Visiting Nancy Walden’s garden is like opening a fairy-tale book to look at the pictures. One can easily imagine a troll hiding in the gnarly banyan tree, or some of Maurice Sendak’s "Wild Things" playing amid the giant golden bamboo.
"People have come here and said, ‘Oh, look, you’re right next door to a park!’" Walden said.
Her home lies at the base of a steep slope in the Woodlawn area of Manoa, flush against a retaining wall that supports the street in front. From a bird’s-eye view, it would look like the house is built right up against the street, with most of her 10,000-square-foot lot stretching behind the house to the Manoa Chinese Cemetery beyond.
"I don’t have a front yard, I just have a backyard, and that’s why it looks so big," said Walden, a retired fundraiser.
After descending a flight of stairs from the street, visitors first see the garden from above, at canopy level. Her deck overlooks a carefully manicured lawn, abstractly shaped to embrace small plots of plants, flowers and trees, with a view of the verdant Manoa hillside in the background. In Hawaii these days, such immaculate beauty tends to be associated with golf courses, but there’s too much growth and color here to want to risk losing a ball, though Walden’s dog Pono certainly enjoys chasing a tennis ball or dragging a coconut around the yard.
Walden and her husband, Robert, first lived at the home in 1987, when the yard was merely wild, rugged terrain. They moved to Hawaii island two years later and lived there for 10 years. After her husband died, Walden returned to Honolulu and started work on the garden.
After consulting several gardeners and landscapers, she hired landscape architect Rick Quinn, whose projects include landscaping for the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He advised against a simple rectangular lawn surrounded by various plants, which others had suggested.
"He said you want to create a garden like a pathway," Walden said. "So if you stand over there, you don’t see those pink bromeliads. There are things to be seen as you walk through."
Her gardening aesthetic reflects the colors of her homes on the islands. On Hawaii island she first lived in a log cabin with red and white trim, then moved to a white house. When she moved back to Honolulu, the nurseries were featuring a lot of pinks.
"So this is a pink, white and green garden," she said.
Walden is diligent about maintaining the color palette, filling the garden with pink-toned gardenias, heliconia, mussaenda, anthuriums and other colorful plants, including a variegated hau tree, which has leaves that start out pink, then turn white, then green. After she planted dianella, which has long, spiky green and white leaves, she discovered "much to my horror, it has yellow and blue flowers! Yikes!"
So she trims the flowers off.
From the original lot, she kept some of the golden bamboo and the major trees — a five-story paperbark that "has to be one of the tallest in the state," a silver oak and the huge banyan, which received a pruning that was both necessary and cleverly executed.
"The banyan tree used to come out to the silver oak, and it was just a mess," Walden said. "We cut a window in the banyan tree (canopy) so that you can see to the other side."
Walden got estimates of $50,000 and higher for the job but got away with spending only $30,000 on the project, which included leveling and shoring up the foundation of the house. That part of the project resulted in the construction of a rock wall and a walkway lined with monstera plants.
She reduced spending by acting as her own contractor, and saved money in other ways. For example, when Walden noticed nearby homes under construction, she arranged for any excess soil and rock to be brought to her yard, where it was used to fill in and raise the eventual lawn area, in some areas by as much as five feet. The cemetery helped her save time and money by taking any excess material and letting her cart in supplies and equipment.
Now her yardman comes twice a week to mow the lawn and do the major trimming, and Walden does everything else herself. She already knows which new plants she’ll be bringing in over the next year, all color-correct.
"These other homes in the area, they have a view to the ocean," Walden said. "I create my own view."
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