Variety, surprises await visitors to 7 gardens on tour

LENIA SCHMIDT’S GARDEN is for the birds – really. The canopy of her blue spruce protects birds from neighborhood cats and gives them a spot to roost. A dead snag is for roosting, too. Lenia allows her tall purple irises to go to seed so the birds have natural food through winter. She grows plants with red trumpet-shaped flowers for hummingbirds, and honeyberries and strawberries for bird food.

“I never really thought about the birds until we moved here and had pheasants, quail and partridge,” she says. “We wanted to keep them here.”

So Lenia became a master gardener and ardent researcher into bird-friendly gardens. Now, her garden in northern Coeur d’Alene is designated a backyard wildlife habitat, and it’s one of seven gardens included in this year’s Coeur d’Alene Garden Club Tour on July 11.

The tour is worth the $10 ticket and price of gas it’ll take to travel the few miles between each garden. In past years, the tour has featured gardens from the Garwood area to the south side of Post Falls. This year, the club made an effort to condense mileage between gardens to save on gas and allow participants more time at each site.

“There’s maybe five to seven miles between all the gardens,” says tour chairman Pat Hartman.

Participants will ride a shuttle bus to one garden where parking is at a premium. The ride adds an element of mystery and the garden at the end of the trip is certain to satisfy even the most overactive imaginations.

It belongs to Paul, a retired photographer. The club is keeping his last name secret to prevent people from looking up his address and driving to his home. His garden, which he named Picture Perfect, is a tribute to his 101-year-old mother, who struggled to grow anything in South Dakota during the Dust Bowl years.

“I said I’d have a beautiful garden because Mom worked so hard and couldn’t grow anything but moss roses,” he says.

Paul’s garden opens by his driveway with a massive rock the size of an elk surrounded by a field of color from ferns, Japanese maple and ground cover.

“We had it moved in by crane and they dropped it five times,” he says, chuckling.

The rock is the first of a series of surprises that includes a flowering crabapple clinging to the side of Paul’s garage, its six limbs perpendicular to its trunk and parallel to each other. Just past the crabapple, a storybook garden unfolds over gentle slopes Paul built himself and crisscrossed with gravel paths. Not a single blade of grass lives among the healthy greenery and rainbow of asters, scotch moss, Japanese irises, cosmos, calendulas and much more.

Trees grow in half-barrels. Hedges cluster together in random rows. Hostas cover a stretch of hillside like a cornfield. Punctuating it all is a rusted flagpole reaching into the sky. Attached to the pole are metal grates that covered lights at Expo ‘74. Paul is the artist.

His islands and paths lead to a rock fountain and an area at the back of the house his roommate, Richard, designed. It includes a wooden sun deck and another flagpole creation, black obelisks 3 feet high and a raised flower bed, a trellis of weathered dead limbs for Oriental pea pods and a sculpture of a crouching nude man that belonged to Frank Lloyd Wright.

“This is the garden I had to have on the tour,” Pat says. “With its art, paintings, sculptures – it’s an amazing garden.”

If Paul’s garden intimidates with its creativity, Donna Lange’s wonderland offers hope that gardening is not beyond the masses.

Donna saw opportunity in the dirt yard that faced her when she moved in 11 years ago. She started with roses – 63 different types that bloom in every color imaginable. She even has a ground cover rose now. Under each bush is a rock with the name of the rose painted on it.

Donna was addicted to gardening and subdivided her yard every time she had a new idea. Now she refers to the various sections of her yard as rooms. There’s Tiger Temple with waterlilies floating in its dribbling fountain and the shade garden under a huge pine. There’s the tea garden filled with yellow columbine, lavender and pink phlox, peach irises and coral bells, the bench garden, paradise island and pond garden, a large rock pond surrounded by hostas and roses and filled with 19 goldfish.

Healthy grass connects the rooms like hallways, and benches, tables and chairs serve as furnishings.

“I come out here and I feel so good,” says Donna, whose eye for color is apparent in her paintings as well as her garden.

Lenia and David Schmidt’s garden shows what’s possible despite encroaching houses and disappearing open spaces. Their house was on the edge of a subdivision when they moved in 1996. Quail, pheasant and partridge still considered the Schmidt property part of the fields in which they lived.

Designing a garden for birds gave their yard purpose. They planted bleeding hearts, Japanese maple and hostas around a pond and fountain to provide water and shade. They installed a nozzle that emits mist in an archway between the front and back gardens, and a bog to attract frogs. Lenia planted a variety of berry bushes for food and flowering herbs to attract honeybees, hummingbirds and butterflies.

She filled the garden with color from peonies, clematis, succulents and more, and hung birdhouses and suncatchers. An expanse of grass divides the islands of flowers, bushes and trees and is about all that needs upkeep.

“I try to keep to mowing once a week and prune twice a year so the birds have time to enjoy the area and relax,” Lenia says.

The other gardens on the tour range from a family plot with fruit trees growing around a basketball court and berry bushes by a fire pit to a professionally designed getaway. Two gardens will feature musicians – a violin and harp duo and a banjo and guitar pair. Antique cars will grace three stops. Artisans will exhibit garden art, plants, stepping stones, birdhouses and more.

The Garden Tour raises money for the Kootenai Humane Society, Coeur d’Alene Women’s Center and other charities. Tickets cost $10 and are available at most Kootenai County nurseries and at Northwest Seed and Pet, Stanek’s, Hangman Valley Greenhouse and Jared Family Greenhouse in Spokane.