michael slater
Landscape Planning, Design & Management
Our Home Garden
The Site
Salem, Oregon
Our garden is located in Salem, Oregon. Our 1958 ranch home is situated on a quarter acre lot that used to be strawberry fields before it was developed into housing. Before it was strawberry fields, it was upland oak savanna managed by the native Kalapuya people, who burned it each summer to prevent it from becoming a closed Douglas Fir forest. Our soil is clay loam and slightly acid. We are in USDA Hardiness Zone 8b with cool, wet winters and warm dry summers. Climate change is bringing hotter summer temperatures and a longer period of summer dry weather.
Inspiration
Our home garden is (loosely) inspired by Japanese garden tradition. While I don't have access to the material and skills to create an "authentic" Japanese garden, there are a number of concepts that readily translate to our Pacific Northwest garden.These include designing on a human scale, using evergreen shrubs for structure, designing with attention to planes and volumes, marking seasonal changes, and paying attention to detail. Japanese gardens tend to have a more restrained hand when it comes to flowers and especially summer perennials compared to, for example, English gardens. Japanese-inspired gardens also demand a fair amount of maintenance. While 'miniaturization" is the defining feature of Japanese gardens, some might argue that intense maintenance is true the defining feature of Japanese gardens. I've read somewhere that Japanese gardens are 10 percent design and 90 percent maintenance. The theory and aesthetics of Japanese gardens is far more complex than the few ideas I've adopted for our garden. The books below are a good introduction to the topic.
Design
The front garden includes a foundation bed, a small lawn, and a summer-blooming perennial bed between the sidewalk and the road.
The back garden consists of an open gravel courtyard (or 'sea" to borrow from Japananse garden design). This space is due to the presence of two mature Norway maples, which provide welcome summer shade and produce too much root competition for grass. Gravel was a logical alternative and provides space to gather and play. The gravel courtyard is surrounded on the south, west, and north by a large planting bed that varies from six feet deep to over twenty feet deep. The bed includes trees, shrubs, perennials, ornamental grasses, and a wide range of spring bulbs. A "beach" and play house are set into the border on the southwest and a circular stone patio is set into the border on the northwest side. A slightly raised border, or peninsula, and a low black fence separate the main garden from the productive garden on the northeast side.
The productive garden has two raised cedar beds, one we use for herbs and the other we use for whatever vegetables we want to try out. (I am not much a vegetable gardener). We have a trellis for raspberries and marionberies, and two prolific blueberry bushes. We have two stone areas (manufactured concrete pavers) that support plants in pots; one supports plants that I'm growing on until I can find a home for them and the other for cut flowers. The chicken coop is located here as well..
