Bellingham woman creates ‘feminine and nurturing’ Eden

ZOE FRALEY

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For Lynn Torno, a paralegal at a Bellingham law firm, life tends to be a bit of a man’s world. But all of that testosterone fades away when she steps into the sloping green world of her garden.

“It’s a very masculine world,” she says of her job. “I have a husband and a son. I live in a house of men. The garden feels feminine and nurturing.”

And it should. It was Torno’s third attempt at growing her own garden, and she was going to learn from her past mistakes.

“The first garden I did, I gardened for the flowers,” she says. “I didn’t pay enough attention to form and texture and shape of plants. It was lots of flowers and lots of teeny leaves, but nothing stood out.”

And when the flowers died out, the whole garden looked dead. This time around, Torno wanted to get it right. She took gardening classes and got a summer job at a nursery. She learned how to take care of plants and how to build a balanced garden, with flowers, trees, shrubs and art.

“It’s peaceful,” she says of her sanctuary. “I spend a lot of time sitting and listening to the sound of birds or the frogs in the pond. It’s a perfect contrast to my work.”

The garden started as a blank slate when Torno and her husband, Dennis Murphy, moved into their Bellingham home seven years ago.

“When we moved in, it was all grass back here and all bark out front,” says Torno, 52. “There may have been five plants. It was really, really blank.”

The couple started with a few trees, then some sod and then added a pond and waterfall. They just kept going from there. This year for the first time, the garden was on the Whatcom Horticultural Society’s Annual Tour of Private Gardens in June. Torno also has entered it into the Whatcom in Bloom competition.

When they moved into their home, it was on a dead-end street, but as workers blasted to build a through road, her husband saw some serious landscaping potential. He asked the blasters if they could drop off some of the boulders they were moving at the couple’s home.

“We ended up with about $5,000 worth of native granite,” she says. “I don’t know if we would’ve found anything better suited for this place because it came from this place.”

While her husband uses the woodsy property north of their home as his playground, the garden is the place where Torno finds solace.

“I pretty much spend all my free time in the garden,” she says. “There’s something really satisfying about getting your hands dirty. It’s almost like a conductor for the orchestra in the spring.”

“I say ‘up,’ ” she says with a dramatic swoosh of her arms.

Though she tends to stay in on really rainy days, just about any other time Torno is out in her garden trimming a flower here, pruning a bush there or adding something special. As time progresses, the garden is constantly evolving and Torno finds herself learning more and more about the natural world around her.

“One of the things I like about gardening is that you’re never going to get to the end of it,” she says. “You’re just going to get deeper and deeper into what there is to know.”