Safari in their own backyard

By Scherrie Goettsch • Before and After photos provided by Heather Schafer

Inside a home arranged with lush, multicolored paintings of flowers and landscapes—predominantly by South African artists—it’s no wonder that the home’s owners, Dr. James Fairlamb and Marieta Fairlamb, intentionally set out to surround their outside space to complement their home’s inside space. “Coming from Zimbabwe, my husband is the garden god,” Marieta said. His mom was an art teacher, so he grew up surrounded by art, and he practically lived outdoors. There, the average temperature is consistently between 18 and 25 Celsius—a mecca for the outdoor lover.

As a cardiologist with the Missouri Heart Center, James grew up in Harare, formerly Salisbury, Rhodesia, while Marieta grew up on a farm near Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, where temperatures are decidedly cooler. As a nurse and physical therapist, Marieta met James while working in a hospital in Canada. Once married, they quickly realized they would have to settle somewhere between the two continents if they were going to find a climate that suited them both.

Adjusting to the Midwest began with a move from Canada to Missouri. After six years in St. Louis, the Fairlambs were lured to Columbia in 2005. While looking for a home to raise their children (Paige, 5, Carter, 3, and Reid, 22 months now), the couple discovered their Columbia home built in 1993 and nestled into a steep hillside on almost an acre.

Although many potential buyers were put off by the watershed problems in the backyard of this property, James saw its potential. “My husband had this vision of a walkabout sort of thing through the forest,” Marieta said. James used his background to imagine the possibilities. “I grew up in the tropics where we spent a lot of time outside,” he said. “I wanted to create a garden where the children could play and experience nature. We have a possum, groundhog, many deer, birds and squirrels in our garden, a place where they could create forests and castles and anything else their imaginations could dream up.”

Given the initial impression of the yard, Marieta recalled: “One of the problems was that this yard had a real drainage problem; a part of the yard was always sopping wet; all the runoff from everywhere comes down into this yard and goes down there, past the shade garden. The neighbors had already put in a dry creek bed, so we wanted to continue it.”

Project Manager Tim Moloney said, “What they had at the beginning was basically a big scar in the backyard.” In fact, the couple nearly didn’t buy the house because of the giant slice of concrete in the backyard that had to be addressed immediately in the spring of 2006. Describing the “scar,” Project Designer Heather Schafer said, “They had a concrete channel from a culvert exposed right through the middle of the backyard.”  It was such a rudimentary way out that didn’t really work at stopping the water after a heavy rain. By incorporating a dry creek bed into the landscape, the area was made attractive, functional and more natural looking.

In addition to building a dry creek, the Rost contractors moved back the existing play structure, added a sandbox for the children and planted shrubs, flowers and plants to help stabilize the soil erosion. Once underbrush was cleared away, the Fairlambs discovered their yard had basically doubled in size. Two large oak trees on the upper half of the back slope, once hidden by the thick bush, provide a surprise shade canopy and a sturdy limb for a 
tire swing.

Last summer, on the recommendation of a neighbor, the Fairlambs decided to continue what the Rost crew began with a second phase using Lael Landscaping services. Although their yard was the last one Jonah Roberts worked on in Columbia before he moved to North Carolina, Roberts added a couple more trenches to handle additional rainwater, inserted many more boulders and made major changes to the front and side yards as well.

“We wanted it to look natural, and we didn’t want something that was contrived,” Marieta said. “This creek bed is now 3 years old, and it’s just starting to mature enough that it is starting to look like it has been here awhile. We tried to do mostly perennials. We don’t want to have to do a lot of maintenance.” Last year, Roberts put in great big banks of the ground cover tiarella or foamflowers. In the shade garden, more than a hundred ferns were planted along with hydrangeas and creeping jenny between the rocks. “Hopefully it will get a little wild. What we really wanted was an adventure park for our kids, a place where they can live outside, be creative and use their imaginations. They have all kinds of adventures out here. They play pirate games, Dora and Diego, they make fairy gardens and collect all the little bottoms of the acorns and put them out for paint pots, so that when the fairies come in the spring they can paint our garden with color.”

Indeed, the Fairlamb family anticipates their own spring symphony—a profuse display of color and fragrance—soon to pop up around the rocks, bridges and pathways. “The typography of this property is really quite cool,” Marieta underscored. “It allowed us to do some really great things. It was all my husband’s vision. He was seeing it, and I wasn’t really getting it until they constructed this. Our kids are really the perfect age for this garden. They dig, and they plant seeds. I love nothing more than seeing the three of them toddle behind each other, going over the bridge.”

In anticipation of spring, Marieta said: “I’m really excited and nervous. When you spend a lot of money and time and emotion investing yourself in this kind 
of project, you really hope that it all comes up.”

As the designated garden god, James emphasized: “The great thing about a garden is that there are two aspects to it—the planned part and the chance aspect. The ever-changing nature of a garden makes for unending input and interaction but also makes it unendingly interesting. My main goal in creating this garden was to try to blur the boundaries between forest, garden and house so that people feel invited into the garden through a series of invisible borders.”

Before/After Landscaping
2006 Landscape contractor: Tim Rost, owner, overseer Rost, Inc.
Design manager: Tim Moloney
Landscape designer: 
Heather Schafer
Lael Landscaping: 
Jonah Roberts, LLC
2008 plantings: 
Piotter E C & Sons Nursery
Rock to form initial dry creek bed:  20 tons of weathered limestone boulders and ledge rock, 15-20 tons of river rock
Plant Material provided by Rost, Inc.:
Perennials: Liriope groundcover, Iris, Salvia
Shrubs: Knockout Shrub Rose (Bright pink flowers all through summer season)
Little Henry Dwarf Itea (White flower spikes in early summer)
Caryopteris (Blue flowers all through summer season)
Winterberry Holly (Bright red berries in fall/winter)
Grasses: Little Bluestem (gray-green leaves add color and texture)
Evergreen shrubs: Mops Cypress (small evergreen shrub with yellow-green color)