Small plantings on tiny lot make this gardener a winner

Some people throw parties. Sharon Danovich throws gardens.

“Throw gardens” is her name for small patches of perennials and shrubs she plants at the base of trees or in a neglected corner of her small Edgewood, Pennsylvania, yard.

But these are far from casual get-togethers. They’re carefully planned collections of interesting plants brought together for a purpose. But if they don’t get along -- or worse, fade like wallflowers -- you won’t see them again. She’ll throw a new garden in their place.

“Patience, plant size and bloom time are key,” she said. “I don’t buy mature plants. I don’t do annuals. They don’t give you enough for your money.”

Danovich’s carefully designed vignettes made her the small-garden winner in the newspaper’s Great Gardens Contest, summer edition. By late August, when judges from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Botanic Garden visited, many flowers had faded.

But the well-executed hardscape -- walls, pavers, wrought iron and a fountain -- and the varying foliage of traditional favorites like weigela, hydrangea, sweetshrub and hosta made it a cool green spot in the dog days of summer.

Actually, the dog that day was Samson, and this is his domain. Not only was the miniature schnauzer the only attendant at Danovich’s wedding to John Lupone in 2011, he is the reason so many of the foreground plants are so tall.

“If it’s too tall for him to pee on, he doesn’t like it,” she said.

On the day the judges visited, he tagged along, watering as he saw fit.

Samson is also the reason Danovich uses no herbicides or pesticides and only organic fertilizers. When she discovered a deer tick on him -- and that the shrubs he was in often harbor ticks -- she threw a new English garden ringed with boxwood and filled with miniature weigela, coral bells and eight types of daylilies. One other element, bellflowers, was added in honor of her Aunt Violet, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, where they are native.

Clearly, Danovich is not a garden purist. Her love for Virginia’s Colonial Willamsburg and Charleston, South Carolina, shows through in small potted crepe myrtles, Confederate jasmine and wrought ironwork patterned after a window guard she saw at the South Carolina State Office Building.

Hidden deep in her beds -- far from Samson’s lifted leg -- are some tropical surprises, including bright red and orange crocosmia, spider lilies and pineapple lilies.

The front yard is also a garden party of delights. When the couple moved into the early 1900s Federal-style Colonial nearly seven years ago, it held a couple of large maple trees, overgrown viburnums, half-dead conifers and not much else.

Today, it features a weeping peach tree, three kinds of hydrangea, pink and white coneflowers, brunnera, sandcherry, coreopsis and golden privet.

Lupone, who shares his wife’s love for rehabbing and flipping houses, gets involved in the garden when she needs help with large shrubs or to offer advice on color, spacing and scale. He did insist that this was the year to replace the overgrown viburnum hedges by the front door with holly.

He also handles about one-third of the watering, not a small task in what was a crazy wet-then-dry, humid summer.

“Kind of like you live in New Orleans and don’t know it,” Danovich said.

This story was originally published October 14, 2015 at 10:07 PM with the headline "Small plantings on tiny lot make this gardener a winner ."