Remember that brown is a color. Heatherwood is full of various shades of brown in the winter. Grasses and spent perennials grace our garden with various tones of brown and textures during the winter months. The various grasses in the meadow have different forms, colors, and textures. Throughout the winter, they keep my interest peaked. Very soon, they will all be cut back to make room for spring’s spurts of new growth. The meadow will soon look bare.
Autumn Leaves, Sedum, and Thyme Heatherwood Winter
Even the ground is covered with winter color and textures in our garden. Purple woolly thyme provides the base of this vignette. The red new growth of Tri-color sedum highlights the image, while the fallen autumn leaves create a gentle overlay.
Enjoying this little scene provides a stimulus to add more and more ground covers to our spring planting plan! Spring is less that a month away.
Garden art is all around me as I walk through Heatherwood. I just need to discover a way to display it. I saw this combination of ornamental grasses in the foreground, red twig dogwoods in the mid ground, and yellow twig dogwoods in the background peeking through the red twigs. I thought of an abstract watercolor painting of beige, red, and yellow brush strokes. I played with a series of multiple exposures and “voila”, an abstract painting appeared.
Many times I wake up early in the morning and my mind is in a fog. It doesn’t worry me though. I close my eyes and think what is right about the world around me. I open my eyes and up pops an idea or thought that I can focus my day upon. It’s a much better way to start the day than brooding on something that is outside my influence.
I often use a similar technique when I photograph. I will be walking around with my camera enjoying the world around me. I feel good, but nothing is popping up that focuses my interest. I close my eyes and clear my mind. I open my eyes and just look around. Then there it is, something captures my eye and off I go!
This is one of the several views that we have designed into our Heatherwood garden. Its purpose is to create an interesting view into the garden from the street as walkers stroll past our driveway. Late autumn provides beautiful color contrasts with the whites of the birch limbs against the reds of the Autumn Glory maples. The foreground of grasses, perennials and evergreen shrubs give it a little extra punch.
It is our pleasure to share the garden with our neighbors to brighten their days as well as ours.
Oranges, reds, yellows, and browns are the colors of Thanksgiving. Heatherwood, in the late fall, displays these colors throughout the garden. We cook our Thanksgiving turkey outside. So even with all the football games going on, we venture out every half hour or so and enjoy the fall colors around us.
We have so much to be thankful for, including this little spot of Eden. We wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving as you enjoy it with family, friends, loved ones, and each other!
Winter Garden Color in the Lower Garden Heatherwood Autumn
We designed Heatherwood to have color throughout all four seasons. Color provided by the Midwinter Fire, red-twig, and yellow-twig dogwoods complements the brightness and textures of the ornamental grasses. In a few years, the evergreen trees will get taller creating a nice green background. Together they all provide brightness to a dreary late fall day.
This part of the garden is three years old. We have enjoyed watching the plants grow from one gallon pots to these mid-sized shrubs and grasses. It will take a couple more years for them to fill in and mature into “garden-sized” plants. By then, the evergreens will have grown several feet taller. Watching a garden grow provides so much enjoyment for Mary and I!
Japanese Maple Leaf Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle
As I walk along a trail, it so easy for me to focus my vision looking forward. I frequently just stop and look all around, up, down, side to side, and backwards. When I am with others, it drives them crazy … there he goes again! All I can say is that I see and enjoy what surrounds me much more.
I created this image when I glanced up and saw backlit maple tree leaves fluttering in a gentle breeze. I stopped along the path and watched the branches and leaves waving back and forth, surrounded by rays of light flickering through the canopy trees above. Before I raised my camera, I had to move aside on the path to let several people whisk by not realizing what they were missing.
Now the work began, I looked and looked to find that perfect leaf. After several minutes, I again realized that nature is not perfect. I closed my eyes and re-opened them, looking for something that caught my eye. I found this one fluttering leaf, moved around to get a good background, then just waited for the breeze to position it just right.
A neighborhood garden should be designed to be enjoyed from the outside looking in as well as internally. As we designed Heatherwood, we wanted to provide a separation between our property and our neighbor’s. At the same time, we wanted to present a pleasing view from our neighbor’s back yard through our garden up to the hills rising above. In this section we kept the planting height down with ornamental grasses and mid-sized deciduous shrubs. For winter interest, the yellows, reds, and oranges of the Midwinter Fire, red twig, and yellow twig dogwoods mixed between the ornamental grasses will provide a textured and colorful winter foreground for the bluff above.
During our design process, we reviewed our concepts with our neighbor over a glass of wine or two. They were happy with what we envisioned and we were happy that they could enjoy it as much as we would.
