Clare Dohna’s artwork can’t be contained in a frame, on a page or even on a pedestal. Instead, it slithers through a mossy glade behind her house and curls up on a hilltop. It creeps slowly, on the back of a turtle. It leads visitors step by step through her chartreuse and blue-violet perennial gardens to the forest that rings her yard.

A 50-foot-long cement snake in yellow-green skin, pebbled with blue beach rock and inlaid with diamond-shaped blue and purple mosaics, is the defining feature of Clare’s backyard. It forms a footpath that curves between raised rock garden beds.

In the front yard, a sunken rock circle with a mosaic floor sits in the center of a hilltop garden. Smaller pieces—mosaic stepping stones and tilework animal figures—are scattered throughout the garden.

The plants and the artwork in Clare’s garden complement each other so perfectly that they seem to have evolved together. And so they did, says Clare, who counts her years as a gardener from the time she and her family moved to this home on Vashon Island, Washington, 14 years ago.

“We had a small garden in Seattle, but we really started to get into it when we moved to the island,” she says.

She had worked as an artist for years by then, and she had a vision of what she wanted to create in her forest garden. View the entire story, including more photos, in a PDF.