rooms we love: @fritz&gignoux

For this Rooms We Love, we’re taking it outside with @fritz&gignoux (Leslie and Scott) a Washington DC based landscape architecture team to tour their own home garden. I’ve personally followed them for years and as you’ll see, their work is exceptional. Below are excerpts from their blog on Dec 31, 2019, and I’m so appreciative that Leslie let us share. On her full blog, she has her tried and true favorites, which she calls “the old reliables.” It’s a great list of plants that flower all summer and prefer the heat. To read the full blog head over to https://www.fritzgignoux.com/post/the-perennial-garden

There is a certain satisfaction in making your own garden. You have done it yourself. There is none like yours. It took us over two years to find our house and garden. The disruption of moving three times during this wanderlust period with tiny children, the sheer desperation of the whole situation, made us especially prone to signing the contract for our house on our realtor’s car. We had nearly given up, for us the house and garden had to have the potential to speak to one another, there needed to be a certain magic which we could expand upon. Our wonderful realtor did not give up on us and she found our dream house and garden, a place so unlivable that you had to cover your face with a heavy scarf to avoid asphyxiation from the fumes of cat feces and cat urine. We happily saw through all that and upon entering the foyer knew that the house had good bones, we did not need to go further into the house. Later when spring awakened our garden, we were elated to see that we had a massive grouping of a very old fashioned and unusual deep rose pink hydrangea. We had made a smart purchase!

With our garden, we had certain guidelines to follow--the garden should be relatively easy to maintain (once a week mowing, big seasonal cleanups, seasonal pruning), it should work in harmony with the house, and it should be presentable year round.

If the garden were a canvas, the perennials and roses form the painting. Perennials unlike annuals or biennials which are seasonal or last for just 2 years, come back with proper care year after year. But without a good framework, they would be lost in the garden and the painting would lose its hold on you. A garden that is simple and peaceful is a garden with structure. The flowers and perennials are organized by color, in long, narrow ‘drifts’ that run into other masses of drifts. It seems so effortless, so simple.