In downtown Seaside, garden designer Pam Fleming tells stories with plants rather than pen. In the 17 years she’s been in charge of the coastal town’s street-side garden spaces, she’s used themes to create storefront planters and beds that go beyond pretty texture and color.
For Seaside Apothecary‘s planter, for example, she chose medicinal plants to reflect the pharmacy, mingling willow for pain relief, wormwood for digestion, chaste tree for regulating hormones, witch hazel for astringent and mallow for poultices.
Restaurants are easy, she says. Pig ‘N Pancake is fronted with planter boxes of blueberry, parsley, lovage and a small knot garden with germander, santolina and lavender intermixed with purple basil and sage. Dooger’s Seafood and Grill has the traditional quartet of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, along with fennel, oregano, savory and scented geraniums. To reflect the orange and blue crab logo, Fleming added orange poppies and geum, and blue laurentia.
Not surprisingly, the most imagination plays out in front of Funland Arcade. Whether the obedient plant and calming chamomile have any effect on electrified children is doubtful, but parents in the know will be amused by the pocketbook plant and impatiens, knowing they’ll open their pockets to dole out money and wait impatiently for the fun to end.
Fleming, who started her landscaping business Nature’s Helper in Kansas almost 25 years ago, brought it with her when she moved to Seaside in 1993.
“I felt a little inadequate at first,” she says. “Gardening in Kansas and Seaside are very different.”
That didn’t slow her down. Within two years, the city offered her two contracts, one to overhaul, design and maintain the street plantings in the boardwalk area, the other for doing the same at city buildings such as the library and convention center.
“I wanted the gardens to reflect Seaside,” says Fleming, who also works with merchants on the hanging baskets in front of their shops. “Once I came up with the themes, it made things a lot easier.”
But first, the neglected gardens in the boardwalk area fronting the beach had to be dealt with.
“I had people ask me if we’d had a flood,” she says of the overgrown gardens that were tangled with daisies, crocosmia and mugo pines.
In the first year, Fleming and a landscape contractor donned rain gear to rip out everything but trees. Now the 100 garden beds reflect her vision of themed designs popping with bright colors. Poppies, especially, are one of her favorites — and for several years were also a favorite of a mystery person who made off with the blooms right before they opened. Police and merchants got in on the poppy watch, but no one was ever apprehended.
“It was maddening,” she says. “I’m assuming they mistakenly thought they were opium poppies. But, thankfully, this year they’ve been left alone. One merchant told me he thought he knew who the thief was and that the thief had moved away. Hooray.”
The store and restaurant owners, as well as visitors, are among the reasons Fleming loves her job. Last year she took her career to the next step by opening Back Alley Gardens Nursery at the back of The Natural Nook, a 37-year-old flower shop owned by Cathie Cates. It became obvious the space wasn’t working, so last February off they went to open a new flower shop and nursery in the small town of Gearhart, a few miles north of Seaside, in the old Fitzgerald building, next to one of the oldest livery stables in Oregon.
“I’ve got big ideas,” Fleming says of future garden projects. “We’ll see how they turn out.”
PAM’S PICKS FOR THE BEACH
Ask Pam Fleming to name good plants for the beach and she could rattle off a couple hundred. She culled it down to these.
Aster
Bellflower (Campanula)
Fuchsia
Heather
Hydrangea
Jerusalem sage (Phlomis)
Masterwort (Astrantia)
Meadow rue (Thalictrum)
Mexican lobelia (Lobelia laxiflora)
Ornamental grass
Pinks (Dianthus)
Poppy (Papaver)
Salvia
Sneezeweed (Helenium)
Toad lily (Tricyrtis)
Turtlehead (Chelone)
Wormwood (Artemisia)
— Kym Pokorny
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