Jaime Hart calls this her divorce garden.
This street-side apartment garden is tiny at 30 by 15 feet. What she calls “garden rooms” are swaths of plants arranged by color and intuition.
She moved here a year ago to start a new life and a new garden from little more than weedy grass. Visitors won’t find designer stone paths or a marble fountain. They will see what an expert gardener can do in one year with a small space, an even smaller budget and a full heart.
Hart’s Edmonds garden is one of a dozen gardens on The Snohomish County Master Gardeners 2008 Garden Tours. The dozen gardens reflect the varied tastes and talents of their masters.
The tour provides people a chance to see gardens of all sizes and styles, including more formal gardens, a Victorian cottage garden and a vegetable and flower garden with 86 varieties of dahlias. And they can see how experienced gardeners have tackled problems such as steep slopes, shade, poor soil, erosion, limited space, big trees and big dogs.
Hart found her way to this garden through a combination of bad luck and bad business sense. For years she worked as a clinical pharmacologist, involved in drug trials for people with liver disease. She found it emotional work; she couldn’t detach herself from the patients.
When her husband needed help with his business, it seemed natural for her to work with him. When the business began to fall apart, she sold off her beloved property on Lopez Island and cashed out her pension. She lost her home and an established garden in Edmonds.
Last year she was single and nearly broke. She found this apartment through a friend and fellow gardener.
“A lot of people would be complaining about it, but it is my dwelling and I dearly love it,” Hart said. “And she said I could do anything I wanted with the yard.”
The yard was nothing more than a dried out hedge and some ratty grass, a common space she shares with two other renters. To her it looked like opportunity, a fresh start, a blank canvas.
“All the sudden here is this little artist banging her fists on the walls saying, ‘Let me out, let me out.’ “
Hart believes the only good grass is dead grass so she dug it out except for a winding strip that serves as a path. She spread compost and brought plants she had saved from her old garden. Just a year later it’s a pleasant swatch of color, texture and fragrance.
Look carefully among the lavender and hostas and phlox and you’ll see some exceptional plants, including stunning Himalayan blue poppies, Zaluzianskya ovata with its precise crimson-backed flowers, and brugmansia. These three are special to her because they shouldn’t be growing in our climate zone and they are, mainly because her garden is tucked in a warmer micro-climate, she said.
Her change in life has come with a new job too. She works at My Garden Nursery in Mill Creek caring for plants and teaching classes on pruning and landscaping.
Her job title?
“I am the eccentric,” she said.
She has a special way with people and plants that sometimes bewilders her bosses, she said. She can coax an ailing plant back to health as well as she can convince customers that if they can decorate the inside of their houses, they can handle the garden too.
“So many people come into the nursery and they say, ‘I can’t do this. I have a black thumb. I kill everything,’” she said. “I tell them straight up, ‘You need an attitude change.’ All that’s lacking is confidence.”
By sharing her garden, she hopes she can inspire a few more.
“The whole principle of the master gardener tours, at least for me, is that the gardens are truly works in progress,” Hart said. “So many people are so intimidated as they make their way through formal gardens where there is not a blade of grass out of place, not a weed to be seen. I don’t think people can relate.”
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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