Like many people, I'm drawn to gardens for their calm serenity and their beauty. I love texture and color and 1/3 of the photos I take are landscapes and gardens. In preparation to designing our garden, I pulled together a bunch of my photos and created an inspiration book. The individual photos can be found on my
flickr site.
I had originally planned to hire someone to help me with the install of the garden. I had a rough idea of what form the garden would take, but not the specific plants. But then I realized that the garden is something that will be constantly evolving over our lifetime of living there, so it doesn't have to be perfectly done right away. Therefore, I can do a little bit here and a little bit there and learn more about gardening as I go. So I've been reading a lot of books and studying my photos more closely and making lists of the plants I want to include.
I've also been visiting our local Japanese Garden at different times of the year. We are lucky here in Seattle to have so much greenery all year round. The
Seattle Japanese Garden and the 230 acre
Washington Park Arboretum are just a 5-10 minute walk from our property.
