204 Alicia Avenue

You can often tell, just by looking at a garden (house too) that someone artistic lives there.  Such is the case at 204 Alicia Avenue which is the Ashland Garden Club’s September Garden of the Month.  This is the home of Betsy and her husband Chuck.  Betsy is a Crafts Artisan in the costume shop at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  They have lived in the home for eight years.

The house remodeling and garden hardscape were a collaborative design effort with James Stiritz of Dragonfly Construction.  Wonderful details abound in the decorative fencing, garden screens, and car arbor.

Betsy prefers curves to straight lines in the garden and she is conscious of textures and scale as well as color.  Irrigation and original plantings were by Carol’s Colors, but Betsy has moved, replaced, and added to the vegetation in the intervening years.  In the summer, she spends a couple of hours a day working in the yard.

The musical notes of a seasonal creek and pond add to the calming ambiance of the backyard retreat.

Among the many interesting plants are a smoke tree, grasses, ferns, spirea, rock rose, morning glory, euphorbia, and eucalyptus.  Edibles include plum, cherry, and crabapple.

Article by Ruth Sloan
Photos by Larry Rosengren