Garden tour to feature five home landscapes
Time was in short enough supply in the mid-1990s for Laura Warriner as she worked long hours to transform a long-abandoned warehouse in the Deep Deuce district into art exhibition space.
Dealing with the yard at home, as well, was nearly impossible.
“It was beautiful with lots and lots of trees,” said Warriner, owner of [ArtSpace] at Untitled, 1 NE 3. “But over 30 years, it had gotten overgrown, and the trees were so large you couldn’t even see the house from the street.”
Flooding from a nearby school, plus trees downed by an ice storm, only compounded the problem at her home in the Belle Isle neighborhood.
So when garden designer Roger Runge suggested swapping out the lush landscape for something more drought-tolerant, Warriner and her husband, Joe, decided that was a good idea.
The resulting garden is one of five home landscapes featured in the Oklahoma Horticultural Society’s Garden Tour for Connoisseurs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.
The annual tour is the society’s main fundraiser. Proceeds support scholarships for horticulture students and help sponsor “Oklahoma Gardening” on OETA.
Tickets will come with garden descriptions and addresses. Tickets to all five gardens are $20, and tickets for one individual garden is $5. Children 12 admitted free.
Buy tickets at TLC Nursery and Greenhouses, 105 W Memorial Road and 8208 Northwest Expressway; Precure Nursery and Garden Centers, 8125 W Reno Ave. and 4535 NW 63; Marcum’s Nursery, 2121 SW 119; and Tony’s Tree Plantation, 3801 S Post Road.
Before the redesign at the Warriner home, trees were obscuring what many consider an architectural jewel, a house designed by a noted Oklahoma architect Bruce Goff. Life magazine noted in 1951 that Goff was one of the few American architects Frank Lloyd Wright considered creative, a designer who scorned “boxes with little holes.”
Warriner’s home, with its sharply angled roof and diamond-shaped skylights, definitely isn’t a box. It was built in 1957, and the Warriners bought it from the original owners in 1966. Joe Warriner died in 2016.
“There was no garden there when we bought it,” Laura Warriner said. “It was just Bermuda grass.”
They hired a professional in the late 1970s to design and install landscaping around the house. When they replaced that with the more drought-tolerant landscaping in the 1990s, river stones, low-growing shrubs and succulents replaced the grass, shrubs and trees. A tall mixture of shrubbery and bamboo surround three sides of the house, but the striking front exterior can be admired from the street.
“This will be the simplest of all the gardens (on the tour),” Warriner said.
“I’m really kind of surprised they wanted me to be on the tour because my yard is really very simple.”
The shrubbery-andbamboo mix offers privacy for the backyard, and a backing keeps people from pushing through to get a closer look at the house — a common issue shared by those living in architecturally significant homes.
“You have no idea what people will do to get a look at this house,” Warriner said.
The simple, droughttolerant approach may be one reason the horticultural society put her home on this year’s tour.
“We always emphasize the use of different plant material and plant material that is suitable for the Oklahoma climate,” John Fluitt, the tour committee chairman. “So our tour is more based on horticulture than perhaps just appearance. We try to find places that have more horticultural interest.”
For more information about the horticulture society and the tour, go to www.ok-hort.org.