How does your garden grow?
Homeowners work hard to keep their yards spectacular
The beautiful yards in Bella Vista don’t happen by accident. It takes dedication to have a beautiful yard in a city where beautiful yards are common.
Georgia Yanik works outside every day. She prefers to be outside as much as possible. Even in the winter months, there’s work to do in her garden. After she and her husband bought their house about 19 years ago, they bought the empty lot next door so she could expand her garden.
It was a wooded lot, so it took her a couple of years to clear it and add beds one at a time. Now, she can sit in her porch swing towards the back of the lot and see dozens of different plants.
“That’s my love,” she explains.
Yanik, like other Bella Vista gardeners, likes to keep her beds full with perennials that include small shrubs. Annuals such as pansies, impatiens and other small flowers, she grows in large pots. One bird-bath-size pot in her front yard is planted in petunias. She expects them to grow until they spill out and touch the ground, looking like a ball of color.
She also plants a lot of bulbs, which bloom early in the spring. She pulls her tulip bulbs and replaces them every year so they don’t look “leggy.” The dogwoods around the house also provide springtime color.
“Each season has different things in bloom,” she said.
She has several varieties of daylilies, ranging in color from the old-fashioned orange to salmon and yellow.
Her newest addition came after all the rain this spring. She added a drainage area that resembles a dry creek that will help the water flow down into the ravine behind the house without taking gravel or plants along with it. She doesn’t plan to add a sprinkler system because she wants to control how much water each plant receives. In the summer, she waters her entire garden my hand.
She keeps deer out of her yard with a simple fishing line stretched across the front and back of the garden about 4 feet high. It works very well, she said.
Yanik learned her gardening skills as a child in east Arkansas, where her father was also an avid gardener and drafted his children to help. What she used to call work is now how she chooses to spend every day.
“I love to grow things, to make things pretty,” she said. People often stop in front of her house to take photos.
Not too far away, Roland Sperry also enjoys growing things. He is retired from Amoco, where he spent most of his career abroad including several years in Iran and Egypt, but he still describes himself as a “Kansas farm boy.”
“He had to have grass when we moved here,” his wife, Nona Sperry, said. They’ve lived in the Highlands for about 18 years.
“It’s very relaxing for me,” he said about keeping his lawn well maintained. Mowing gives him a chance to think, he said.
But even though he likes mowing, he recently put gravel onto a steep area in his side yard. Mowing just got too difficult. He also said he fights a continuing battle to keep armadillos out of the yard.
Like Yanik, Sperry uses many perennials including azaleas in the front yard and oak leaf hydrangeas that come into bloom when the azaleas are done. In the spring, he has lots of irises.
He also puts his smaller annuals in containers.
Nona Sperry has an herb garden along the side of the house.
Pene Pigott can no longer get out to work in her yard the way she used to, but she still has a “spring garden.” In the spring, her azaleas and rhododendron bloom and that is the peak of her gardening year. After they bloom, she has pretty green foliage and a shade garden.
“I have a lot of bulbs I have collected over the years,” she said. A few of the bulbs have to be “lifted” — pulled out of the garden to winter in the garage — but most remain in place year after year.
She’s also collected a lot of native plants over the years. Some have done so well that they have been divided and moved from home to home. The native plants, including many ferns, don’t need a lot of care.
She does get out to water early in the morning or late in the afternoon. The dermatologist has told her to avoid the sun, and she doesn’t mind that restriction because early morning and late afternoon are her favorite times in the garden anyway.
Pigott has lived in Gravette and Bella Vista since the 1970s and loves the area, but now she has to consider downsizing.
“I don’t want to be here and see my garden neglected,” she said.