Contained Glory: Tina Dixon's designing genius has gone to pot, and that's a good thing

I first noticed Tina Dixon's containers at the Flower and Garden Show last February, when the other judges for Pacific Horticulture and I gave the magazine's award to the patio garden featuring her containers. The garden was a subdued symphony of blues in plantings, gate and stone. Dixon's three pots detailed the garden, both fluffing it up and emphasizing the color theme. Large urns in a washy tone of mid-blue, they were planted in a surprising cascade of blue foliages and flowers, including hydrangeas, delphinium, eucalyptus, salvia, rue and lotus vine. We were all standing around gawking at the color artistry when Dixon bounced up, looking like an excited kid with her bangs and long, straight hair, direct blue-eyed gaze and movie-star-white smile.

"This was challenging," she told us. "I usually base color schemes around yellow, and it is tough to find blue flowers in the winter." Even while talking about the problems of forcing delphinium to bloom in winter, Dixon exudes enthusiasm. It's clear she enjoys her job.

Dixon thinks it might be memories of her grandparents' perfect little oasis of a garden in View Ridge that sent her down the path of garden design. She started out watering interior plants after working all day in an insurance office. She'd hop on a bus, ride to the Red Robin corporate headquarters to care for their plants, then ride another bus home.

Two decades later, she still does interiorscaping, but has earned her reputation, and numerous awards, by designing container plantings. Dixon runs a crew of six that plants up pots for decks, docks and patios all over Seattle. She calls her business Plants a la Cart, just to make sure clients understand it isn't beds and borders she designs, but contained works of art.

How did Dixon move from watering houseplants to running a successful business? There were many twists and turns along the way, including a divorce, remarriage and going back to school. A one-year horticulture course at Lake Washington Vocational Technical College was a first step.

"I was just like a dry sponge, soaking it all up. I'd been in such a sterile, insurance-office environment," says Dixon. Her specialty came about when another container designer took time off to have children, and passed along some of her business to Dixon, including schematics on how to plant up pots. It didn't take Dixon long to develop her own style.

While in her own garden she sticks to yellow, orange, blue and burgundy, for clients she takes a good look inside their house and finds out their color preferences. She considers the style and color of the house as well as the budget. A 22-inch terra-cotta pot all planted up costs about $235; a great big urn full of canna lilies, abutilon, begonias, fuchsias and heliotrope will run closer to $800. She rarely uses glazed pots, preferring earth-toned containers, which read almost as the soil itself.

The main elements of a Dixon pot are texture and color repetition. She repeats the color of the upright elements in trailing plants. She makes sure there are some feathery textures, such as asparagus fern or lotus vine, then pairs these danglers with a bolder leaf like a sweet-potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) in chartreuse or maroon. Heliotrope and geraniums are staples. Jewel-tone pots feature verbena, heliotrope, chocolate cosmos, purple fountain grass and coleus. For autumn, she layers in tulips (lots of orange and purple 'Princess Irene'), topping off with heuchera, heather, hebes, pansies, hellebores and euphorbias. Structure is particularly important in autumn when the pots aren't so flowery, so Dixon centers each pot with an evergreen fern, camellia or nandina.

Dixon's gardening year begins May 1. She works every single day through the end of June. Then she maintains, waters and tweaks pots through the summer, and starts over again creating autumn pots from late September through Halloween. In the winter she plans, puts together orders, rests, runs her interiorscaping business, and reads all those gardening magazines that have piled up during the busy season. Recently her husband told her she works too much and needs to find a hobby, but all Dixon could think to suggest was gardening.

Valerie Easton is manager at the Miller Horticultural Library. Her book, "Plant Life: Growing a Garden in the Pacific Northwest" (Sasquatch Books, 2002) is an updated selection of her magazine columns. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com.