KaBloom

An Orcas Cottage Garden

Below are some before/after shots of a 2019 Eastsound installation around a newly renovated hillside cottage. The property began as a scraggly lawn falling precipitously away from the house. I created 3 broad terraces connected by bouldered hillside plantings. From the top terrace just around the house, one can look out into Eastsound harbor. As one descends a simple wooden stair to the groundcover lawn, the view becomes immersed in a rich mixture of fruiting and flowering trees, shrubs, grasses, bamboos and perennials. The lowest tier holds the firepit zone.

This project demonstrates how the creative application of terracing in a hillside environment actually creates dwellable outdoor real estate, where there was nothing before. This is no small feat. It involves importing volumes of soil and quarried boulders—sometimes, this being Orcas, those gathered from the property. These novel rocky outcroppings and interesting boulders begin to make your space feel fundamentally transformed.

After these dwelling spaces are firmly constructed, the plantings begin. Fist, structural plants are layered into place—the trees, shrubs and structural grasses. These botanical backbones of the garden ecosystem will become the walls and ceiling of your outdoor rooms, giving shelter, channeling views, and being good company with their textures, colors, blossoms, fruit and general demeanor. Next, the garden gets populated with a dizzying array of herbaceous friends—herbs, perennials, grasses, groundcovers and vines.

The exuberance of the growth you see here happened in a short time (upper right picture is late spring 2020-1 year post planting) and was the result of conscious soil building, irrigation, good mulching, and right plants put in the right places.

Design and Installation: Emily Aring/Kabloom 2019

Excavation and Construction: Orcas Excavation and Terry Wood