Feature Garden: Where East Meets West
27 Sep 2015
This garden draws inspiration from two locales.
By Lisa Truesdale photos by kate zari roberts Through gardening, Tina Davis has figured out a way to be in her two favorite places at once. Although she moved to Colorado from her native Massachusetts in the early 1980s, Davis has carefully designed her sprawling Longmont garden to remind her of the lush estate gardens on Cape Cod that she has always loved. In fact, until a few years ago, she spent nearly every summer traveling back to Cape Cod for a “gardening vacation” to help her good friend and college roommate, Rebecca Perry, who runs an estate-garden design company called Gardens by Rebecca. “Becca has taught me so much,” Davis says, “and my time spent working with her has influenced most of my choices in the garden.” These include the variety of plants, the concept of composition, the graceful curved lines, and even certain colors she favors, like bright reds and vibrant purples. At the end of each summer working on Cape Cod, Davis would return home with “plants of the year”—several of her favorites from the summer—to try in her own garden. Although she left her yard in her husband’s capable hands each summer and was grateful for his watering and weeding, her garden never looked quite the way she thought it would when she returned. The new plants were a way to help perk it up—even though there was a lot of trial and error, and not all of the plants survived here. “Gardening is always a work in progress, and it’s forever changing,” Davis says. “The fun of gardening is trying new things.” If Perry had her way, Davis would be trying something else new—working on Cape Cod full time. “But no amount of gardening adventures on Cape Cod could ever convince Tina to move back here with her family,” Perry says, “even though I dangled a supervisor position in front of her.” About five years ago, Davis decided to end her yearly pilgrimages to Cape Cod, choosing instead to stay put in Longmont each summer and focus on her own garden, and also on her successful career as a glass and ceramic artist and teacher. “Tina’s retirement from my company has allowed her to develop her gardens into a beautiful outdoor room with elements like water features, raised vegetable beds, architectural features and her lovely art pieces,” Perry says. “I’m jealous, though. Although I’m a professional gardener, I have no time to cultivate the gardens I dream of having at my own home; it’s the classic ‘shoemaker’s children’ syndrome.”
