GARDENER'S NOTEBOOK
Peggy Turner Zablotny - Showstopper Gardener
By Jani Gardner
Drivers are known to drive around the bloc and gape at the profusive, magical yard and garden of Peggy and Steve Zablotny. Their colorful shock and awe hillside landscape suddenly appears before you, as you cross over State Road and head up Look Street. Traffic constantly slows, trying to take it all in.
That same profusion of color, scale and wow which permeates all of her botanical collage fine art prints creates a giant living collage of garden vegetables and flowers.
Perpetually intrigued with texture and color, Peggy is fascinated with integrating flowers with vegetables, adding texture and pattern. “It’s like growing a design,” says Peggy.
She’ll partner up seafoamy green Swiss chard with electric shades of yellow, orange and red. Or she’ll mix kale with nasturtiums for a riot of color and textures. Peggy mixes in a serious green called tyfon – a cross between Chinese cabbage and turnip, a plant which takes 43 days to your table. Husband Steve tells that it tastes to him a bit like bok choy.
“Vegetables become a background,” explains Peggy. The same goes for her beans climbing up metal bean towers. And her pale Italian zucchini –zuchetta – is a pole grower, not a bush. In the foreground, you’ll see rudbeckia, with slender petals, mostly yellow, although some are streaked with maroons.
Like a mother with a passel of children, Peggy wants each of her offspring to be seen and noted. She’s nurtured them through seasons, to this summer spectacle, where she mingles unexpected color palettes of cosmos, sunflowers and even more vegetables with proliferating flowers in a poetic hillside dance. She saves seeds from cosmos, and gets sunflower seeds from catalogues. She first planted their now multitudinous raspberries in 1982, grown next to an existing grapevine.
Peggy planted eggplants and tomatoes in self-watering pots. Morning glories and cucumbers on the side porch grow in similar fashion. Peggy tells that their biggest garden surprise is still simply seeing the planted seeds germinate. “Evidently, I dig to the right depth with them – they come up, and we are extremely pleased,” she says. “I simply let chance happen.”
The skunk population does help with digging holes, and sadly all of the lilies are gone, thanks to those little red bugs. The crows and squirrels ate a good portion of the pears.
Gardening is in Peggy’s genes, including a grandpa who was a legitimate farmer. Her parents always gardened flowers, roses, and vegetables. Peggy and Steve met at the Philadelphia College of Art, and they established their own firm, Z Studio, in 1976, specializing in exhibit design, graphic design and much more
The couple first came here in 1972, after Peggy read of the Vineyard in National Geographic while she was still in high school. “I need to go there,” she told her parens. Steve received the same request. Obviously they did, and their talents in art and horticulture grew and grew. Now their work is savored on the Island, and around the entire country.
That same profusion of color, scale and wow which permeates all of her botanical collage fine art prints creates a giant living collage of garden vegetables and flowers.
Perpetually intrigued with texture and color, Peggy is fascinated with integrating flowers with vegetables, adding texture and pattern. “It’s like growing a design,” says Peggy.
She’ll partner up seafoamy green Swiss chard with electric shades of yellow, orange and red. Or she’ll mix kale with nasturtiums for a riot of color and textures. Peggy mixes in a serious green called tyfon – a cross between Chinese cabbage and turnip, a plant which takes 43 days to your table. Husband Steve tells that it tastes to him a bit like bok choy.
“Vegetables become a background,” explains Peggy. The same goes for her beans climbing up metal bean towers. And her pale Italian zucchini –zuchetta – is a pole grower, not a bush. In the foreground, you’ll see rudbeckia, with slender petals, mostly yellow, although some are streaked with maroons.
Like a mother with a passel of children, Peggy wants each of her offspring to be seen and noted. She’s nurtured them through seasons, to this summer spectacle, where she mingles unexpected color palettes of cosmos, sunflowers and even more vegetables with proliferating flowers in a poetic hillside dance. She saves seeds from cosmos, and gets sunflower seeds from catalogues. She first planted their now multitudinous raspberries in 1982, grown next to an existing grapevine.
Peggy planted eggplants and tomatoes in self-watering pots. Morning glories and cucumbers on the side porch grow in similar fashion. Peggy tells that their biggest garden surprise is still simply seeing the planted seeds germinate. “Evidently, I dig to the right depth with them – they come up, and we are extremely pleased,” she says. “I simply let chance happen.”
The skunk population does help with digging holes, and sadly all of the lilies are gone, thanks to those little red bugs. The crows and squirrels ate a good portion of the pears.
Gardening is in Peggy’s genes, including a grandpa who was a legitimate farmer. Her parents always gardened flowers, roses, and vegetables. Peggy and Steve met at the Philadelphia College of Art, and they established their own firm, Z Studio, in 1976, specializing in exhibit design, graphic design and much more
The couple first came here in 1972, after Peggy read of the Vineyard in National Geographic while she was still in high school. “I need to go there,” she told her parens. Steve received the same request. Obviously they did, and their talents in art and horticulture grew and grew. Now their work is savored on the Island, and around the entire country.