After a few years of volunteering at the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival, in 2024 we made our first splash as Relish Gardens on the display floor! Our goal while designing our garden was to show how you can stretch the interior decorating themes from inside your home to the design choices you make outside of the home in your garden. We were thrilled to have won the People’s Choice award, the Best Use of Horticulture award, and Gold medal award winning garden.

We chose to create our own version of a stumpery using reclaimed wood interplanted with various plants you can find in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the plants you see in the outside portion of our design along either side of the curved walkway are things you can find in your local garden centers, or at least variations of them. The plants that are displayed on the inside portion of our design staged on interplanted pavers are tropical plants that can be housed in your home or a heated greenhouse in our climate.

The divider between the two sections of our display garden was made from burned and oiled wood using the Japanese art of Shou Sugi Ban. This is a traditional practice used to strengthen the wood against pests and rot, and is traditionally used with the wood of a Cryptomeria tree. As you look around the display garden you will see homage being paid to this tradition with our use of Cryptomerias in several areas.

A table-top and matching live edge coffee table-top made of emerald green stone were loaned to us for this display garden. We transformed the base of the larger spinning table with the use of ferns tied on using the Japanese art of Kokedama. Using moss covered balls of soil around the root balls of the ferns and fastening them with monofilament fishing line created the effect that these plants were growing up and out of the base of this table. The art of Kokedama was also used while creating the floating bark planters hung from the dividing wall. This bark was reclaimed from our very own office trees. Tropical plants with small root balls were chosen to adorn this beautiful bark and displayed as art pieces along the wall.

Part of our manifesto is to use Edimental plants as often as we can in our designs. As you look through our photos you will see an edible meadow where you can find Chives growing with Blueberries along the entrance trail and a foraging path full of Wasabi and edible mushrooms along the exit trail. The mushrooms used in the design inspired the couch used on the inside portion of the design. With its mushroom-y color and soft wavy edges, it was as if it was made for us.

Treasures can be found everywhere in the garden, lift up a fern frond and you may find a mushroom growing from the moss, look behind the large leaves of a Philodendron and you may find beautiful polished crystal adorning silver trays.