August 27, 2024
When you’ve read about a garden and then visit in person for the first time, it can feel both strangely familiar and a little disorienting. As you walk around, you recognize certain features — plants, art, viewpoints — but you also don’t really know it. Maybe it’s like running into someone you knew decades ago. Familiar yet unfamiliar.
That was my experience exploring Windcliff, the famous garden of plantsman Dan Hinkley and Robert Jones, at the Puget Sound Fling last month. (See my review of Dan’s book Windcliff for my starting point.) In my last post, I shared about Windcliff’s entry and back patio garden. Today let’s explore the larger garden!
From the back terrace, the garden steps down to a pond and then ambles toward the edge of a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. Appealingly simple garden art — metal circles — zigzag the eye across the garden, from a sphere elevated on an old tree stump to a big steel hoop dangling from a tree at the bluff’s edge, an oculus to the view beyond.
I love how Dan turned a dead tree — a winter casualty? — into an uplifted arm displaying art.
Flat boulders offer passage across the lily pond.
Yellow waterlilies crowd the gaps between rocks.
Uphill, a curved waterfall sluices water from the upper pond. A weeping tree droops its limbs into the water.
Fellow Austinite Lori Daul paused here for a photo too. Beyond her you can see another section of the garden under solarizing plastic. Dan lost a lot of plants in a hard freeze last winter, and he decided to start over in that area, except for a few palms.
Angel’s fishing rod, one of those cooler-climate plants I covet
Diaphanous grasses and fringey palms frame a mosaic-pebble patio and stone council ring overlooking the water.
Appropriately beachy
A smiling stone face is built into the seat wall — a Marcia Donahue sculpture, according to Janet Davis.
Can you imagine sitting here on a cool day with the fire pit burning, watching ships go by?
Janet Davis and I sat here a while, taking it in.
Nearby, broom was in full bloom.
Grasses and agapanthus mingled beautifully.
Is this a big nolina? Not sure. That’s crocosmia behind it. The Puget Sound area is a summer-dry climate with warm (but cool by Texas standards) and rainless summers and cool, rainy winters. Not at all like Central Texas, even though our hardiness zones are the same (9a).
The result is a very different plant palette, even if they do go dry in the summer.
Agapanthus and that artful porthole
Reds and blues
Lots of grasses and palms
And of course that incredible view of the water and downtown Seattle.
You can stand here and watch ship traffic cruise by.
Turn around and the garden screens the house except along view corridors.
Blue agapanthus was stealing the show, with fizzing grasses all around.
Reds and yellows showing off too
While many Flingers headed to Dan’s on-site nursery to shop for plant treasures, I walked around the house again. In the woodland garden out front, I admired flowering shrubs like a hydrangea with purple-backed leaves…
…and Carolina allspice.
Allspice flower and its shadow
Near the garage, a hollowed log on stump legs makes a woodsy planter.
A massive fiber optic plant was hanging like a green waterfall.
The couple’s pups were lounging on the cool concrete.
Working my way back around to the bluff garden, I found another pond and the part of the garden that Dan is solarizing following significant winter plant losses.
Dustin Gimbel‘s ceramic totems make a dramatic statement in a gravel garden below the deck. (For a tour of Dustin’s own garden in Long Beach, California, click here.)
These ceramic sculptures are very tall!
Curved steel terraces the garden as it steps down from the house.
Enormous boulders are incorporated into the beds — here originally or moved, I don’t know.
Cactus flower
And this happy stone face echoed every Flinger’s face after time spent exploring Windcliff.
Up next: Daniel Sparler and Jeff Schouten’s well-named Garden of Exuberant Refuge. For a look back at Part 1 of my Windcliff Garden visit, click here.
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Explore the world of succulents and cacti at the Austin Cactus and Succulent Society’s Fall Sale on 8/31 and 9/1, from 10 am to 5 pm. Held at the Austin Area Garden Center in Zilker Botanical Garden, it includes a plant show with specimen cacti and succulents, handcrafted pottery, daily silent auction and hourly plant raffles, and expert advice. Entry included with the cost of admission at Zilker Botanical Garden: Adults $6 to $8, Seniors $5 to $7, Youths $3 to $4, Children under 2 free.
Come learn about gardening and design at Garden Spark! I organize in-person talks by inspiring designers, landscape architects, authors, and gardeners a few times a year in Austin. These are limited-attendance events that sell out quickly, so join the Garden Spark email list to be notified in advance; simply click this link and ask to be added. Season 8 kicks off in fall 2024. Stay tuned for more info!
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