A Garden in Portland

A well-loved garden of one's own: the first one, but not the last

A cut flower patch, a lilac tree, and Drew’s cucumber trellis peeking through

Portland, Oregon is where I first really fell in love with gardening, even though our first two gardens there were disasters. At our first place we shared a driveway with a house full of people who were the perfect neighbors to have for a true welcome-to-Portland experience. Very punk rock and friendly, definitely weird. Portlandia was still on the air, and these people could easily have been characters on the show. One of the guys kept dead, rotting animals in the garage so that he could preserve their bones, and unfortunately the garage was a shared one. He was so nice though that we just tried not to think about it.

We didn’t have shared backyards, but there were no fences so I guess that we did have shared backyards. When we first moved to Portland in April of 2015 we excitedly went to Portland Nursery and bought some vegetable starts for the yard. But soon enough the neighbor dogs were wandering into the yard to do their business, and since they especially loved the tiny little garden patch, we decided to grow for ornamental purposes only. I will say that I’ve never been able to grow such healthy-looking chard, though.

The second house we lived in was small and charming and from the 1920s, a tiny craftsman with a front porch and a rose arbor and three empty raised garden beds. It looked like something out of a silent film. Perfect! We filled up the beds with more starts from Portland Nursery, but the plants hardly grew at all. It turns out that garden beds completely shaded by a neighboring fence and towering fir trees aren’t the best for growing tomatoes and zucchinis and any plants that love (and need) the sun. But no matter—I had a lot to learn still.

Maybe the gardening wasn’t going so well for us, but we were knocked out by Portland. I’d never lived in a place I loved more. It had just the right about of weirdness—cloying at times; Portlandia wasn’t that much of a stretch—but very unself-conscious, relaxed. Sure, the winters were rainy, but the bright and blue summers made up for them. We picnicked by the ocean and hiked in the mountains.

When we decided that Portland was for us and started looking for a house to buy, a private and sunny backyard was near the top of our list of musts. We ended up with a little 1950s ranch house, perched up on a sunny hill on a quiet street in the southeastern part of town. The yard had an old-fashioned feel to it: a little ‘50s cement patio, but also lilacs and honeysuckle and raspberries growing all along the back fence. After we moved in we put in two raised beds, filling them up so quickly that we eventually got four more.

The final bed: my 3 feet wide patch of flower farm

For the first few years I was mainly interested in growing vegetables. Drew would build a bamboo trellis every year for the cucumbers, and we’d grow four tomato plants and winter squashes and zucchini. We’d buy most of the plants as starts since we didn’t need many, but eventually I found that just buying seed packets and direct sowing zucchini and cucumber seeds worked better anyway.

I’m not sure when or why I started growing flowers. One year I direct-sowed some California poppy and gomphrena seeds in a bed only to have them completely dug up by squirrels. The next year I decided to grow under lights for the first time; Drew got me a grow light shelf for Christmas, and there was plenty of space to grow in our basement laundry room. (A basement laundry room! Seems like such luxury now) I sowed zinnias, cosmos, scabiosa, snapdragons, celosia, and chocolate lace flower into cell trays, transplanting into three inch pots when necessary. Everything survived except for the zinnias, which struggled and died in their little pots because I’d planted them too early and the summer came so late that year. But once it finally did warm up I direct sowed zinnia seeds, and they did just fine, catching up quickly with the rest of the plants.

Randoms in the perennial patch—fading peony foliage, salvia, grasses, artemisia, and what was that plant that looked a bit like eucalyptus and shot up seedy flower spikes? I can’t remember.

I’ll write about my dahlia misadventures later. I grew them for a few years, finally getting some tubers to successfully overwinter by just leaving them in the ground under a pile of mulch. But when I planted some new tubers in the spring they must have come with some sort of virus which then spread to the other dahlias. I ripped them all out of their bed and replaced them with whatever seedlings I had left: cosmos, celosia. I bought a few nicotianas at the nursery and seeded some more zinnias, and the result was a a beautiful, unplanned mess of flowers that I liked better than the dahlias anyway. The dahlias planted all together looked a little flower farm, but the bed of random plantings looked like the happiest and wildest of accidents.

