Succulents and More™

On my Portland trip in early April , I had the pleasure of staying at the house of my friend Loree Bohl, the creator of the popular blog danger garden and author of the book Fearless Gardening , and her husband Andrew. This gave me plenty of opportunity to photograph Loree’s garden at different times of day. As is so often the case, I took far more photos than I can possibly show you. I’ve tried hard to edit myself, but there’s so much to see — as you know very well if you follow Loree’s blog . This post is about the front garden. I’ll cover the back garden in a separate post, maybe even multiple posts. Front garden as seen from the sidewalk, April 2026 On her blog, Loree has written extensively about her garden. This post from August 2025 has photos of what the property looked like when they bought the house in 2005. Take a look at this : The front garden was pretty much all lawn, with some foundation shrubs up against the house. Compare that to the photo above. The difference coul...

One of the destinations on my early April trip to Portland, Oregon was the garden of mosaic artist and garden designer Jeffrey Bale . What little I knew about him I had gleaned from Loree’s post on her blog, danger garden . As I was working on this post, I did additional research and found that Jeffrey is not just some guy making mosaics, he’s world-renowned. You can see examples of his work on his own blog . Here’s some background on Jeffrey. When you look at my photos of his garden below, keep this context in mind and you’ll understand better what his garden is about. Jeffrey earned a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon in 1981. After briefly working at a traditional architectural firm (he lasted all of twenty minutes, apparently ), he left to travel around the world, studying the historical outdoor architecture of Europe, Southeast Asia, and Morocco. He was particularly influenced by the stone plazas of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and the traditional Moo...