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My Garden

© Kirk Johnson

I live on the southern Oregon coast on about 15 acres. The part of the property that I actually live and garden on is flat ground, heavy clay, probably less than three acres. This is the part of the property which is next to Highway 101. The rest of the property is meadow, marsh and forest. While my garden is rather formal, I experience the entire property on my walks. People who just visit my garden have a very different experience than I do.

I moved to this property in the summer of 1978 and began my garden the following spring in what had been a horse pasture to the east of the house. This garden was inspired by an engraving of a 16th century Dutch garden. A year later, when my bedroom was added, I created a small Japanese inspired pond garden on the north side of my bedroom. I redid this pond last fall. The original pond was too narrow and shallow, the raccoons kept eating the fish. The new pond is three feet deep and wider than the first pond. I kept the mature planting on the north side of the pond, but I removed the planting that separated the pond from the narrow deck which runs along the north side of my bedroom. Now the pond comes right up to the deck.

The point where these two gardens meet is the most awkward part of my garden, but visitors tend to be delighted by the surprise of finding a Japanese inspired garden just around the corner from a rather formal garden. During the spring, the beds of this formal garden are full of columbine and geums. Later in the summer, the same beds are full of dahlias. I am able to combine columbine and dahlias in the same beds because our climate is so mild that I am able to leave my dahlia tubers in the ground. The beds are raised and edged with rocks, so the drainage is good. Without good drainage, dahlia tubers would rot during our wet winters.

I thought about expanding my garden for a decade, I began to expand it in 1989. There were two main reasons for this. In 1989 a rectangular 25 by 50 foot pond was dug for fire protection, that same year, a 30 by 40 foot metal pole building was constructed to the east of the large greenhouse (48 by 72 feet). I designed the new part of the garden to integrate these two new features into the property. There was always a 20 foot wide driveway between the original part of the garden and the greenhouse, this was extended. The driveway functions as my garden's grandest walk, I don't screen out the driveway, I accept it as part of the garden.