By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer
Photos © Darcy Daniels, Bloomtown Garden Design
Sometimes a tatty garden space looks almost too dismal to tackle. That’s where a good garden designer like Darcy Daniels comes in: she has the vision to see what’s possible and the experience to make it happen. In one corner of Grant and Suzanne Malin’s Portland garden, Daniels chose a fairly simple solution that used bamboo to quickly screen out a neighbor’s house, a curving gravel path to draw visitors into the garden and keep them out of the mud, and perennials and sedges to fill in around the edges with texture and color.
To keep the bamboo in bounds (it’s a spreading species), Daniels has it surrounded by a plastic root barrier that extends well underground and a couple of inches above ground.
She doesn’t conceal the top of the barrier with mulch because surface roots would eventually crawl through the mulch and over the barrier; instead, she screens the barrier with low perennials such as bergenia.
