Flower Garden | Friends Create Colorful Landscape Together
It’s a friendship that started over a classic but dead Jaguar. Claudia Gendron and her husband had just driven it from Seattle to Spokane to deliver it to Julie Nesbitt and her husband on Five Mile Prairie. Within a block of the Nesbitts’ house, the car died. The husbands rebuilt the car and Julie and Claudia built a friendship and then agarden.
Nesbitt had a passion for a beautiful garden ” and a very overgrown landscape ” while Gendron, of Post Falls, had plant and landscape design knowledge and a willingness to share. Their combined efforts earned the July Garden of the Month award from the Inland EmpireGardeners.
When they started their collaboration, Nesbitt’s garden was an overgrown tangle of evergreens and shrubs that hid a gorgeous rock wall along the front of the house and nearly swallowed up the foundation at the back of the house. European birches and willows provided lots of filtered shade to three sides of the house but were in dire need of better watering andcare.
To start, they ripped out the junipers in front and exposed the rock wall. Nesbitt wanted bright colorful flowers but the shade from the trees meant new plantings had to be shade-tolerant. Gendron designed a garden that used shade-tolerant plants with colorful leaves and interesting shapes to create the color Nesbittwanted.
“It’s even better than a flower garden because it’s colorful all year,” said Nesbitt. They added a large concave basalt rock that serves as a bird bath, lots of birdhouses and some comfortable chairs to watch theaction.
Along the side of the house, they planted a colorful collection of hostas under the
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