Garden delight: blue, green and everything in between

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

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In 20 years, Elaine and Bill Spencer have turned a small acreage on Bay Shore Road into a gardener's paradise of blooming plants and curious collectibles.

Their home is surrounded by paths, Elaine's plants and Bill's eclectic birdhouses. Their view to the east stretches over a grassy field and Terry Lake. The abundant foliage thrives on irrigation water.

"We don't have a birdfeeder because we think the whole yard is a birdfeeder," Elaine Spencer observed.

Foxes also pass through the garden, and the pond is home to goldfish, not $40 lunches for wildlife.

Spencer has made gardening a part of daily life, enjoying the succession of blooms and experimenting with placement and color. She prefers to buy from local nurseries, but enjoys new finds in gardening catalogs. She grows plants from seed, swaps plants and is trying her hand at breeding daylilies.

"I try to buy stuff from local nurseries," she said, "because if we don't patronize them we won't have them."

Spencer also places high value on her gardening friends. "I really like the people," she said. "They are interesting and sharing." And she finds them everywhere, visiting nurseries whenever she travels.

She's a member of the Northern Colorado Daylily Association and a volunteer at the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins. The Gardens, she said, are a "real resource in our community that's under utilized" - a showpiece for annuals, perennials and garden designs that fit a Colorado landscape.

Unique in Spencer's collection is the bluebottle tree, low-maintenance and xeric. It blooms with a friend's recycled bottles of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry attached to a metal sculpture of trunk and limbs.

The bluebottle tree and a ceramic blue cat from Fort Collins Nursery inspired a color scheme that spread to strategically placed garden benches with the purchase of specially mixed paint.

A fairy garden of small plants and figurines in a barrel delights the Spencers' grandchildren, and the larger landscape is home to gnomes, a swinging nun, and metal-crafted spiders and bats.

Spencer praises Lynn Demaranville, a man of many talents including welding, and path-builder Ken Pinkston of Mother Earth Landscaping for making their country landscape a visual delight that's easy to negotiate.

She credits husband Bill for with making everything work - pond, pumps and irrigation system. Retired from the agricultural economics department at Colorado State University, he likes to spend winter months crafting birdhouses from odds and ends found at junk stores. He doesn't plant or weed.

To keep up with flower gardens and vegetable beds, Spencer has turned to hiring teens for part-time labor. After a few false starts she discovered that the best wording for a classified ad is "must be able to accept direction from grouchy old lady."

It must have worked. The result is in an overwhelming sense of peaceful repose.