Skeptics give ovation to colorful parking lot border strip

Garden Muse

By barbara blossom ashmun

The Portland Tribune, May 22, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Along Southeast 28th Street, near Reed College, what was once an unattractive “hell strip” is now a little piece of paradise with bursts of color from a variety of drought-resistant plants.

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“Hell strips are what we start with, but then we get a little taste of paradise,” says Maurice Horn, co-owner of Joy Creek Nursery (www.joycreek.com).

He’s referring to the challenging process of transforming parking strips into beautiful borders.

In 2003 Horn designed such a curbside garden for Reed College’s theater arts building, along Southeast 28th Street, just south of Steele Street.

I recently drove by it to see how it’s filled out and was amazed. On a recent sunny afternoon, the 10-by-140-foot strip was ablaze with color. Brilliant yellow spurges, blue California lilac and red rosemary grevillia are showy enough to stop traffic. And the golden banner (Thermopsis lanceolata), giant yellow lupine, blue-flowering rosemary and red tulips — strong primary colors — deliver lots of punch.

Plenty more plants promise summer color: orange flowering pomegranate, yellow yarrow, purple irises and indigo blue Clematis x durandii.

And gorgeous ginkgo trees with fan-shaped leaves, established before Horn began the project, light up the garden with gold fall color.

The most startling fact is that this bed is extremely drought tolerant. Reed College waters it with hoses from the building only once a year.

Horn credits two factors for this feat: soil preparation and plant selection.

To make sure the soil drains well, 2 to 3 inches of 1/4-10 crushed basalt gravel and 2 to 3 inches of compost are worked into the existing soil. A few more inches of gravel are applied as a mulch to preserve moisture.

But Horn’s greatest challenge was dreaming up a design.

“There was nothing to go on, architecturally,” he says.

However, a triangle over the door of the theater-arts building drew his attention.

When he began, there was construction across the street, a warehouse behind the building and a gas station nearby.

Inspiration was absent until he went inside the building, while looking for a classroom, where he would give a slide show for a Hardy Plant Society of Oregon workshop.

“That’s when I knew exactly what it was going to be — a theater garden about drama, comedy and theater of the absurd. I gave myself a theme. That’s how the scheme came together,” Horn says.

He threw away months of planning and stayed up all night working with tissue paper drawings.

The south end of the planting would represent high drama, with purple, intense orange and dark blue. The central section would embody comedy, with bright pastels and yellow.

And the north end’s motif would be theater of the absurd, with brown, black and rust colors, quirky flowers like bottlebrushes and weird-looking plants.

There, “Gloire de Versailles” California lilac blooms all summer, with pink and blue flowers at the same time. A prostrate California lilac (Ceanothus prostratus) Gloire de Versailles” California lilac sprawls along the ground.

Horn cuts out some of the branches and plants bulbs of Scilla peruviana in the gaps. They’re the same blue color, with jumbo flowers that nestle in the foliage.

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