An exuberant, upcycled, scrap-art garden: Denver Garden Bloggers Fling
Colorful stucco walls! Upcycled metal garden art! Octopus planters! Agaves (atop caged columns) and alliums and poppies! Amusing vignettes! As soon as we stepped off the bus at Denver Garden Bloggers Fling (June 2019), I knew this garden would be one of my tour favorites. Who could resist such unbridled exuberance?
As bloggers streamed into the front garden, I dilly-dallied to admire the walled entry. Y’all know how I adore a painted stucco wall. This low, orange beauty is paired with an arbor that, surprisingly, is constructed not of wood but steel tubes and metal beams. The horizontal beams even have traditional angled cuts on the ends.
Atop a notch in the wall, a gorgeous square pedestal planter spills over with purple prickly pear and yellow-green sedum.
At the end of the lush border, an arching sculpture of bent steel bars capped with cast-iron finials makes a graceful accent. I want one!
The steel arbor frames a view of a flagstone walk edged with boxwood and pines, leading to an orange stucco house. And check out the wooden gate…
Zigzagging pickets, sage-green edged with orange, are unexpected and fun. With the addition of wooden prickly pear pads, painted purple and poking through the fence, this gate has personality and pizzazz. For a better view of it, see this professional photo by Charles Mann.
Oversized pots, lots of color, a serpentine boxwood hedge, a Medusa-head planter — you can tell this is going to be a joyful garden.
A perfect plant for this pot is Medusa’s head (Euphorbia flanaganii), if I have the ID right.
The inner front garden glows with moonshine-yellow columbine and comfrey and white iris, accented with purple allium.
Alliums and roses and green foliage against the orange stucco wall
A rotund, cobalt-blue planter shows off another interesting (but unknown to me) plant.
Following a narrow path into the back yard, you pass through a colorful, carved wooden gate topped with elephants. Entering another world…
And then…oh my! The garden slopes downhill behind the house, skirting a small stream and rivulets of colorful poppies, irises, and alliums, past shaggy-headed yuccas (or sotols or nolinas?) and looping steel sculptures, to a fish pond and purple-walled deck at the bottom of the garden.
A curved deck backing up to a purple stucco wall overlooks the koi pond. In the foreground, in a cushion of thyme, a curvy steel sculpture undulates like the Loch Ness monster.
The deck enjoys shade from a batik cloth strung along a wooden arbor. Tentacled planters hang from the arbor and on the wall. (Yes, I have some of these wonderfully silly pots in my own garden.) I spotted a large tentacled pot on the front porch too but didn’t get a good photo.
Aren’t they fun? I put wavy-armed tillandsias in mine. The maker is Diana Moulds of Tentacle Arts in Phoenix, Arizona, and she does have an online store.
Pink poppy with Snuffleupagus eyelashes
Pastel irises, poppies, and alliums grow thickly in the mid-level of the garden, framed by one swooping arm of a bent-steel sculpture. A swirled orange glass globe on a steel pillar reminds me of Sauron’s eye.
An orange bead-and-metal dragonfly perches on the tip of one swooping steel arm.
Blushing pink poppies
Louise Hartwig of Two Girls with a Purpose looks at home in the garden with her color-coordinated dress.
Orange is embraced in this garden to delicious effect. It’s a softer version of JJ de Sousa’s equally orange-alicious garden in Portland.
The owner-gardener is Dan Johnson, who’s been with Denver Botanic Gardens for 22 years and is currently Curator of Native Plant Collections and Associate Director of Horticulture. Together with partner Tony Miles, he’s created an eclectic collection of plants accented with “upcycled artifacts just for fun.” They started the garden in 1999.
An agave pup grows atop a scrap-metal column with rebar trellising.
The back stoop of the house enjoys an elevated view of the garden, all the way down to the pond deck. It’s filled with scrap art and color, and I want to spend a day here exploring every nook and cranny.
Sprocket flowers
I wonder if Dan makes the bent steel pieces himself, and if so, how? They’re wonderful.
Happy bloggers enjoying Dan’s garden: first-time Flinger Jane Shellenberger of Colorado Gardener Blog and Judy Seaborn of Botanical Interests, lead planner of the Denver Fling, looking justly pleased with how the tour is going.
Another first-time Flinger, Michelle Olivier of Sound Gardener, tries to avoid getting impaled by a yucca.
It was a very full garden with 40 or so bloggers milling through it.
I would love to have a piece like this in my sedge lawn.
And check this out — little skulls impaled on agave spines like shrunken heads. Perfect for Halloween or, obviously, year-round!
All-white skulls adorn this agave surrounded by California poppies, with a single ‘Lauren’s Grape’ poppy standing tall in the middle. At bottom-right…
…a metal quail hen struts alongside hens-and-chicks succulents.
This green pot fountain is, I believe, the “source” of the stream that flows down to the pond.
Spiraling metal garden stakes and alliums — sympatico, yes?
An agave in a pipe planter gets a similar treatment.
Glass beads and “jewels” make a glittering pool in a depression in a rock. Bleached antlers (or weathered branches?) add natural texture to the scene.
Lavender flowers harmonize with the glass.
More skulls!
Everywhere are little vignettes, like this bottle spilling water in an endless stream into a gleaming shell. Below, a tiny frog lifts his umbrella.
This totemic figure confronting a snake made me laugh.
And long-necked blue bottles float like swans in a flowery pond.