We ended up clearing out two more spaces for planting during the last spring we lived there. One for perennials, in which I planted peonies, salvia, yarrow, grasses, artemisia, and nepeta, along with daffodil, tulip, and allium bulbs for the spring. The other patch was a three feet by eleven feet cut flower patch, and I did my best flower farmer impersonation. I planted snapdragons, zinnias, cosmos, scabiosa, and chocolate lace flower, spacing them out according to Erin Benzakein’s exact recommendations. She knows what she’s talking about, and she’s a fellow Pacific Northwest grower, too. I bamboo staked and all. But again I discovered that maybe I wasn’t going for a flower farm look after all—that I liked a more natural look—so I scattered cornflower seeds on the bare patches, and put up a teepee for some thunbergia to climb up, ever so slowly.

October 2022, a month or so before we left. Most of the summer vegetables were finished and ripped out, but the flowers were still going strong.

We stayed in the house for five years—we initially thought it would be forever, but as wonderful as it was to live there, it didn’t feel so wonderful to be so far from our families, all on the east coast. The pandemic was hard for everyone, and it was hard for us. We were fortunate in that no one close to us died of COVID, but during that time our 16-year-old chihuahua Berry passed away, and there was depression, along with worries about the future, wild fires in the summer that made the skies glow orange. I didn’t see my family for a few years, and didn’t meet my new niece in South Carolina until she was two years old. I learned that you can be in a beautiful place where the light hits golden, where there are few mosquitoes, where your heart feels impossibly tied to the land—both city and garden—but still feel an emptiness somehow.

We put our house on the market, and I threw myself into the garden, even though I knew I’d have to leave it. I gardened for us, to put flower arrangements on the table, but a part of me knew I was also gardening for the future owner, and I can’t say that my feelings were always generous. But I saved seeds from the annuals, taking some for us and leaving some for the new owner to grow on, if she wanted to. I even drew out a map for her to let her know which perennials were planted where. She probably thought I was crazy. I felt crazy. I just wanted the garden to live on somehow. Even if she tore everything up and started from scratch. I just wanted it to go on.

Who knows what else we would have done to the garden if we’d stayed. I know I was already scheming to put in some David Austin roses, and probably would have tried to put in some fussily romantic and old-fashioned trellis that would have been all wrong for the style of the garden, which we’d designed very straight and orderly to complement the boxy, midcentury-era house.

When we left I cried and said my goodbyes, packing up the saved seeds to take with us. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew that there would be a new garden of some kind, and that maybe I could bring a little bit of the old one with me. Last year I sowed some of the seeds I’d collected from a blue scabiosa and a white nicotiana I had bought from Portland Nursery, and it was wonderful to see the flowers blooming in my parents’ and sisters’ yards in South Carolina. And this year I’ve already planted the same blue scabiosa seeds here, as well as sweet pea seeds I’d saved. So if all goes according to plan, a little bit of the Portland garden will be growing here in Brooklyn, too.

Garden Notes:

• Portland Nursery: Looking back, I know I was spoiled to be able to have it as my local nursery. They had pretty much everything, from perennials to vegetable starts, but my favorites were the interesting flower annuals, usually grown by small cut flower farmers in Washington.

• My favorite Portland garden inspiration Instagram account: @somemelodiousplot. Somehow I made it eight years in the Rose City without buying a rose bush; was I just being a contrarian and did roses seem too obvious to grow? Anyhow Jennifer’s Instagram of her beyond lovely, rose-filled cottage garden showed me the errors of my ways, and I ordered a David Austin rose as soon as I knew I’d have a place to put it.

• And not mentioned in this post at all, but I bought a clematis at the Rogerson Clematis Garden during the last summer I was in Portland, and sadly had to leave it behind. But if you’re in the market for a clematis and live anywhere close, please go! The volunteers working at the sales are super knowledgeable and even pronounce “clematis” the British way.