Now that famed landscape designers Charles Withey and Glenn Price are installed as curators of the Olmsted Brothers-designed Dunn Gardens in Seattle, the pair have installed a colorfully layered Curator's Garden that makes its own distinctive mark in the green, naturalistic setting of the larger gardens.
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Artist Tony Angell sculpted the stone kingfisher in the Curator's Garden.
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Withey and Price are masters of potted drama, as in this Cordyline 'Festival Grass' underplanted with variegated Ceanothus griseus var. horizontalis 'Diamond Heights.' The ceanothus is dependably hardy; the cordyline needs protection from freezing weather.
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Charles Price, left, and Glenn Withey hang out on the front steps of their home at the Dunn Gardens in North Seattle. The colorful, iconoclastic Curator's Garden they've created is tucked behind the house in the midst of a historic landscape designed by the Olmsted Brothers.
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Layer upon layer of textural hedging creates the illusion of depth in a narrow garden. The layers range from weeping blue cedars (Cedrus atlantica 'Glauca Pendula') to horsetail (Equisetum hyemale), the latter securely corralled in an 18-inch-deep fiberglass trough.
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Withey and Price pushed the retaining wall back from the house to create a larger terrace, then filled the space with pots of annuals in Mexican fiesta shades of orange, pink and magenta. To the right is one of the mossy concrete piers from an old water tower, left in the garden as a reminder of the property's history.
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Dahlia 'Firepot' flowers amid all the colored foliages; a hedge of dahlias 'Firepot' and 'Cheyenne' are left to overwinter in the ground.
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Coleus 'Rustic Orange' is one of many colorful annuals filling pots in the Curator's Garden.
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French doors to the dining room are outlined by the tracery of a climbing bamboo espaliered against the house. "We have to prune it twice a year or it'd take over," says Withey. A tall, orange-flowering brugmansia, lily-pad-like darmera and spiky purple Cordyline 'Festival Grass' complete the picture.
Source: The Seattle Times
