Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Homes

Front Porch: An oasis amid the industrial

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published May 27, 2005

From her dining table where she sits sipping iced lemon mint tea, Gretchen Warren can look out her French doors into an oasis that blooms beneath 150-year-old oak trees.

Even when she walks through the front doors, she can see it: the shade garden she's spent the last year cultivating. Butterfly plants, bamboo, ferns, angel trumpets and Agapanthus.

"To me, it's sort of like looking at a living painting," says Warren, a longtime dance professor at the University of South Florida, who wrote a leading textbook on ballet, Classical Ballet Technique.

As a young adult, Warren was a ballerina, a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet. Later, she was the ballet mistress of the American Ballet Theatre II in New York, where she worked for Mikhail Baryshnikov, recruiting and training young dancers.

When she came to Tampa 20 years ago, she was tired of the traveling, tired of the requisite six months spent on the road each year.

She wanted to dig her hands in the soil, to grow things as her father had at the family's circa 1700 Dutch farmhouse outside Princeton, N.J.

She bought a half-acre and an old Florida ranch house in an industrial section of East Tampa near Hillsborough Avenue, in an area thick with storage lockers and food distributors.

"Some people - especially friends in South Tampa - can't believe I live out here," she says. "But 20 years ago when I was looking for something to buy, this was all I could afford on a professor's salary, especially if I wanted land."

Over time, she has cultivated a legendary rose garden, with more than 165 rose plants, her favorite being the fragrant and feminine Belle Story, named after a World War I nurse. Among her neighbors, she is known as "the Rose Lady." Her old-fashioned rose bouquet won best of show at this year's Tampa Rose Show.

She loves giving away flowers, proffering a first-time visitor with the last gardenia bloom of the season or giving a garden-grown rose to a young man to take to his girlfriend.

She dreamed up the shade garden last year while on sabbatical. The effort, which consumed nearly two-thirds of her property, required 125 railroad ties, four dump trucks of topsoil and the layout skills of Dean Jones, a Tampa Bay garden designer.

She prefers to call it a "dappled shade" garden because it incorporates both sun and shade where needed. She also included a brick sitting area, cooled beneath a canvas umbrella where a small wrought-iron table and chairs beckon a weary gardener to sit a spell.

On the table top: a cascade of pink coral vine, a Florida native that spills from a vase around a crystal candlestick and Verde-green garden frog.

This is the reason for her passion, she explains, a place to come enjoy the outdoors after 12-hour days teaching and rehearsing in dark theaters.

At 60, she imagines she will spend just another six years in this urban sanctuary, before retiring to a family summer home in Cape Cod.

"This is really just for the moment," she says of her creation, a manifestation of the human soul in a gritty section of Tampa where most single women might not have gone house hunting - or dared to live alone.

She feels safe here, cradled in the bounty of nature.

"Yes, this was probably a terrible investment, and the real estate value is practically nil," she explains.

"But I always look forward to the changes from week to week - whether the iris or bananas are blooming. To me, a garden is a place where two people can sit and talk quietly, a place for escape, meditation and quiet, where you can even hear the sounds of the insects. And when the citrus trees were in bloom in February, I thought I had died and gone to heaven."

[Last modified May 26, 2005, 08:33:06]