The Nature of Design:
Working with a professional landscaper can yield impressive results.

When Bill Gay bought a 700-pound, 6-foot-tall, bronze water spouting dragon in New York City, he wasn't exactly sure what he was going to do with it. Luckily, inspiration came from the company that maintains his lawn — Christie's Fine Gardening & Creative Landscapes — which designed a castle-themed garden around the unusual piece at this Fan home. Finding the right landscaper into design your yard is like finding the right interior designer to decorate your home

Doing the Work

Bill and Carol Gay chose Christie's... after visiting the company's website and realizing that it did a lot more than just cut lawns. "People come to us for the 'wow' factor," says owner Christie Barry, whose team strives to "bring art into the garden" from design to construction to planting and maintenance. Her associates are members of the Virginia Society of Landscape Designers (VSLD), and they also have art backgrounds, having taken undergraduate courses in applied arts and art history. Barry herself has an art minor in ceramics from the University of Richmond.

The team created a garden that incorporated the dragon for the Gays' home. To make the dragon appear as if it belonged, they used dramatic colors and textures for the plants and built a wall that resembles a medieval castle, using natural stone and a jagged edge. The dragon shoots water into the pond, aiming toward two oncoming trumpeting elephants — bonuses the seller threw in when Gay purchased the dragons.

The time it takes to design, construct and plant a landscape varies greatly in terms of complexity. The Gays' dragon garden took about a month to design and install.

Designing a Dragon-Centric Garden:
Christie Barry describes how she uses serendipity and sense to design a landscape.

Q: How did you work with a 6-foot-tall bronze dragon?

A: We knew it needed a backdrop, but because it is so flashy, you have to complement it and not upscale it. We knew we needed a retaining wall, so the area behind the dragon served as the backdrop with the wall designed to look like the back of a castle.

Q: What did you have to do to prepare the site?

A: We removed the existing stone wall. We dug down one-and-a-half feet then put down gravel, crushed gravel and stone dust for a stable base. We put in electrical for the pump and then laid the terrace on top.

Q: What materials did you use for the hardscapes?

A: We used a brownish tan pavers tile for the terrace. For the wall, we laid concrete block, then mortared South Bay thin stone to it. For the reflecting pool, we put sand on the bottom, then built a 2x4 frame for the pond liner. We took the tiles and cut them in half and laid them around the top of the liner. We made pedestal for the dragon out of the same stone as the wall. The tricky part was measuring how far it spits, so it spits right into the center of the pond.

Q: How did you choose the plants?

A: The dragon is pretty big and menacing, so behind it we used more texture and dramatic color with autumn ferns; hypericum that blooms yellow in the summer and has a textured burgundy leaf; mahonia that is an evergreen with dramatic blue berries with a dramatic yellow bloom; and a craggily leaf like its spine. The bed in front of the dragon is mundo grass. On either side of the dragon in pots are red geraniums and white canna lilies.

— Deborah Allen, Richmond Home and Garden Magazine