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“Serving the Washington horticulture community since 1937.” |
NWFGS 2007
Take Five: Fresh design ideas and plant trends at the 2007 Northwest Flower & Garden Show
by Debra Prinzing. Seattle Homes & Lifestyles, April 2007.
The 19th annual Northwest Flower & Garden Show, themed 'The Living Room," inspired Seattle homeowners to move outdoors with all aspects of their lives. No garden better demonstrated the interior-exterior design connection than the Washington State Nursery & Landscape Association's "Suburban Swank with a Twist," recipient of Seattle Homes & Lifestyles' "First in Residential Garden Design Award."
We singled out designers Colleen Miko, CPH and Phyllis Warman for creating a contemporary landscape that blends the best of midcentury modern architecture with an updated palette of plants and materials. The designers, who will wage friendly competition against each other on an upcoming episode of HGTV's Landscaper's Challenge, collaborated on a vibrant reinterpretation of a retro patio and garden.
Miko and Warman were drawn to the casual dining patio that dominates so many backyards of 1940s, '50s, and '60s architecture. "What could you do with a covered patio and garden that would be affordable without trying to make it into a contemporary house when it really wasn't" Warman asks. "We wanted to combine retro and modern and make it doable for the 21st century."
As an antidote to the linear, rectangular appearance of midcentury homes, Warman and Miko dotted the landscape with circular forms.
"We tried to break up the linear grid by introducing the circular pattern throughout the garden," Warman says.
The shape appears in round pots, a curved stone sculpture, and orb-like water feature and stepping stones. Lively circles of colored glass punctuate the contemporary fencing. Outdoor furnishings reinforce the message with a round stainless steel cocktail bar by Kalamazoo, globe-style hanging lamps and a set of orange, wave-shaped chaises by Ilan Dei.
Citrus plants - in shades of lime, orange, and yellow - appear throughout the garden to great effect. While flowering bulbs and spring annuals provide seasonal touches of orange, Warman points out that much of the garden's citrus palettes comes from leaves, needles, and bark of everyday plants such as heather, sedge, twig dogwood, euphorbia, hebe, heuchera, New Zealand flax and dwarf pines.
"We wanted bright colors without bringing in exotic plants that are impractical for this area," Warman says. "All of the plants are hardy to this [Seattle] climate."
Cool metal finishes serve as the counterpoint to the designers' hot plant scheme, a unifying device in the landscape. The corrugated shape of galvanized metal sheeting walls and a clear patio roof harkens back to the 1950s. Circle pavers, seemingly tossed across the grassy area, were cut from diamond-plate aluminum (the type that shows up as running boards on trucks.) Miko and Warman like the added skid-proof nature of the industrial material. "The inclusion of modern materials in the garden follows the logic of midcentury architecture, which took risks and came up with a really innovative style for the time," Miko explains.
Innovative in design and impeccable in execution, "Suburban Swank with a Twist" takes an ordinary backyard and infuses it with zest. In scale, material and plantings, it has a fresh attitude we love.
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