Garden Gallery a

Celebrated internationally as artists and gardeners, Little and Lewis open the gates to their renowned Puget Sound garden and share the enthusiasm that informs and enlivens their wild fantasia of plants, hardscape, and art. Water features, oversized and broadleaved plants, expansive use of color, zone-pushing tropicals, architectural emphasis, and elements of classicism and mystery-all combine to create a magical space. The authors describe how you too can achieve this kind of retreat for reflection in your own backyard. From practical advice on how to make a slow-drip natural fountain to tips on building an inexpensive Tuscan-style wall, you will be encouraged to use your imagination and take risks. Stunning photographs perfectly complement the inspiring text.

When we began our garden years ago, it was as sculptors who loved gardening. We did not have, and still do not have, a plan for how the place should look or what it would become in the future. We started for simple enjoyment in the act of gardening and a love of the results, of the atmosphere that it produced. We appreciated how it made us feel. From the beginning we were keenly aware of our feelings about, or our impressions of, pot arrangements, plantings in beds, placement of fountains, and uses of color. Did the area we had just changed from the previous year or newly re-made this year move us in some way? How? How did it seem to affect visitors? We gardened by just doing what worked for us, though we also wanted to know something about how it worked without attempting to intellectualize it too much. Plant taxonomy, soil mixtures, chemical analyses are all good and necessary, but it was a more ineffable quality that led to our style of gardening in the first place. Like a painting, it is what it is: The experience is the important thing. And, as in the process of making a painting, it is vital not to "over-paint," to over-plan the garden. We wanted to let it be as fresh and spontaneouns as we could without being in thrall to a plan.

With our hard-won concrete techniques, we set out to give the garden and our work what we call an "excavated look" — that is, we tried to eoke ancient cultures with the use of muted color washes for the columns, walls of earthy terra-cotta and Mediterranean blue, and over-scale plantings of large-leaved perennials and tropical-looking plants grouped in clay pots of various sizes. So, over time, and keeping our desired look in mind, we gradually made a garden that we love, and, if reactions are any indication, that other people do too. There was a lot of trial and error, but we don't carry the burden of how our garden should look. Many of the things that make the garden appealing, such as some of the sculpture and smaller columns, are easily movable, the better to suit our annual desire to give the place a different look. We allow ourselves to take risks with color, so the garden has a regularly changing look that appeals to our (and our visitors') sense of entering a new garden, even though many of the elements are unchanged from the previous year.

The emphasis here is on the importance of not putting yourself into a box when it comes to creative decision-making. Introduce change as the core of your garden, and let go of the anxiety about what you think it ought to be. If a wall is the wrong color, change it. It's only paint. Have you felt frustrated and guilty for years over that straggly old rhodie? Throw it out and put in something more rewarding and enjoyable. The garden should be a place of celebration, whether contemplative and quiet, or buoyant and colorful, or all of these. What it shouldn't be is a source of annual conflict with your own good intuition. One morning not long ago I misread "clarity of perception" as "charity of perception." What a wonderful way to describe perceiving the world of the garden as it is. A nonjudgmental and openhearted approach is certainly the best way to act on your own creative instincts, including gardening, and it needn't preclude exercising a discerning yet compassionate eye.

One of the most successful gardens I've seen in this respect is the large woodland garden at Heronswood Nursery near Kingston, Washington. Our good friends there, Robert Jones and Dan Hinkley, commissioned us to make an archaeological ruin that resembled a fallen temple for one of the boggy and more tropical areas of the garden. We put in a 12-foot-diameter pool surrounded by seven blue Doric-style columns, each 8 feet tall. Some were connected with curved lintel planters, while some were made to look as if they had broken and fallen and been left on the site. Now the "temple" is grown around with lush tropical looking plantings: dicksonias and musas, gunneras and darmeras, and many others. It is truly beautiful and draws many visitors. Dan and Robert were open to putting in something unusual and perhaps a little risky, and the result is an atmospheric, lovely spot in their universally acclaimed garden. A little folly can be a good thing.

Picasso said that every time he faced a blank canvas he risked everything. Obviously, we can't all be great masters, but the point is to be true to your dreams of a garden paradise, your own instincts and imagination.