Borrowed Beauty

This Sun Valley garden started with a simple question – how do you make a private garden belong to the sagebrush hills around it rather than interrupt them? From a distance the planting reads as an extension of the sage-steppe beyond the property line; up close it’s a full garden with four seasons of structure, color and movement.

Most of the site – over 14,000 square feet of ground disturbed by construction – went back to a low-maintenance Wood River seed mix, stitching the property back into the native grassland around it. Lawn was kept to a little over 4,000 square feet, just enough for gathering and getting around. Closer to the house, hundreds of prairie dropseed, blue oat grass and autumn moor grass create a textured ground plane that moves with the wind, with drifts of penstemon, catmint, sage, blazing star, wild indigo and coneflower blooming one after another through the short mountain season. Aspen, bristlecone pine, Doug fir, juniper, serviceberry and chokecherry give it bones year-round. A favorite moment – a set of boulders we rescued from a landscaper’s “boneyard” now anchors one of the courtyards. Their mass called for something lighter alongside, so in came a few whimsical western red birch. Plans evolve, and this one is better for it.