Lift your eyes above the colorful poppies and irises, and you notice taller plants with cool, silvery blue foliage, like these large yuccas (or sotols or nolinas?) and conifers along the perimeter fence.
Hot-headed poppies glow in front of a cool-hued variegated agave.
Why have one ceramic bird when you can have a whole windowsill of them?
A cairn balances amid bright-green conifer foliage.
In a shady garden along the path back to the front, a lone gargoyle bade us a pensive farewell.
It was hard to tear myself away from this delightful garden, and I wasn’t the only one. Even as we were called to re-board the buses, many of us dallied to admire the colorful, matrix-planted hellstrip.
What lucky neighbors who get to enjoy this view every day.
Up next: Keith Funk’s rock garden and front-yard patio. For a look back at the plant collector’s garden of Panayoti Kelaidis, click here.
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Digging Deeper
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All material © 2024 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
This was one of my favorites too! A floriferous, colorful garden full of repurposed stuff that displays a sense of humor will always capture my heart.
Mine too. It has all the things.
This would have been my favorite for sure. Sorry I missed it! Thanks for posting it though – great photos.
Thanks, Jim. Look for a similar sort of Austin garden visit on my blog soon.
This is one of my favorites. I will have to look at these pictures again and again. Not only does it have wonderful plants and flowers they are so artfully accentuated.
Yes, it was creative and wonderfully arranged.
pam – thanks for taking us along to these dreamy and fun gardens!
It’s my pleasure, Heather!
I loved this garden and would have loved to stay longer. You got so many great photos!
I took a bazillion and then had a heck of a time winnowing them down for this post.
That is a lot to take in! What an abundance of creativity! I like the skulls on the tips of the agave spikes. Very funny!
Those little skulls charmed me so much that I’m going to bring a little Day of the Dead into my own garden soon. I recall that there was a similar agave treatment in Jeff Minnich’s garden on the DC Fling. https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=43943
Fantastic garden and challenging photography conditions! You managed it well..
It was definitely challenging! 🙂
I’ve been trying to put together a post on this garden but just don’t have enough photos. Well done, Pam! This was one of my favs too.
Thanks, Denise. But I bet you have enough photos to post something. I always enjoy your garden commentary on what you see.
Another fun post and garden! The art interspersed throughout really shows off the creativity of the gardener. It’s so nice to relive spring vicariously while I avert my eyes from the parched landscape out my windows. I’m in a new house and yard, and you give me so much inspiration. I went down the JJ de Sousa bunny trail again, too – so many wonderful ideas. Thank you!!
Virtual garden tours instead of being outside in 100-degree heat — I hear you! I’m glad you enjoyed it, Maggie.
I think the plant you called unknown could be a night blooming Cerus.
In the “rotund, cobalt-blue planter”? Maybe so!
I have a similar plant – I call it Queen of the Night. She does well in Austin Texas shade, but I bring her in for the winter.
I’ve been following your posts of all the Fling gardens and this, too, is my favorite. Quirky, whimsical, mischievous, fun…This garden embodies all of it.
It’s a crowd favorite!
what a fantastic riot of a garden! the owners must be wonderful hoots themselves to have created this…my favorite “fling garden” so far: THANKS!
I wish I’d met them, but I was wandering around ogling everything the whole time.
Oh man, so many things I love in this garden! And I would also love to know how those swooping metal sculptures are constructed!
A special rod-bending tool, I wonder?
Vignette-o-rama! One of the subtler echoes is very upright, dark-foliaged ?penstemons/?lilies punctuating the planting around those tall black metal pillars. Good looks at the effect in photos #24 (“An agave pup grows atop a scrap-metal column with rebar trellising.”) and #35 (“This green pot fountain is, I believe, the “source” of the stream that flows down to the pond.”) The dark spires of the mystery plant are also evident in the nice panorama shot of the walkway back to the orange house facade, with Louise H. (photo #21).
The curvy wrought iron sculptures really are the signature of this garden; they’d be fantastic against a simple spread of sedges. Somewhere I feel as if I’ve read the name of the artist, I believe someone other than the owners. Maybe a Flinger was alert enough to take it down…
No, my impression was wrong: Charles Mann credits the curvy iron rails to Dan Johnson. (Thanks for the link to those photos, by the way; they’re full of examples of subtle differences in planting and structure 12 years back in the garden’s evolution.)
Ooh, yes, those dark flower spires are dramatic and perfect with the pillars. They do look like a type of penstemon. Let’s fantasize that Dan will pop over here and answer our questions. 🙂
And I’m glad you had a chance to check out Charles Mann’s photos too. As you say, it’s interesting to see how Dan’s garden has evolved since then.
Just realized (“D’oh!”) that the top photo in the post is one of the best looks at the dark tower combo.
Great garden here! All the colors, clean vs. wavy lines, and plantsmanship would make it hard to leave. Dan’s definitely a desert sw X high plains aficionado. Thanks for the tour!
It WAS hard to leave. There was just so much to see.
[…] by skull-tipped agaves in Dan Johnson’s Denver garden, I’ve given a few of my own agaves the Yorick treatment. Turns out, all sorts of skull beads […]
Pam, this is so marvelous. I love the whimsy of the garden but also how wonderful the idea of this type of garden tour. Thanks so much for sharing. I signed up for updates.
That’s great, Joyce. Thanks for your comment!