Garden of Many Rooms

This garden is a love letter to London, where every pub has a garden of many rooms, and to Sydney, Australia, where botanical gardens welcome visitors with year-round sights and fragrance. All this is wrapped in a Japanese calming influence, encouraging wanderers to slow down and take it all in.

The parking strip offers a patchwork of repeated colors and textures.  Look here for crepe myrtle trees, leathery leafed Viburnum davidii, pink heather, and fragrant lavender.  The front yard has gently curved, crunchy gravel paths woven among trees – Japanese umbrella pine, ‘Pendula’ weeping beech, and a ‘Golden Spirit’ smoke tree. The Brazilian teak deck in front is flanked by a lush Western hemlock and a 50-year-old laceleaf Japanese maple.

Along the side path, jasmine grows up the chimney while ‘Veitcheii’ Boston ivy climbs the fence opposite. By the house are fragrant sweet box shrubs facing camellias. The gardeners spend 70% of their time in the outdoor rooms, even in winter. Under cover, there is an outdoor kitchen, seating around fire pits, a hot tub for soaking, several dining areas, a hammock for naps under the big birch tree, and a former office converted to a library. Dwarf mondo grasses trickle down the slope from the NW corner below a water feature made from an old mill grinder from the Yellow River in China. Hellebore, hostas, and black mondo grass thrive under the birch.  On the west side of the garden are a magnolia and black locust.