Scenes From A Master's Garden

We are nearing mid-April and some of those poems, written months ago in disappearing ink are finally reappearing. They are finally beginning to reveal their whispered sonnets and meanings.

Just two plants to make all this magic: Adiantum venustum (Himalayan Maidenhair Fern), and native, Vancouveria hexandra. Just… wow.

Welcome to springtime in Albers Marcovina Vista Gardens, Bremerton, WA where I spent much of yesterday with my most amazing friend, John Albers.

We like to be able to see behind the curtain, or sometimes through it. Here, a see-through veil of blooming Manzanita, aka, Arctostaphylos x densiflora 'Howard Mcminn.'

(Click to enlarge.) The sun disappeared behind the clouds and within just a few minutes the temperature dropped enough that I was wishing for that jacket I'd taken off an hour earlier. It was chilly enough, too, that these native bees (there were three of them within a foot of one another), loaded down with Mahonia repens (Creeping Oregon Grape), pollen just couldn't manage to fly. I reached out to this little one and it immediately crawled off the mahonia flowers and onto my extended finger, calm as a cucumber. We chatted a bit and considered one another kindly before I set my new little friend (a miner bee, one presumes), safely back onto the mahonia flowers.

Erica arborea (Tree Heather), still in flower and showing new spring growth. This plant is as currently tall as John, but according to Wikipedia: “Erica arborea is an upright evergreen shrub or small tree with a typical height in the wild of some 7 m (23 ft), especially in Africa, but more typically 1–4 m (3–13 ft) in gardens.”

Two wonderful plants that I’d never have thought to put together, but Shazammm! They so totally work.! Native Camas and Epimedium

A hillside swath of Epimedium that gets just the right amount of sun for these new leaves to really color up. This much of anything this beautiful feels like wealth.

I heard John way up in the far reaches of the garden calling my name and I was down in the lowest part of the garden, probably a third of a mile and at least a couple of hundred feet in elevation away, photographing that first image you see, above, a stunning combination of Himalayan Maidenhair ferns interspersed with those dinosaur footprint leaves of Vancouveria. I hollered back, “John… Down here!” but he obviously didn’t hear me so I pulled out my phone and FaceTimed him. We find so many things to laugh and smile about when we get together. On a whim I quickly grabbed this screen capture of John and me just before we hung up to start walking toward one another so we could sort out next moves… This is the face of the intuitive, 80plus year-old magician responsible for the beautiful garden scenes I’ve pictured here. Gardening, especially on this scale is a lot of work but I swear it keeps him young.