprietary product, or vendor does not constitute a guarantee or warranty of the product by the publisher or author and does not imply its approval to the exclusion of other products or vendors.

Printed in the United States of America
Second printing 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Easton, Valerie.
The new low-maintenance garden: how to have a beautiful, productive garden and the time to enjoy it / Valerie Easton; photography by Jacqueline M. Koch. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-88192-916-4
ISBN 978-1-60469-166-5 (pbk.)
1. Low maintenance gardening. 2. Landscape gardening. 3. GardensDesign. I. Koch, Jacqueline. II. Title. III. Title: New low maintenance garden. IV. Title: How to have a beautiful, productive garden and the time to enjoy it.
SB473.E235 2009
635dc22

2009008199

A catalog record for this book is also available from the British Library

Book design: Karen Schober, Seattle, Washington

To my nongardening family, who by enjoying the garden
in their own ways have taught me the breadth of its pleasures.
Their disinclination to pick up a shovel led to my simplifying the
garden so that Im able to care for it joyously and by myself.

VALERIE EASTON

Always to my mother, who first got me into
the garden, and to Chris, who keeps the garden of
my life abundant, rich, and full of discovery.

JACQUELINE M. KOCH

IM GRATEFUL TO MY PARTNER IN PUBLISHING, Jacqueline Koch, who tracked down so many of the gardeners and designers you meet in these pages. Her photographic artistry makes the book. Thanks to all the hard-working folks at Timber Press, especially Tom Fischer, whose early interest kicked this project into gear. I never would have considered doing another book if he hadnt promised us the design skills of Karen Schober, whose vision and talent light up our work.

Writing a column in the age of email is an interactive endeavor, and Im grateful to all the readers who have responded to my weekly Plant Life column in the Seattle Times over the past dozen years. Your enthusiasm keeps me gardening and writing.

Most of all, I thank the gardeners and designers who so generously share their creativity and knowledge in these pages. The idea of a simplified, new low-maintenance garden may have started in my own backyard, but it grew in the writing to encompass so many innovative gardens around the country. Thanks, too, to the many experts who shared their thoughts on the future of gardening. I hope youre as inspired by their humor, prescience, and collective wisdom as I am.

VALERIE EASTON

THIS SMALL SPACE ON THE PAGE WONT ALLOW ME to name all the invaluable friends, garden owners, designers, hortisexuals, landscape architects, artists, and indefatigable garden enthusiasts who helped make this project possible. I hope you know who you are and that you have my gratitude.

JACQUELINE M. KOCH

Ribbons of orange, repeated in pots, pansies, and wallflowers, weave through my garden to warm it up in all seasons. An egg-shaped orange pot sports Princess Irene tulips in spring, followed by foliage plants dotted with apricot pansies in summer.

GARDENING, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE WORTHWHILE IN LIFE except maybe love, comes down to time and resources. Our passion for plants and nature too often obscures this basic truth. But we ignore the time and resource part of the equation at our peril.

The idea for a fresh take on a simplified, low-maintenance garden came directly from my own years of intensely gardening an overplanted quarter-acre hillside. All the weeding, grooming, watering, mulching, and mowing finally wore me out. As a horticultural librarian and weekly garden columnist for the Seattle Times, I used my garden as my laboratory. For many years my enthusiasm for digging, planting, and caring for all Id created was boundless. And then one day it wasnt.

The spring I felt more jaded than enthused when I looked at flats of beguiling baby annuals waiting to be potted up, I realized with a sinking heart that while my passion for plants and gardens was perpetual, my inclination to spend most waking moments working outdoors was not.

OPPOSITE and ABOVE: My garden in late summer is rich in coneflowers, nasturtiums, and pumpkins. Lemon verbena is in the foreground; the second bed is trimmed with a chive hedge.

And then my husband resigned as yard boy. After thirty years of marriage, hed run out of patience helping me with something he was never much interested in. As middle-age crises go, it wasnt too bad. He simply told me, again and again until I heard him, that he was going to spend his weekends bike riding and kayaking rather than hauling buckets of mulch up the stairs, mucking out the pond, and carting away excess biomass. Greg now claims it took four years before I heard him say he was through toiling in the garden. Out of kindness, he kept working during the time it took to sink into my consciousness that I no longer had a crew. When I finally did understand that I was on my own caring for these thousands of plants, I belatedly realized that while I loved my garden, I too craved a little downtime, more spaces in my life to read a novel, go to a movie, or browse a museum without feeling guilty about time away from endless garden chores. It was time for a new low-maintenance garden intervention.