A City Pastoral

Tiny, trim and flower-filled, an English storybook garden grows

IT TOOK THE combined talents of an actor/painter/seamstress and a carpenter/theater-set designer to salvage a 1909 Ballard garden and bungalow from sad decay. When David and Sharva Maynard bought the place nine years ago, the neighbors referred to the red-pumice-rock yard as "the putt-putt golf course on the moon." Sharva, the actor, shudders when she remembers the home's "horrific" interior. It's hard to imagine that the windows of the now tidy, freshly painted house were buried beneath asphalt siding, and that the corners of the rooms were curved from so many built-up layers of wallpaper.

Even with the restoration and the windows uncovered, the little house offered only 800 square feet and one bedroom. So David, the carpenter, built Sharva a studio squeezed up against the back property line. It's so narrowly tall and charming you can imagine that Pippi Longstocking might step out onto the porch at any moment. And indeed Pippi's exuberance seems to infuse this hub of creative activity, where Sharva keeps her sewing machine, costume-making and painting supplies.

With its small footprint and high windows flung wide open, the studio is an appealing backdrop to the garden. Inside, it feels like a treehouse with its steep staircase and bird's-eye view overlooking the garden. A pillow-strewn daybed invites napping, and upstairs are all the thread, buttons and collected oddities Sharva uses to create costume pieces for Teatro Zinzanni. The view from the windows looks out over neighboring rooftops, Mount Rainier and lots of treetop bird action. But even these pleasures don't match the vista of the flower-packed English cottage garden right beneath the windows.

Nine years ago, the studio windows would have offered only a bleak vista of pumice and bark. Maybe it was a good thing that neither Sharva nor David had gardened before, or they might have been daunted by the layers of plastic beneath all the rock and the lack of living green. "We set in reading all about gardening," says Sharva. It helped that the pair were used to combining talents; they'd worked together for years building theater sets in Ashland, Ore.

The flowery cottage style of the Maynards' renovated garden was inspired by a lovely old novel by A.A. Milne. Both Sharva and David love "Westaways," a pastoral English novel where the garden is as integral to the story as Piglet and Tigger in the author's better known adventures of Winnie the Pooh. A three-week trip to England in 1990 clinched their admiration for British gardens, turning the couple into passionate Anglophiles. They'd longed to make their own "Westaways" garden, and now they had the chance, albeit on a much tinier scale.

Sharva was able to gracefully shoehorn in all the quintessential English-garden elements despite the small, urban lot. A scrap of green lawn, stone paths and a vine-draped arbor define the back garden between house and studio. A minuscule patio holds wicker chairs and table, and comfy cushions transform an old metal bedstead into an inviting bench. A tiny stone-lined stream flows and drips nearby, representing a river meandering through the countryside.

And everywhere are trees, shrubs, clematis and tumbles of old-fashioned flowers such as daisies, nasturtiums and fragrant phlox. A pale pink 'Cecile Brunner' rose that Sharva remembers from her grandmother's garden turns the arbor into a spring-blooming bower, the final touch of nostalgia in this most personal of gardens. Even though Sharva has recently experimented with euphorbias and ornamental grasses, pulling out a plant here and adding something new there, she says of her garden, "It'll always be our 'Westaways.' "

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.