Homeowner Terry Price.
Starla Pointer/News-Register

Over 25 years, Terry Price has gradually designed, altered and worked on a lush, vibrant cottage-style garden that won the McMinnville Garden Club’s May Yard of the Month award.
Starla Pointer/News-Register

Wooden flowers with lively faces create permanent spots of color in the window boxes — with the added advantage of never needing to be watered.
Starla Pointer/News-Register

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It's a home that anyone walking by North Galloway Street has surely noticed.

Instead of sporting grass and an ornamental street tree or two, the curb strips burgeon with apple trees, roses, flowering shrubs, bulbs and even vegetables. Irisis line the sidewalk outside the picket fence; inside it, the yard is crowded with a luxuriant mix of shrubs and flowers.

Terry Price has spent 25 years designing and revising his small but stunning front yard, and the McMinnville Garden Club has presented him with its Yard of the Month award for May in recognition.

It's not the first time the Garden Club has noticed Price's work. It also awarded him Yard of the Month honors back in July 1998.

Price said he takes his ideas from gardening magazines.

"I like the cottage-type garden," he said. "It has more of an overflowing, unorganized type of feel. ... I kind of stick stuff wherever there's room."

The result is a charming, old-fashioned combination of blossoms, fruit and vegetables.

Price said he enjoys the works and the ability to provide some of his own food, along with months of flowers. "There's always something blooming, now through fall," he said.

Some of the blooms are particularly long lasting.

Wooden tulips flourish in the window boxes, on stems that bend in the wind, adding a colorful note of whimsy. Price said he started making them because: "I got tired of watering the window boxes, as they dry out really fast in the summer. And I wanted a bit of color."

The faces on the sprightly flowers, which look as if they could have originated in Oz, "reflect the day's work," Price said. Consequently some are smiling brightly, while others frown.

He said he extended the concept to the curb strips, "because I didn't want to mow the grass. All I have to do now is pull a few weeds."

Over the years, he's begun gradually shifting the focus of the plantings to perennials and self-seeding annuals that require less time to maintain, he said. "The foxgloves and the columbine and the hollyhocks, they re-seed themselves, so I hardly have to buy new plants."

Although a generous section of roses remains, he's removed dozens, because they became too maintenance-intensive.

"I'm kind of nearing retirement," he said. "I'm getting to the point where I don't want to spend as much time out here.

"It's still a year or two out, but I'm getting it to where if I go on vacation, I can come back and everything is still green."

* Favorite garden feature: "Probably my favorite part is when they start blooming, and I get the reward of all the hard work," he said.

* Time spent maintaining it: Price estimated a few hours a week, watering one section a day. Wife Sue, who made it emphatically clear she's not the gardener in the family, joked, "You know how I find him? I follow the hose."

* How he began gardening: Price was raised on farm in Hood River, and had gardening in his blood from the beginning.

* Why he enjoys it: "Probably for the reward you get out of it," he said. "And it's not that hard a work.

"A lot of people don't like it because they have to pull weeds. Gardening is for an impatient person. Sometimes you have to wait a whole year before you see results."