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For many homeowners, that point is nothing more than a pre-made Home Depot lattice arch, painted tastefully white.
But for some gardeners, the entry is an opportunity to show their own personal style, and South Sound is full of fanciful, original garden gates, fences and portals.
In Olympia, general contractor Geoff Gowens recently started a decorative wood and metal business. Using his skills, he made a double gate to protect his and wife Debbie’s vegetable garden. Made from steel with copper highlights the gate features salmon and a tree. Stylized foliage and water come from different types of steel wire mesh.
He made it in just three days from scrap laying around the shop. His motivation: “I have this material. What can I make out of it?”
But it is practical as well. “It was also meant to keep the chickens in. I haven’t lost any to critters yet,” Gowens said.
A more whimsical approach was taken by Casey Kanzler in Olympia’s South Capitol neighborhood. The former auto mechanic took a pre-made metal arch and welded saw blades, crank wheels and a trundle wheel from an old Singer sewing machine onto it. It was a Mother’s Day gift for his wife, Susan Cierebieg. “He’s the artist in the family,” she said.
Metal is also the medium at Melissa and Dick Balch’s home in north Tacoma. The home, which Melissa wryly calls the Taco Bell house, seems more suited to Tucson with its stucco walls and jutting timbers. Shortly after the Balchs purchased the home, they installed an 8-foot-tall wire fence around their property.
The couple had just moved from rural Graham. “It felt so exposed,” Melissa said. The fence was to be a trellis for passion vines but they died during the recent harsh winters. By then Melissa didn’t mind. “I’ve gotten over my shyness of being in the neighborhood.”
The installation of the wire fence and gate was not a hit with neighbors. One called the building inspector on the Balchs, but the couple had obtained all the necessary permits. “The reaction was bad. People thought I was building some kind of fortress,” Melissa said.
Melissa, an artist and former nursery owner, and Dick, known around the Puget Sound for his 1970s car-smashing auto dealership TV commercials, have now filled the front garden with a variety of eye-catching and unusual plants.
“Now people want to know about the fence: who did it, where I got the material,” Melissa said.
On Tacoma’s east side, one couple has created an outdoor entry that invites people to sit a spell.
Two seating areas flank the main walk up to the home of Ron and Seanna Baker. The most impressive is a 12-foot-square arbor built next to the public sidewalk. It contains comfortable furniture, pots with heliotrope, honeysuckle and black mondo grass and built-in railings holding plants. “Sparkle” the hummingbird comes to feed on crocosmia.
“This is where we get our peace,” Ron says. He’s the builder, she’s the gardener.
Some passers-by might find the placement next to the sidewalk and main entry a bit public, but the couple have their reasons. “Beauty begets beauty. It helps to inspire others. I’ve met a lot of the neighbors,” Seanna says.
On Olympia’s north side, Brandon Reed has created much more than a picket fence and gate. The owner of Breed Gardens, a company that manufactures and installs raised garden beds, Reed has created a naturally finished stake fence that has as its centerpiece a gabled pergola. The fence is punctuated by a bright red gate that mimics the design of the pergola.
On the shores of Thurston County’s Offut Lake, one of Stan Kildow’s two vegetable gardens is entered through a topiary gate. The portal is made of a King apple tree on one side and a Seckel pear tree on the other. Kildow, a former landscaper and nursery owner, lets the apple tree grow straight out of the top of the portal. He gets about a dozen apples a year from the tree with the help of a ladder. Adding to the whimsy is a topiary shrub man and a “rug” made from moss.
Most gardeners would be happy to have just one eye-catching garden portal. But not Vashon Island gardener Jonathan Morse. He has three jaw-dropping entries on the two-acre property that serves his extended family.
Morse, who runs the garden center at Island Home Center and Lumber, and owns North Shore Garden Design, uses his work to show off his design skills. “As a designer, it’s hard to express your creative theme in just words.” That theme would be the juxtaposition of organic and industrial forms.
Near his cabin, Morse created a geometric wall with see-through partitions in shades of green. Along a black-trimmed top grows Mexican feather grass. Behind the wall is a stunning view of Puget Sound. He built the wall to create a sense of visual suspense.
Up near his parents’ house, he built a portal out of two large salvaged cedar logs. Above, a 4-by-12-foot-long trough holds sedums. In the earth more sedums, sempervivums, alpine firs and cedars grow, giving the entire entry the look and aroma of a Mount Rainier vista. Not coincidentally, Morse used to work at the park.
Finally, Morse’s perennial and vegetable garden is protected from deer by a gate that is sandwiched between two walls made of cedar rounds. Old iron pipes and culverts mixed in with the rounds offer peek-a-boo views as do holes cut in the twin gates. The deer can look but they can’t touch.
Craig Sailor: 253-597-8541 craig.sailor@thenewstribune.com
