Full Garden Tour — Late April 2026 | Portland Zone 8b

This is the full April 24 tour—front to back, all the way around. Three weeks since the last walk-through, and the garden is going full steam ahead. The parking strips are filling in, the clematis are waking up, the new back courtyard seating area is already in use, and there's a color story building in the front entry that I'm happy with.

I don't stop to name everything—there are hundreds of plants and this is a tour, not a lecture. But I do get into the color echo strategy I use to keep a dense, plant-packed garden from reading as chaos. It's one of the things I come back to again and again in design, and late April is a good time to see it in action.

The back path foliage tapestry gets some attention too: Jeffersonia, ghost fern, Selaginella, black mondo grass, Athyrium otophorum—all the little detail plants I keep collecting and tucking in. That's where a lot of the quiet satisfaction in this garden lives.

The garden is my living laboratory—a 50×100-foot NE Portland lot that's been intensively planted for 25 years, with narrow side gardens, wide parking strips, and plenty of places to actually sit and enjoy it. A lot of what you see here finds its way onto eGardenGo. Browse the plant combinations at egardengo.com/explore-plant-combinations.

If a plant catches your eye, leave a comment on YouTube with a time stamp.