Most summer evenings, Shirley Thompson putters around her near-acre garden, a a cold drink in one hand and clippers in the other.
“I’m one of the few people I know who love deadheading,” she says with a laugh.
It’s the perfect antidote to her tech-heavy work running an investor and public relations company with her husband, Carl.
And the payoff is big: a three-season profusion of blooms spilling from cool shade gardens close to their house, then heading west in curvaceous stone terraces to red-hot beach gardens planted in sand at the edge of a small lake.
During the past 12 years, the
Thompsons have transformed their spread in a neighborhood reclaimed from a gravel-mining operation into an oasis of soothing habitat for man and beast.
It was a giant experiment for these two city creatures. She was reared in Los Angeles, he grew up in Miami, and neither had much practical gardening experience.
They began by planting about 300 trees – as large as they could afford – to soften the edges and screen their French country-style home and invite the birds in.
Raised stone planting beds were constructed, and meandering paths were carved from their rural Lafayette home’s full skirt of dense green turf.
And then Thompson started planting. At first, she took a law-and-order approach, following planting instructions to the letter. But as the years passed, she started to realize gardening is as much art as science. She started paying more attention to the cues the plants were giving and stopped being afraid to try new locations for bloomers that weren’t blossoming.
In the process, she and Carl stuffed the yard with a dazzling array of mostly low-water perennials, and created shrubby hide-outs for local fauna. Thompson pulls back a low juniper brush near the kitchen window to reveal a duck nest littered with spent eggshells. Out front, bunnies nibble tender rose foliage.
“I feel like we’re living in a wildlife park,” says Thompson, 44. “We doing what we can to make ourselves invisible and still be part of it.”
And in fact, the Thompson garden is certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a wildlife habitat because it provides food, water, shelter and places for birds and other animals to raise their young.
All that and lovely, too.
Someone else handles the lawn care, but the Thompsons do their own planting and weeding, mulching and watering.
“It fills me up again in terms of energy and inspiration,” she says. “It adds life.”
The Thompson’s wildlife garden and six others are on the 2005 Mental Health Center of Boulder and Broomfield Garden Tour, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. June 18-19. For ticket information visit frontrangeliving.com.
