Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

My House

This is how her garden grows

By Elizabeth Bettendorf
Published March 25, 2006

PORT RICHEY - Clarice Deslauriers knew she wanted her garden to be Florida-friendly.

After all, she made her home that way.

The tiny 1960s concrete block house in the old Regency neighborhood of Pasco County looked like every other one on the block: small and cozy with too few closets and barely enough room for the bedroom doors to open.

For $52,000 in 1990, she got two bedrooms, one bath and 980 square feet of living space. Deslauriers made proverbial lemonade, designing a tiny kingdom with cubbyhole storage tunneling throughout, space-saving louvered doors and bookshelves climbing the wall next to her dishwasher. She hung stained-glass film over her French doors and created an inviting sunroom with an electric fireplace, blue wainscoting and places to display the angels that seem to traipse through her house by the dozen.

The garden, though, is her masterpiece, flourishing with water gardens, orchids and tropical climbing plants that in season explode with bright red, purple and orange the way fireworks fizz against a Florida summer sky. Gardening, she says, has filled her soul since her childhood in Connecticut, where her mother, an avid gardener, taught her about trees, plants, birds and nature and how to identify wildflowers.

"It's the creating, the beauty, the rebirth and the growing," she explained one cool March morning as she looked at her gazebo shrouded in cape honeysuckle. Her dog, a fawnlike rescued greyhound named Sabre, hung behind at her heels.

"Plus, a garden is such a joy; it's so relaxing, truly relaxing," she added. "Every day before I go to work I can enjoy the sunrise out here and the birds in the back yard. When I come home, I can decompress in my garden, even if it's just for a half-hour."

But Deslauriers learned to garden in the forgiving soil of Connecticut. When she moved to Florida to be closer to her parents and friends, she chose Pasco County because it was still cheap enough to allow her a home on enough land to grow a prized garden.

Figuring out how to make things grow in the state's sandy soil was the hard part. Like Julia Daniels Moseley, who wrote of settling on the 1880s Tampa frontier in Come to My Sunland, Deslauriers encountered a largely rural Pasco County.

Wildlife abounded. She learned to make things grow beautifully in the strange soil. And over time, she created a Florida-friendly paradise in a 60- by 40-foot space surrounding a natural-looking swimming pool and two ponds, one of which she dug herself. For her smart planting and conservation efforts, she is the recipient of the 2005 Pasco County Water Wise award.

The garden blooms with a lush palette of bougainvillea, white bird of paradise (big as a woman's wrist), plumbago, papyrus, citrus and palms. There is no screen, just open space, shaded naturally by plants and trees, and decorated with statues of saints, angels and a cobalt-blue glass wishing ball the size of a globe.

"At night the stars are spectacular - there are no city lights out here, nothing to get in their way," Deslauriers says. "It's just beautiful."

Deslauriers, 56, is the financial administrator for the Palm Harbor Montessori Academy. She was presented with the coveted ceramic stepping stone with its trademark yellow lily at a Pasco County Commission meeting in January. Her two sisters surprised her and flew in from Pittsburgh for the presentation.

The garden is a living canvas dedicated to the memory of their mother, Anna Fehskens, who died in October at age 80.

Fehskens, who was the president of the Venice Garden Club and taught gardening to schoolchildren, guided Deslauriers in the creation of her Pasco garden, one that uses little water and burgeons with native plants and color.

"This award truly is a great honor to me because it so represents the things my mom enjoyed in life and that she passed on to me," Deslauriers said in an an emotional essay she wrote after receiving the award. "She commented whenever she visited my home on how she enjoyed my back yard and what peace it gave her and so I know she would have been very proud to know I won this award."

Mother taught daughter that in Florida, the most important thing to help plants grow is to choose plants that are indigenous and to fertilize them often, using natural ingredients, to make up for the lack of nutrients in the sandy soil.

By "using plants that were natural to the Florida environment, the lack of rain would not be as much of a problem," Deslauriers wrote. "The color groupings of plants in my back yard was also guided by my mom's education to me. ... I chose plants that came in a variety of colors to surround the outer yard (bougainvillea) and then made areas of interest throughout the back yard. My mom was always available to me to get advice on how to help my plants thrive and to learn what nutrients and particular type of fertilizer they might need - often teaching me how to research this through Garden Club information and books on plants and flowers."

Deslauriers was on her way to take her mother to the hospital the morning the judges arrived to look at her garden. She left a note on the door explaining she had been called away by a family emergency.

Two weeks later, her mother died. Deslauriers soon learned that her garden was being honored with the best award a gardener can win in Pasco County.

The thought of it still brings tears.

In the morning she can walk outside with a cup of fragrant vanilla coffee and soak it all in. It's particularly nice at this time of year; the air is cool and dewy and the morning sun silky.

"Things subsist here with very little water. There's no grass to be watered," she explained. "It's its own ecosystem, a habitat for birds, animals and frogs."

And, it's worth noting, a growing collection of garden angels.

The watchful one strumming a wind chime harp is a reminder, she says, of a mother who taught her to love and respect nature.

Even in a modest little back yard in old Pasco County.

Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached ebettendorf@hotmail.com

[Last modified March 25, 2006, 01:51:17]