<< Previous   of   Next >> Michael O'Leary / The Herald  (click to enlarge) This is the ninth year that Betty Dorotik has opened her Camano Island studio and garden for the studio tour. (click to enlarge) Garden art abounds at Betty Dorotik's Camano Island home and studio.

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Studio tour 10th annual Camano Island Studio Tour: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, Camano Island and historic Stanwood. This self-guided tour features 32 studios and galleries with more than 65 artists for visitors to talk with and to see works in progress. Tour highlights this year include five new artists, a new gallery and two husband-wife teams. Call 425-231-7236 for a brochure or go to www.camanoarts.org. Brochures are also available the day of the tour at Haggen, 26603 72nd Ave. NW, Stanwood. Visiting all the studios is free. To gain admission to Betty Dorotik's private garden, visitors must make a $3 minimum purchase of her work.

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Melanie Munk, Features Editor munk@heraldnet.com

Studio tour: Camano Island artist's garden offers inspiration

By Debra Smith
Herald Writer

The Camano Island Studio Tour is all about art and the local people who create it.

For a weekend the public can peek at artists' work spaces and watch them create.

At Betty Dorotik's home, visitors can also see what happens when a talented creative type turns her attention to the garden.

Her studio is part of the 10th Annual Camano Island Studio Tour set for this weekend. The tour features 32 studios and more than 65 artists who work in a variety of media including photography, jewelry, sculpture, blown glass and oil painting. Artist John Ebner also opens his garden to visitors.

Dorotik's garden is a jaw-dropper, a tapestry of vine-laden arbors, pots spilling succulents and swaths of her favorite plants. Something about this garden's thousand shades of green and secret spaces relaxes the body like a tonic. All of it is set around a picturesque home that hugs the edge of the island.

Dorotik, 64, built this garden from a blackberry-choked lot and iffy soil. She and her husband, Johnnie, retired here in 1992. She had spent most of her adult life raising three children and taking care of the family's home. Along the way she developed an interest in antiques and interior design. And she began taking art lessons.

Retirement has allowed her to more seriously pursue art. She works with watercolors, sometimes combined with line drawings, to create botanical illustrations. Her fossil series features collections of found items she loves such as acorns, ferns, leaves and coral. Calligraphy is a passion, and she's working on a book that features luscious letters paired with plants and birds.

It's her garden, though, that seems to garner the most attention. It has been featured in garden books and magazine spreads. And by happenstance it has become a fan favorite on the studio tour, something Dorotik has mixed feelings about.

When Dorotik participated in her first studio tour, she started the day with her garden gate closed.

It was, after all, a tour of artists' studios and people were supposed to be looking at her art. One woman asked to go into Dorotik's garden and she couldn't refuse. Visitor after visitor pushed through the gate.

The next year, those people brought back aunts, sisters and whoever to see the garden. She estimates that 2,000 people tromped through. Her garden stole the show. Now, repeat visitors to the tour drive and drive and drive nearly to the hinterlands of the island just to visit. One woman told Dorotik it wouldn't be Mother's Day without a stroll through her garden.

All that attention took its toll. Someone broke a pot. Plants were trampled. And many visitors bypassed her garage studio and her art entirely.

"I'm thinking this isn't even fair," she said. "I work so hard with my art, and they don't even look at it."

She loves sharing her garden, but it can't handle the traffic, so be forewarned: Her garden is open only for people willing to buy her art, even if it's a $3 art card.

Her originals sell for $200 to $600, prints are $18 to $32, and she also created a series of art cards.

That dictum is mostly about limiting foot traffic, but she also wants people to make the connection between her garden and her art. The two twine together like clematis on an arbor.

"My garden produces my art," she said.

The gardening certainly came first for Dorotik, who grew up in Texas eating sun-warmed tomatoes straight from her mother's garden. At a young age she had her own seeds and garden space to plant.

Wherever her husband's career took her, she gardened. When they began building their retirement home here -- a two-year process -- she planted along the edges around the work of the heavy machinery. Not gardening for that long would have made her physically sick, she said.

Today, the couple can push open the sunroom windows and the scents of her rose garden waft in. This is a four-season garden with winding paths and whimsical touches. She pruned a boxwood honeysuckle into a gigantic green basket. She hid pink flamingos in the woods. Empty window frames and a chair sit in one garden room.

Her garden has no particular plan, she said.

"I only put things in my garden that I love," Dorotik said. "Not to fill space or look pretty at a certain time of year. If I don't love a plant or it doesn't perform, it doesn't come in my garden. It has to excite me and give me pleasure or I won't have it."



Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com. Visit her blog at www.heraldnet.com.

Betty's favorite plants

1. Epimedium x youngianium Roseum (pink)

2. Hamamelis X intermedia Diane (witch hazel)

3. Echiveria

4. Rose Belle Story

5. Euphorbia amyadaloides (wood spurge)

6. Echium vulgare (Viper's Bugloss)

7. Clematis x durandii

8. Corydalis flexiosa China Blue

9. Lilium Oriental Scheherazade

10. Lysimachia cilata Purpurea