Maintaining Grace

A landscaper cuts back, and finds a new kind of fulfillment

IT TOOK THE prospect of sailing around the world to convince professional landscaper Robyn Atkinson to streamline her Lake Forest Park garden. For years she'd been cramming vines, fragrant perennials, viburnum, roses and favorite evergreen magnolias into her overflowing half acre. Plants spilled over the walls, climbed the fences, coated the arbors and billowed out to the street, lining the walking trail that runs past the house.

But faced with the prospect of leaving home for five years, Atkinson realized she had to simplify and, literally, cut back.

For so many years, Atkinson freely indulged her plant lust. Frequent nursery visits are an occupational hazard for landscapers. And Atkinson was adept at playing the "three for you and one for me" game, which made her job great fun but left her garden staggering under the flora.

How to transform this high-maintenance, plant-rich garden into a durable, low-maintenance landscape that renters could care for while she and husband Eric Lichty were off navigating the seas? "It took several years to do it right," Atkinson sighs. "It's pretty tough to accomplish in a season or two, and I've got a crew!"

It took many hours of hard labor, her own and her landscaping crew's, to remove past-their-prime trees and shrubs. A huge holly came out, plus several ornamental cherries suffering from blight. Years ago, Atkinson planted buddleias to lend her new garden near-instant height. Now she chucked them all, except for the one sheltering a bird's nest.

One of Atkinson's main goals was to replace maintenance-heavy perennials with small, easy-care shrubs. "The new ratio is five shrubs to each perennial, just to keep me in line," she says. Gone are perennials like eupatorium and alstroemeria that tend to take over. Well-behaved, shade-tolerant perennials, such as ferns and Acanthus mollis, were left to mingle with hydrangeas beneath the magnolias, palms and banana trees that have grown up to shade the front courtyard. A new drip watering system will help ensure the plants are still alive when she returns from her voyage.

The sunny street-side garden is drought-tolerant, planted with native serviceberries (Amelanchier alnifolia), tough small trees with white flowers in spring and a blaze of fall color. Underplanted with euphorbia and fluffy little ornamental grasses, studded with a show of self-seeding poppies in May, these are plants that will persist through the seasons despite neglect.

Within the garden walls, the fussy hybrid tea roses are gone. White- and yellow-splashed foliage of variegated vinca and small-leaf ivy lightens the shady borders. Nandina, yew, rhododendron, osmanthus, mahonia, euonymus, fatsia and clumping bamboo create year-round evergreen structure. To aid passage through all the foliage and cut down on weeding, Atkinson added new and wider pathways made of mortared-together chunks of salvaged concrete. The random, casual look of this low-cost material suits the cottage feel of the garden.

Atkinson harbors no regrets over eliminating lawn, but winces when acknowledging the garden's greatly narrowed-down plant palette.

She rallies, though, when talk turns to her new hot-colored "Mexican border." "Shrubs don't mean it needs to look like you plan to die soon," she exclaims, pointing out a new bright golden ninebark, various hebes, and even a few dahlias, planted deeply to help them stay alive. "I don't want to be afraid to come back in five years," Atkinson says, "but I want to come home to a garden."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.