PORT ANGELES — Walking along these garden paths, you’ll feel like taking one deep breath. Then, another — and naturally, your body will be bathed in oxygen from the hundreds of green, violet, golden and hot pink organisms around you.
This is the Petals & Pathways tour in and around Port Angeles, featuring seven gardens open to ticket holders between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday.
The Clallam County Master Gardeners are your hosts, and your ticket helps them keep their demonstration gardens, as well as the Robin Hill garden that produces vegetables for the Salvation Army Food Bank, growing.
In bloom
This year’s tour is loaded. Peonies are bursting. Strawberries are proliferating.
And besides all the beauty, the circuit highlights innovative methods people can take home with them, promised Amanda Rosenberg, the garden tour publicist.
A visit last Saturday to just four of the featured gardens yielded sights both dazzling and relaxing: from the enormous artichokes and lush lettuces in Bill Fitzsimmons and Jerry Ring’s place to the grove of Japanese maple and glass “garden totems” at Jodi Riverstone’s.
The tour’s easternmost stop is a backyard wildlife sanctuary where gardener Nancy Lang may call your attention to the frog sunning itself on a leaf floating in her pond, or point out a pine siskin — a petite brown bird — flitting along the rocks.
Nancy and her husband, Larry, both master gardeners, do all of the design and upkeep themselves.
They relish their time amid the green and decided this year to be part of the tour so they could share knowledge about things like their “lasagna garden.”
Springy bed of veggies
While some lasagna ingredients grow here — it’s easy to see that vegetables and herbs are thriving — the moniker comes from the way Larry layered the foundation: first with newspaper put down over the grass, then straw and then compost.
These strata created a springy mattress, Larry said, on which he planted.
Now he and Nancy enjoy fresh produce — more than they liked that old lawn.
The Langs, who will celebrate their seventh anniversary July 12, have built quite the love nest here.
Their pond is surrounded by blooming flowers, the Strait of Juan de Fuca is in view from the yard, and they added a roof deck to enjoy it that much more.
Work in progress
And like a marriage, the garden is ever-evolving.
“It’s a work in progress,” Nancy said, “and we love it.”
A mile northwest, in the middle of Port Angeles, is another tour stop: the landscape that feeds Fitzsimmons and Ring, plus their family and friends.
The couple moved here from Big Pine Key, Fla., where fresh water and dirt are scarce and growing scarcer — and got busy, building raised beds for vegetables and transforming the yard into an edible, flowering forest.
There’s pretty — in the fuchsias and poppies — and there’s productive, as in tomatoes, lettuces, chard, basil and too many other ingredients to list.
“It’s ghetto gardening,” Fitzsimmons joked.
And it produces serious food. The pair of gardeners enjoy big salads every night, year-round.
“We probably get 300 to 400 pounds of potatoes in a year,” Ring added.
Travel west another two and a half miles, and you come to two tour stops that are across the alley from each other: Kristina and Bob Lawrence’s place and Jodi Riverstone’s secret garden.
Out in front of the Lawrences,’ the peonies are showing off; so is the catmint and the African corn-lily.
Waist-high beds
In the backyard are wooden beds built waist-high, so Kristina and Bob don’t have to hunker or kneel down while tending the kitchen gardens in them.
Visitors can also see Bob Lawrence’s worm-bin-composter and rain barrels.
A few steps away, overlooking the Valley Creek ravine, is Riverstone’s haven. It’s bordered by dozens of Japanese maples, many of which are rare.
Riverstone has decorated her garden with recycled-glass art, from small garden totems to glass “fruit” hanging from one big tree.
Along her back fence, a coppery dragon undulates, and encircling another tree trunk are multicolored fragments of pottery.
The westernmost stop on the tour is master gardener Barbara Baker and her husband Bob Baker’s place.
They’ve created a sanctuary, with a pond and waterfall, seating under cedar trees and abundance of native plants, replete with a sweeping view of the Elwha River valley.
The Bakers have wheelchair-accessible paths through their rose garden, vegetable plot, columnar apple trees and shade garden; the place is home to 630 labeled plants, including 23 species first documented by Lewis and Clark circa 1804.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
