5x5 Five Minutes, Five Questions Omni Peace Gardeners

This year's Omni Peace Garden Tour -- now in its ninth year -- invites humans into Fayetteville spaces created more for plants and animals. Froggy Bottom, at 324 E. Sutton St., is home to butterflies, birds, fish, frogs and toads, say gardeners Jennifer Mortensen and Kyle Quinn.

"We've been working to further enhance the space for our many wild visitors and actually named our garden 'Froggy Bottom' after its amphibian residents," Mortensen says. "In the spring and in the summer, it keeps us quite busy -- busy during the day, maintaining and admiring. Busy at night, listening to the boisterous croaking of frogs and toads."

And Deb King's and Jeanne Sievert's Bees Here Now Garden, 228 E. Dickson St., is intended to attract pollinators and honey makers -- along with the occasional admiration of human passersby.

Before Saturday's tour of their gardens, the two pairs of gardeners answered these questions for What's Up!

Q. Where/who did your green thumb come from?

A. Bees Here Now: We each had parents who gardened -- one of us had a mom who grew flowers and the other a dad who called everything but his vegetable garden "the yard," even though he and his mother grafted camellias, shared gingko saplings and grew exotic lilies

Froggy Bottom: We were primarily indoor gardeners over the past 10 years while living in small East Coast apartments and were fortunate to inherit much of the Sutton Street garden when we purchased the home last fall.

Q. What appeals to you about gardening as an adult?

A. Bees Here Now: We ... enjoy the communing that comes with being in close contact with the birds, bees, snakes and what have you of nature. In our front yard garden, we love to see the joy on peoples' faces as they watch our garden develop through the seasons.

Froggy Bottom: Making tangible progress on a project with near-term payoff. Also, being outside.

Q. How did your garden's theme develop?

A. Bees Here Now: When we bought our English cottage at Dickson and Willow, the front yard begged to match the home's architecture. As a house-warming, a friend gave us "The Cottage Garden" by Christopher Lloyd and Richard Bird. We decided on a design and started digging. During three years of digging, planting and harvesting, bunnies and deer helped modify our design to include a four-foot perimeter of deer-resistant perennials with more traditional rows of veggies and herbs protected from critters by an electric fence.

Like English cottagers, we grow a lot of food in a small space -- vegetables, herbs, spices, brambles and fruit trees along with many bee and butterfly attractors.

A cattle panel arch with a repurposed farm gate, covered with lots of scrounged fallen limbs and vines and a few bird feeders, creates a haven for birds and bees. And we share bounty with the many critters who call our garden home.

Q. What role does your garden play in life around your house?

A. Bees Here Now: What to do in the garden each day is usually first on our daily to-do list. We divide the labor ranging from planting, feeding, weeding and pest control to harvesting, processing, preparing and eating the proceeds. Tending our garden is a year-round endeavor. We keep a garden journal so we know what we did, when. We photo-document the garden's progress. We even wrote a song about it. So ... there's not much we'd rather do than be immersed in the world that is our garden.

Q. What do you hope visitors to your garden remember/ take away with them?

A. Bees Here Now: Joy is what we hope garden visitors remember from experiencing our garden -- sights, smells, sounds, tastes and touches. We also want people to have the sense they, too, can help plants and animals thrive.

Froggy Bottom: We hope visitors find a bit of serenity in the middle of Fayetteville. And maybe a frog or two.

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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NAN What's Up on 05/26/2017