This past spring, dear friends of ours moved and no longer needed their gazebo frame. We offered to give it a good home, and figured we’d decide what to do with it once we got it. We knew we didn’t intend to put a roof on the frame. We were thinking more along the lines of a bit of structural architecture to put somewhere in the garden.

My husband Norman assembled the frame one afternoon, and we moved it around a bit before deciding it was perfectly situated. He used large rocks to level out the “low” corners, because it’s sitting on a bit of a slope. The next question was “what do we want to do with it?”. I envisioned a garden like a moat, encircling the bottom of the 10x10’ frame. Norman went searching through our woods for straight logs to contain the garden. We carted many wheelbarrows full of manure (thank you to our neighbours and their cows!) and topsoil, and filled in the “moat” garden.

We planted it that very same day, mostly with seeds and bulbs, which meant that the transformation from strips of soil to anything resembling a garden was a very slow process. I’d chosen mostly flowers, combined with a few food plants, in a rainbow of colours and a range of heights. Calendula for cheerful yellows and oranges, nasturtiums and scarlet runner beans for vines flowering in hues of orange and red. Gladioli in a tropical peach and a velvety dark purple. Coral fountain amaranth, which I knew would give great height and texture as well as stunning colour. Bachelor’s buttons in pinks, purples, and blues. Nigella - tiny and delicate in shades of blue. 7 different dahlias - our first time trying these tricky but stunning flowers. Ground cherries in two corners, and a few leeks that wouldn’t fit with the rest in the vegetable garden. We watched it patiently all through June, and were grateful when there was something to show during the studio tour in mid-July.

The morning of the studio tour, I realized the perfect addition to the Gazebo Garden would be to hang some of the strands of beads that I’d put together for the Serenity Experience in Riverside a few years back. They add just the right touch of sparkle and magic :)

Here’s a video tour of the mid-July version of the Gazebo Garden:

If you’re ever here, either for the studio tour or as a guest, I hope you’ll take a moment to sit in and enjoy this enchanting part of the garden!