From the street, Florence Welborn's North Slope garden looks like most other Northwest gardens: tall maples and conifers, some rhododendrons. But peer over the edge of the wall and you're in another place — Italy, to be precise. Because Welborn has recreated the formal parterres, statuary and gravel walks of the place she loves to visit again and again, and which bears her own name: Florence.

"I bought the next-door lot four years ago," says Welborn, who's lived in her north-end Tacoma house for 47 years. "So here was this 50-foot lot — it was a dump heap, a jungle of blackberry with a big drop-off."

Read more

Source: http://www.thenewstribune.com