GRAND PRIZE Jeffrey Hedgepeth relaxes amid the lush and pillowy foliage of his Capitol Hill garden, a place where he expends a fair amount of energy in what he calls "crowd-control" pruning.

"I want an attention-getting group of plants," Jeffrey Hedgepeth explains.

He definitely won the attention of judges for the Pacific Northwest Competition for Home Gardeners, who awarded him the contest's eighth-annual Grand Prize: a trip for two to London, including round-trip air fare, five nights' lodging and admission to the 2001 Chelsea Flower Show. The competition, which attracted more than 80 amateur gardeners, is sponsored by The Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest magazine and the Northwest Flower & Garden Show, and is administered by The Arboretum Foundation.

When judges passed through Hedgepeth's front gate last summer, they encountered a fragrant and colorful entry garden, with a large number of in-ground and container plantings that include lilies, canna, geraniums and aralia.

Behind the vintage house, a deck overlooks a densely planted area only 30 by 45 feet. The ground is sunken, as if a house and basement had been extracted like a tooth, and flanked by three-story neighboring houses. None of this registers at first. Instead, rich leaf textures, patches of intense color and a jungle tree-top atmosphere catch the eye. Exactly what's in there - well, at a glance, that's anybody's guess. Maybe a new species that can cure cancer.

Bold plants with big leaves are a defining element of this winning garden, where banana is right at home with canna, castor bean and others of their ilk, together suggesting an oasis.

A few paces down a path and the illusion is complete. Vines twine across or through arbors and shrubs. Hundreds of other plants - some semi-tropical, many of them tender or borderline-hardy perennials - emerge from the tumult of vegetation as distinctive specimens worthy of attention. There are gutsy color combinations and artful placements of container plants, as well as a couple of decks, surprise seating areas, objets d'art at opportune places and small pools joined by a waterway. A winding path leads to these and other discoveries, stitching together house and grounds in coherent fashion, though one does not so much walk in this garden as merge with it.

"We're so surrounded by other buildings that I wanted an oasis kind of feeling," Hedgepeth says. "A lot of it was putting in plants to create enclosure. Of course, since I have a problem in the size and configuration of the lot, a large part of this tight planting has now become crowd control."

Hedgepeth began transforming the former bramble patch into a cottage garden about eight years ago, shortly after he and his partner, John Medlin, moved into the fixer-upper house, a former rental. He saw landscaping possibilities where others could not, but his main focus at that time was remodeling the house. A few years later, he read a magazine feature about a British Columbia garden that was striking for its bold foliage and wild color combinations. The images stuck with him.

Meanwhile, a fellow gardener gave him a start of Petasites japonicus, a type of coltsfoot that grows such large leaves that children in its native Japan use them as umbrellas. Then Hedgepeth discovered good local sources for unusual plant material.

Out went roses, in came the cardoons.

Now, tropical and semi-tropical plantings fill the back of his steep lot like ferns in a cup. He uses passion-flower vines, coleus and many other so-called hot plants to enhance the effect he's after, with rhododendrons, ornamental grasses, wild ginger and other cold-tolerant species blended in. Hedgepeth has given his imagination free rein in this three-season garden.

His fondness for plants goes back to his childhood. He grew up in a fourth-floor tenement in Brooklyn but spent many memorable summers with his grandparents in rural North Carolina, where cotton, tobacco and cucumbers were right out the door.

Several years later, after earning a political-science degree from Princeton University, he moved to Key West, Fla., where he enjoyed the novelty of flowers for all four seasons that he was there.

Hedgepeth noticed guests usually clustered in small groups for conversation during his frequent garden parties, so he placed benches and chairs in several areas to encourage the groupings and provide a sense of intimacy.

Almost 25 years ago, he moved to Portland, where he took landscaping classes at Portland Community College in his spare time "to get used to the language of plants." He also worked in a nursery for a couple of months - for the discount, he says.

A number of visual effects in his garden are achieved by trickery, Hedgepeth adds, referring to container plantings. He has three bougainvillea in pots, for example, and can shuffle them around - say, near a golden catalpa, also grown in a container. Some tender perennials that are treated as annuals - those bougainvillea again, for example - are kept in pots until fall, then planted out, mulched heavily and are available the following year if winter has been mild.

The main part of the garden gets a pretty intense four hours of summer sunlight. On the rare occasions in summer when he goes off for a long weekend, Hedgepeth moves pots together so a timed sprinkler can water them all at once. He sees a day when he will want to install a drip system, but in the meantime he hand-waters, which helps him focus on grooming and notice plants with problems.

He also thought about people control when configuring his spaces. He likes to entertain, and discovered during a party with about 30 guests that gatherings of five or six were the common pattern. This encouraged him to carve out conversation areas along the winding path where small groups could sit and talk. He added niches for folk art and sculpture.

Some of his hardscape is the result of happy accidents. A rustic fence, for example, resulted from finding forgotten wood stacked under a deck dismantled for repair.

"I love recycling stuff," he says, and he obviously has an experimental bent. When he found some silk fabric that he liked, he sprayed on plastic coating and put it in a spot in the corner of the garden that needed brightening.

Then he bent rabbit wire into tube shapes and used spray glue to attach art paper over it, put plastic protective goop on it and inserted tiny outdoor lights. Last summer, nights in the Hedgepeth garden seeped with a soft glow from these colorful tubes, while crickets - bought at a pet store - chirped from hideaways in fallen leaves.

Hedgepeth also built a small pond, saw possibilities, then constructed a larger pond with rubber liner. He's joined two ponds together and used the excavated soil to raise a footbridge and boardwalk. He keeps the water pumping through, has installed oxygenating plants, added fish and frogs. He mixes a little dark coloring in the water to help disguise the system's tubing.

Bottles up-ended on branches bring surprising shapes and colors to an edge of Hedgepeth¹s garden and remind him of bottle trees he saw as a child, when he visited his grandmother in North Carolina.

Water aside, robust foliage plays a leading role here. That's why every year he has cut his empress tree to the ground to encourage the next year's enormous leaves. If left to grow, the tree has purple orchid-like flowers in May or June, but the tree itself would grow too large for Hedgepeth's small space (it can reach 40 feet). This growing season he may try to pinch it back to persuade it to stay at 10 feet and produce blooms.

He also vows to trim trees back from the property line, nudge along the aquatic horsetail plantings and get the sumac under control. He's experimenting with a couple of things to substitute for the less-than-hardy banana foliage.

"I just find plants so fascinating, even when they fail," Hedgepeth says. "Sometimes I'm cursing under my breath, but it's so exciting to figure what's going on, why's this happening. Part of me would like to do this all the time. Another part of me doesn't want me to make this a job."

Yet Hedgepeth, who recently left a university administration position in Seattle to become grants manager for The Pride Foundation, is known by a fair number of people in the gardening community only as a plantsman, largely because of his summer open-garden tours.

To hear Hedgepeth speak of his accomplishments, they are simple ones. A lingering, merging walk through his creation, where hard-to-grow flora thrive, suggests otherwise.