NORTHWEST LIVING
By Valerie Easton
Tropic Exotic
From a Monroe mud hole rises a lush land of unusual beauties
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 Barry Wong Angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia ‘Charles Grimaldii’) drips fragrant yellow bells for most of the summer. Despite its tropical looks, you can cut it back to a foot high and overwinter it in an unheated shed or garage.
Barry Wong The sumptuously lush foliage of elephant ears, Colocasia esculenta ‘Ruffles,’ belies the cold climate in Groendyke’s Monroe garden. Each wavy-edged leaf grows to 3 feet long.
Barry Wong Solanum marginatum is a showy foliage plant in the potato family. Its green and purple leaves are startling in both size and precision of the pale outline along the veins and edges.
Barry Wong The hardy giant sea holly Eryngium pandanifolium is one of the many unusual plants in Groendyke’s Monroe garden. Its spiny blue-green foliage and towering white flower spike are shown off against a backdrop of dark-foliaged dahlias.
Barry Wong Canna ‘Omega’ and the fragrant drooping bell flowers of Brugmansia ‘Charles Grimaldii’ bloom behind the raised koi pond.
Barry Wong By late summer, Groendyke’s garden appears ready to burst through the fence, and the parking strip is luxuriant with grasses and perennials. The cabbage-like leaves of Crambe orientalis grow in front of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light.’ |
"BELIEVE ME, you'll know which house is mine," Mollie Groendyke said when she sent me directions to her garden, a standout in her Monroe cul-de-sac. Shimmery waves of tall ornamental grasses overflow the corner parking strips trimmed with sedums and other perennials.
The yellow-flowering clematis 'Bill Mackenzie' twines through the pewter-toned foliage of Rosa glauca. Fragrant flowering tobacco reseeds among the miscanthus, pennisetums and carexes for an oasis of naturalism in a landscape of smooth lawns.
For Groendyke, it's all about the plants. "I never really thought about design. . . . I just made the soil so the plants would grow well in it," she explains. Clustered around the steps, on the deck and in every corner are pots filled with hundreds of assorted collector's plants. "I paid $40 for a slip of that," says Groendyke, pointing at one rare beauty or another. A greenhouse tucked against the house helps in overwintering all her special finds.
It's not only plants that grow huge and healthy in Groendyke's garden. Fifteen titanic koi luxuriate in the heated waters of her slate-rimmed raised pond, which is 7 feet deep with straight sides to discourage heron and raccoons from feasting on the plump fish.
Although her home is now encircled by a rich mix of bloom, ponds and unusual foliage plants, Groendyke bought the new house in 1994 planning to customize it for her hobby of raising exotic birds. "I wasn't even thinking about gardening," she says, "but I got on an Internet gardening forum and started meeting everyone."
These plants anchor Mollie Groendyke's exuberant border of plants selected for their hot colors and exotic looks:
• Rice paper plant (Tetrapanax papyriferus). This must have the grandest foliage of any hardy perennial, with soft-green serrated leaves that spread wide like a giant's hand.
• Dahlias. Groendyke especially likes those with near-black foliage. Favorites are 'Moonfire,' with an orange-centered yellow flower, and the bright-orange single 'Forncett Furnace.'
• South African honeybush (Melianthus major). It has huge blue-green serrated leaves that smell like peanut butter.
• Castor bean (Ricinus communis). A highly poisonous annual, it grows large in a single summer with burgundy leaves and spiny purple fruit.
• Crocosmia 'Star of the East.' It has sword-like foliage and large orange flowers brushed with burgundy.
• Canna lilies. Preferred are those with huge, paddle-shaped leaves such as C. 'Grande' and showy dark foliage like the striped C. 'Tropicana.'
If she had done more than a bit of vegetable gardening in the past, she might have noticed that the property had been stripped of good soil. "The whole place was just a rocky mud hole," she says. Groendyke, a flight attendant who is jetting around the world when she isn't gardening, spent three years hauling one wheelbarrow load after another of compost and manure — adding so many soil amendments that she raised the ground level 2 to 3 feet. No wonder her Canna grande towers as verdant as a banana tree, and the gingers, tetrapanax and dahlias in her hot border are so large you think they must have been injected with steroids.
"In winter, this place looks like a steel yard," says Groendyke of all the rebar she brings in to lend support to the over-sized plantings she favors. Despite her foggy, windy location in chilly Monroe, which is two zones colder than some areas of Seattle, Groendyke succeeds in growing tropicals that many gardeners in warmer areas only dream of bringing into bloom. And grow they do. An arched arbor laced with clematis leads to fruit trees and rows of raspberries. Garbage cans in a sunny corner hold vegetables and yet more dahlias.
Just in case these extravagantly healthy plants need any more nutrition, Groendyke is perfecting her system of making compost tea. She's also excavating the heavy clay soil every day she's not traveling, creating a series of ponds, bogs and waterfalls. And she's already busy redoing a ground-level koi pond she built early on. She plans to incorporate glaucous Mediterranean plants into the scheme, and recently moved raised vegetable beds to expand the hot border. "It's fun to change things," says Groendyke, a woman truly and pleasantly possessed by plants.
Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.
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