Some people garden for tomatoes and basil. Others dabble — one year planting a Brandywine crab apple tree in the backyard and installing a raised herb garden, another year planting peonies beside the front porch.
And then there are people like Barb Dowski.
These would be the people who fully submit to their gardens. They are possessed by delphiniums and hyssop, tomatoes and pear trees and slate paths fringed with thyme.
Dowski spends her spring and summer mornings, before work, reviewing the status of the many plants surrounding her more than 100-year-old Lafayette house. After work, she gardens. Weekends? With the plants.
“It’s a lot of work,” she says during an interview in her flower- dense front yard. “My friends call and say, ‘Are you in the garden? Do you want to come over?’ And I’m like, ‘No! I’m gardening. Come on over and have a beer in the garden.’ ”
It all started nearly 20 years ago, when she lived for a spell in Japan. The gardens there tantalized her. Shortly after returning home, Dowski, a Colorado native, began digging in the dirt and messing with plants.
Things grew more serious in 1996 when she and her husband, Ed Dowski, bought the 19th century house in Lafayette, which sits on about one-third of an acre. The yard had potential, but most of it at the time was grass. Dowski got to work, first with the front yard, where old junipers lined the sidewalk and little bloomed.
Now, a mass of yellow columbines that is nearly hedge-like runs along one side of the Victorian-style house. Cherry, pear and apple trees rise from different parts of the yard. Her 18-year-old tabby Takao creeps into something approaching a thicket of catmint and goes to sleep.
Dowski’s garden bewitchment fully blossomed about four years ago, when the couple enlarged their house and tore up the grass-blanketed backyard, which was “flat, and so boring,” says Dowski.
No more.
Now the yard holds a sunken patio, with stone walls and a flagstone floor — most of the stone came from an old foundation to the house, which the Dowskis found after the renovations began on their house.
One entire region of the yard is dedicated to vegetables in raised beds — tomatoes, corn, peppers, zucchini, basil. Dowski calls another sunny spot her “Arizona section,” full of agave, giant purple sage, yellow primrose and yucca.
Arches hold clematis and John Cabot roses. Peony blossoms appear from everywhere. Even hydrangeas, a variety called Annabelle, thrive. Pots pepper the yard, bird baths sit here and there, and a family of robins lives above a speaker on the back patio.
The goal for many gardeners, especially those like Dowski, is to create an oasis. She’s pulled it off, after years of work. Along the way, she became a master gardener. Walk around the property with Dowski and she’ll spout off the Latin names of the plants.
Do pangs of regret and sorrow stab at her when fall approaches?
“No!” she says. “I love to ski. It’s time to rest. Take a break.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
