A garden full of flowers flows right on in to a sunny new room

THE WHITE trim on Joyce Laux's Magnolia home matches the birches that line her driveway. From shady courtyard to tricked-out garden shed, Laux brings an antique dealer's eye to decorating her house and garden. Such attention to detail makes her frilly little garden seem to march right up the steps and into the house.

Laux was in the antiques business for years, and it shows in the gracious sunroom that opens to the garden. The blue-green walls, multipaned windows and French doors make the room seem more outdoors than in. "My garden starts here," declares Laux of the flower-filled room, plumped with slipcovered couches sporting chicken-print pillows.

For now, the chickens are merely graphics; Laux no longer keeps a flock in the garden. "Those chickens controlled my life," she says. "They kept the slug and bug population down, but they got into everything." Her aviary may be empty, but the nearby pond is full of koi glinting in the light. Laux brought 10 of the fish from her old Seward Park garden, and created a pond for them by installing a liner in a lap pool, then planting the edges to make it part of the garden.

Near the pond is a riotous cutting garden filled with flowers Laux garnered through exchanges with other gardeners. Hydrangeas, phlox, campanula, delphinium, roses, lysimachia and agapanthus provide plenty of flowers for the house. Laux left apple trees along the garden's perimeter, and grows climbing roses and honeysuckle up them for a fragrant privacy screen. At the back of the property, she turned the old garage into the handy shed decked out with window boxes so it looks more guesthouse than storage unit.

While the back garden is all pots, flowers and fish, the front garden is a serene, shady courtyard screened in green. White metal furniture frames a formal fountain hedged in boxwood. The entry courtyard serves as outdoor dining room and leafy retreat on a warm day. In late winter when the sweet box (Sarcococca) and camellias bloom, Laux says the courtyard smells as if someone dropped a bottle of perfume on its brick paving.

"I'm surprised this garden is blooming, it's so crowded," says Laux. She was inspired to plant such a floriferous garden by one she admired in London's Kensington neighborhood, a frequent destination when she dealt in antiques. "I loved that look of every inch being planted," says Laux, an aesthetic she's successfully transplanted from London to Seattle.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer. Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com. John Lok is a Seattle Times staff photographer.