Vashon Island couple creates a string of English-garden jewels

IT'S NEVER too late to start a garden, as proven by Cindy and Steve Stockett, who lived on their Vashon Island property for two decades before seriously taking spade to soil.

But they've more than made up for lost time. Since retiring from teaching in 1995, Cindy's been busy transforming pasture into a series of English-estate-inspired garden features.

"I didn't want a hodgepodge of perennials. I really love the formal bits of English gardens, like at Sissinghurst and Great Dixter," she says. When a 2006 windstorm blew down 35 big trees, she finally had open, sunny areas to work with.

"I learned the hard way to spend my little bit of budget on soil and irrigation," she says. After dealing with the basics, she's set in to develop 2 ½ of the property's 16 acres, a spacious canvas for a style of gardening Cindy calls "Northwest formal."

How to insert formal design elements into such a pastoral setting? The Stocketts have strung a series of distinct gardens along the banks of a recirculating stream, like pearls along a necklace. The stream flows 150 feet through the garden, from a shady hillside down through sunny expanses of lawn. Cindy has defined the various gardens with hedging, arbors, and little slate and stone walls. Stone pathways lead through thickly planted borders. A walkway is lined with alternating clumps of hostas and Japanese forest grass, an idea that came to Cindy in the middle of the night.

A contrasting yellow and blue color palette defines one little garden, entered by ducking under a foliage-laden arbor. Hedged in yew, the sunny notes are hit by Coreopsis 'Moonbeam,' lilies and foxgloves. Cool-blue delphiniums, salvias, catmints and agapanthus shadow the warmer shades. "I go through color phases," says Cindy.

And because the garden is so big, Cindy uses larger, more structural plants. Leafy architectural statements like silvery cardoons, echiums, ornamental rhubarb and petasites fill the beds and borders with their pointed, jagged and dinner-plate-sized foliage.

Despite her obvious joy in playing with plant forms and textures, Cindy rarely strays from her preference for formality. She even trains and clips plants that are usually left to flop; pee gee hydrangeas are grown to standards, 'Sally Holmes' roses are massed as hedging along lawn margins. "I'm obsessive . . . I like things neat and tidy," says Cindy of all the clipped boxwood. Even photinia, that most unruly of shrubs, is clipped into smooth curtains.

The margins of the property are left more relaxed, a reminder that no matter how British-inspired the garden, we're still on laid-back Vashon Island. The long, gravel driveway winds through trees to the front gate, and a couple of llamas stand like sentinels in their nearby enclosure.

Every formal garden needs its pièce de résistance, and in the Stockett garden this is an imposing rose pergola where their daughter was married last summer. Cindy chose reblooming climbing roses to garnish the collonade-like structure with flowers and fragrance. Some of her favorites include girly-pink 'Gertrude Jekyll,' fruity-fragranced 'Royal Sunset' and the seriously ruffled 'Lady of the Mist,' which Cindy describes as "the best rose ever!"

When 80 wedding guests sat down to dinner in the garden, they could never have guessed that not long ago the intensely cultivated gardens burgeoning up around them were nothing more than llama pasture.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer. Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com. E-mail her at valeaston@comcast.net. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.