Thriving Gardens at Lightwater Cove

Within the gardens throughout Lightwater Cove, we have embraced plants that provide beauty while contributing to a healthy environment and a more robust ecosystem. Even in the few years since we began planting at Lightwater, we have experienced a noticeable climate shift. Many plants that once prospered throughout our coastal seasons now struggle, and our Gardens Team observes and adjusts constantly to incorporate plants that can withstand these more extreme weather shifts. Plants are selected carefully to require minimal inputs and to thrive despite lean soils and summer droughts.

Our Head Garden Designer, Melissa Baron, relies on her combined training in Landscape Architecture, Permaculture Design, and Herbal Medicine to choose plants for beauty while fulfilling multiple functions. Many areas are considered more as food or herbal forests than as simple garden beds. Berry shrubs, apple trees, strawberry ground covers, and elderberry groves are interplanted among culinary herbs such as thyme, sage, rosemary, and lavender, and alongside ornamentals such as grasses, peonies, and heathers.

Hundreds of plants throughout the property are ideal for making herbal medicines, elixirs, and beauty products. Beyond lavender, yarrow, sage, echinacea, thyme, calendula, borage, and elderberry, we have also taken care to include lesser known herbs like Elecampane, Marshmallow, Greek Mountain tea, Maral root, Codenopsis, and many more. Plants such as non-invasive comfrey and yarrow also contribute to soil health and have been incorporated as green manure to re-circulate nutrients back into the soil.

The Gardens Team has put tremendous effort into introducing thousands of plants that provide blooms as early as February and through to December, including winter-flowering heathers, native Oregon grape, daffodils, and sarcacocca, all of which provide early pollination sources for the bees. These early blossoms also help to attract pollinators to the orchards to help pollinate the many fruit trees on the property. Gentle honeybees are active within the property’s flowering beds, ponds, and water streams throughout most of the year.

The gardens at Lightwater Cove create a magical oasis that is a plant lover’s dream to stroll through and explore. We are wholly committed to garden design with plants that give back so much to the humans, wildlife, and insects that are all a part of this precious ecosystem. Far beyond just pretty plants, here visitors will discover food, herbs, pollination sources, fragrance, compost, regeneration, and beauty.

Melissa Baron (MLA, B.Sc.Env.)
Head Landscape Designer