Iguanas scamper amidst Woodstock garden designers’ sedums and callas

By Merry MacKinnon

The Bee, Nov 23, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Merry MacKinnon / THE BEE

By standing atop it, Micha Sinclair and Grace Constantine demonstrate the durability of the fence and gate Micha built for their Woodstock home on S.E. 44th near Raymond. Their own front yard has become a calling card for the landscape design business they own, “Rejuvenation Artisans”.

Her clients may not realize it, but when they hire Woodstock resident Grace Constantine to do a garden, she first takes notes on their tastes. “I look at their car, what kind of jewelry they wear, what color their house is,” says Constantine, who, along with her husband Micha Sinclair, owns “Rejuvenation Artisans”.

Rejuvenation Artisans is a design business which creates and maintains outdoor landscapes and indoor gardens. Grace, the horticulturist and, Micha, the hardscape designer, completed a showcase landscape in their own yard on S.E. 44th and Raymond Street after they moved to Woodstock not long ago. What was once an unremarkable front yard now features a path of stones winding up through a maze of unusually textured and shaped plants, against the background of an imposing, yet graceful, wooden gate.

In fact, the couple’s garden seems as exotic as the two reptiles they keep as pets. Besides having worked at San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Grace paid for her college education in California by running a reptile store. When she moved to Portland, she brought some of her inventory--a couple of very tame iguanas--with her.

Thus, it isn’t surprising that one of her aspirations is to design gardens for zoos.

“Grace uses a much wider variety of plants than most--over four thousand kinds,” offers Micha. With so many plants to choose from, she is able to compose a landscape according to her clients’ tastes.

Grace was drawn to gardening through fine art. “Plants change constantly, which, as an artist, I find really exciting,” she says. After studying painting and sculpture, she enrolled in Oakland’s Merritt College, where she earned her horticulturist certificate in 2000, having taken classes such as “The art of the focal point tree” and “Pruning for the big picture.”

Meanwhile, Micha designs and installs the hardscape side of the business, which, in the case of their own Woodstock yard, includes the gate and the fence that encloses the back yard. “I don't do low-end fences,” he says; “I build fences that last.” This he demonstrates by climbing, and then standing atop, the gate that opens into the back yard.

When he builds a fence, rather than placing fence posts eight feet apart--standard procedure for some contractors--Micha says he places his posts 6.5 feet apart, and digs three-foot deep postholes. He places gravel at the bottom of the holes, and then pours 4000 psi (pound per square inch) concrete. “It makes a difference,” he says. “Posts are the backbone of a fence.”

Micha also aspires to be a professor of Renaissance Theater, and his love of Shakespeare’s “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” is manifest in the couple’s business adventure. Their focus, according to their Internet website, www.rejuve.biz, is to create gardens that are “portals to mythic lands.”

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