Giving up the garage

With a carefully planned renovation, these homeowners gained valuable space inside and out.

Allison and Billy Pritchard had lived in their Mountain Brook, Alabama, home for 20 years. They loved their house and its cul-de-sac location where their three kids could play safely, but Allison still was not satisfied. There was one important piece of the puzzle missing-a garden.

"I'm from a family of flower lovers," she says. "Tending a garden is the best stress reliever. I didn't want a huge plot that would be a major effort to keep up. I just wanted a little garden to maintain." So when Billy and Allison decided to do some renovations to expand their home, including converting their two-car garage into a playroom for their 15-year-old son, Allison saw an opportunity to get the garden she had longed for.

To do the interior work, the couple hired architect Pete Pritchard, who happens to be Billy's cousin. Along with the playroom, the Pritchards also added a downstairs bedroom and converted a seldom-used, shady northside deck into a family room. "Our son Billy had lived upstairs in a room between his two sisters for years, so he was happy to get his own pad downstairs," Allison says. When it came to designing a new landscape that would complement the renovation, they knew they wanted landscape designer Mary Zahl of Birmingham. She had done so many garden plans for other relatives that she was like a member of the family.

"I've worked on five Pritchard gardens," Mary says. "So I feel like I know them pretty well."

One of the biggest hurdles to the design was the steep hillside site. "There's a lot of slope here," Mary says. "When you walked around this side of the house you felt as if you were going to fall off a cliff. All that was here was a huge forsythia, a strip of grass, and a drop-off down to the neighbor's property." Mary terraced the side yard to create level beds and a path. A system of underground drains handles the wash from above. Although the space for the new garden was limited by the driveway out front and a retaining wall at the property line, Mary was able to make the most of it.

Along the side of the house, she created a long, narrow bed bordered by a low stone wall. "Billy was concerned with the huge brick wall of the house," Mary recalls. "But we greened it up with climbing roses. There's a `Graham Thomas' that has a yellow bloom, and a climbing `American Beauty' that's pink." Matching rows of upright boxwoods (Buxus sempervirens) act as sentinels to guide visitors down a 4-foot-wide red rock path. Just above the retaining wall, a solid hedge of 'Wintergreen' boxwoods (B. microphylla `Wintergreen') helps enclose the narrow garden and keeps the hillside from seeming so steep.

Between the driveway and the double-French door entrance to the new playroom, Mary created a small patio of bluestone pavers. Boxwoods soften the corners, and a centrally located planting contains an espaliered `Snow Flurry' sasanqua camellia surrounded by colorful annual bedding plants. Throughout the renovation, Allison coddled her prized smilax vine, which remains trained against the wall above the doors.

The garden features a few hardy perennials, such as phlox, coneflower, Brazilian sage, and black-eyed Susan, but for the most part, the parade of color comes from annuals that Allison relishes changing with the seasons. She also loves watering, fertilizing, and deadheading them. In spring, she plants narrow-leaf zinnia (Zinnia linearis), lantana, potato vine, and coleus. But Allison most enjoys the fall planting of tulip bulbs, snapdragons, pansies, and violas. "The garden is just the perfect size," she says. "And we don't miss the garage a bit. We mainly used it for storage, and with the renovation we created space out back for all of that. We always parked in the driveway anyway." Looking at the completed project, Allison doesn't view it as losing a garage. It was more like gaining a garden. GLENN R. DINELLA

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Spring 2003
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