A Conservation Conversation
Bellevue’s Waterwise Garden is a living showcase of inspirational planting ideas and strategies to cope with heat and drought.
Right about this time last year, the Puget Sound region experienced a “heat dome event” when temperatures soared to record highs and stayed there for days. While heat is perhaps the most obvious marker of our changing climate, drought, it’s meteorologic twin, presents challenges in the garden even when temps remain moderate. It's time to rethink landscape goals and planting strategies to accommodate what’s quickly becoming our new normal.
Jil and Howard Stenn are committed to creating beautiful gardens that conserve soil and water resources. For thirty years Stenn Design, their landscape design and consulting firm, has tended the Waterwise Garden at Bellevue Botanical Garden from design to its present maturity. Sponsored by Bellevue Utilities, the Waterwise Garden is a living laboratory and public demonstration landscape filled with planting ideas and garden practices that are both inspiring and informing.
The Waterwise Garden was designed to present several different growing conditions approached from the perspective of water conservation and efficiency. Planting beds basking in full sun are brimming with flowering perennials, like wand flower (Dierama pulcherrium), several hardy geraniums, Jerusalem sage (Phlomis fruticosa), and beeblossom (Gaura lindheimeri). The plants bloom throughout the dry season with little additional summer water, contradicting the idea that a waterwise garden is weak on flowers. “We’re dispelling the myth that [a drought-tolerant garden] is all lava rock and juniper,” Jil remarks. “It can be a really lush garden.”
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