Poetry. Family. Mysticism. Humor.
You don’t have to be an installation-scale artist to weave all of these things into a garden. But if you are an artist and a gardener, and these are your materials, the result might be more like opera than melody. More like a performance enigma than a landscape.
More like a journey than a place.
* * *
Rebecca DiDomenico’s garden climbs two-thirds of an acre on the edge of west Boulder, bordered by open-space foothills. You can enter it through so many “doors”: through the south side’s iron fence of angled, whimsical bars, where a gate leads to a path of round, engraved stepping stones to an Indian swing covered in tooled metal; or through an arch of boughs hung with multicolored candle lanterns.
You can enter over a small stream, crossing via giant stepping stones to the patio, where a long, blue lap pool throws rippling, gentled sunlight up to the ceiling of a vine-draped pergola. If you stay long enough for your eyes to adjust, you’ll see thick clusters of grapes waiting for harvest.
Pass the pool, and you’ll wander among stones pocked with more plants, blooming in shade and sun. And then, quite suddenly, a lettuce patch, red and green leaves sparkling in the crisp mountain air.
You’ve only seen the beginning.
* * *
“I didn’t plan it,” DiDomenico says of the space that envelops her house like the grounds of a temple. “It kind of evolved over time. I added as my kids grew up. A lot of things, I just sort of stole ideas.”
But what ideas they were. And what stories. Every phase of the property’s transformation is entwined with the family that lives here: DiDomenico, husband Stephen Perry; two sons, Ryder, graduating from high school next year, and Thomas Cole, 13; and Pearl the Weimaraner and Kinkajou the red poodle.
First, though, there was the land, up for sale when DiDomenico graduated from CU more than 25 years ago.
“At the time, for me, just getting out of college, it was a lot of money,” says DiDomenico, and quotes an amount that won’t buy a one-bedroom Denver condo today. “My intuition was that the view was the most important thing because a house you can always improve on. So I sprung for that piece of land for that reason.”
The garden grew. The family grew. But it happened slowly, organically, the way many family gardens do.
“I didn’t do it all at once, and I never got anything that big. That poplar tree” — DiDomenico points to the one towering 25 feet over our heads — “I got as a $14 tree from Kmart.”
The poplar sits on a space where most people wouldn’t wield a trowel: a 6-foot-wide sliver running east of the driveway where a forest reigns, buffering the views of a neighbor’s house: conifers, shrubs, shade-loving groundcovers. It’s punctuated with a small Buddha; a pedestal in the shape of an elephant. A swirl of seashells; a large green stone.
Every turn in the garden holds DiDomenico’s art, found objects, a family footprint or all three. Take that lap pool, which seems just this side of impossible, like something installed by expensive craftsmen of another century. But remember: Boys live here.
“We’ve had the pirate birthday party with the plank across the pool and the treasure at the bottom. One year we had this birthday party for Ryder where we hired a guy to bring all these exotic animals, and the boa constrictor went slithering off and went into the pool.”
* * *
In opera, there is a finale. In this garden, there is a central mystery, a secret and ultimate heart. It grew from a child’s birthday wish and a border dispute.
“We went on a trip and we came back and suddenly our neighbors had put up this concrete wall,” DiDomenico said. It blocked her property’s view to the northwest and the mountains beyond.
Meanwhile, DiDomenico’s younger son’s favorite story was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.” His only birthday request: a secret garden. At the same time, DiDomenico had fallen in love with the garden walls of Morocco, their startling, brilliant colors and partial views through ornamented windows.
She envisioned a long, blue finger of a garden room, open to the sky and smack up against that concrete wall. The family built it out of concrete block, then hired a mason to spread the concrete.
Then the family, with help from the neighborhood kids, embedded shiny, opalescent abalone shells, hammered into chips, then strung in rows and loops. On the garden’s door, under the arch of a tall butterfly bush, hangs a huge, antique lock Thomas Cole chose. It bears lines from “Dreams,” a poem by Mary Oliver: “only how it feels / when deep in the tree / all the locks click open / and the fire surges through the wood / and the blossoms blossom.”
Moroccan wall. Victorian lock. Colorado plants.
How to tie it all together? Something from China, of course.
* * *
“Someone was in my garden, and they said, ‘It’s such a great garden, but it needs something to unify it,’ ” DiDomenico said. “I thought about that.”
She realized that her garden rooms had many separate walkways — flagstones, concrete circles, railroad ties. Through her friendship with Hugo Brooks, owner of Indochine, an Asian antiques and handcrafts store in Boulder, she found millstones from China and bought a dozen to use for a path from the front gate.
“Every time I could, I’d buy three more. Then Hugo called me and said, ‘Rebecca, I’ve got a whole bunch of these millstones, and I need to move them.’ It really does kind of integrate the garden. And they’re so solid when you stand on them.”
Right there is the essential paradox of this place: old millstones buried in the same earth as dead pets and the socks and T-shirts one of the family dogs likes to purloin. For all its global influence, this garden is about rootedness. About what follows from the wise choice of one special place and embracing it for the length of time it takes to raise a family.
“I have a friend who was telling me that she and her kids, in 12 years, have moved 10 times.” DiDomenico says. “With a garden, you can’t really do that, because of the amount of time it takes to grow something. And you have to go through all the different failures.”
It’s about the journey.
“My husband said, ‘Is it ever going to be done?’ and I said to him, ‘No, it’s an ongoing process.’ If you can’t get into the process of it, you can’t love it — because you’re never going to be done.”
Susan Clotfelter: 303-954-1078 or sclotfelter@denverpost.com
