The multipaned white house with wrap-around veranda was barged to Bainbridge Island in 1917, and used by Anne Hauberg's parents as a honeymoon cottage. Now it serves as her summer house and a setting for warm-weather parties, as well as "a bowl full of flowers" for fragrance and cutting.

Hauberg's father was architect Carl Gould, who designed the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and he kept the house as a summer retreat for the family. Originally it was painted black and yellow to create an Asian look, but sometime during Hauberg's childhood the house was painted the white it has remained ever since. Inside, the rooms and even the floors are bathed in tones of pale blue and red, and there's a fireplace in every room. Hauberg restored the place in the late '80s, and more recently remodeled the garage with help from architect Roland Terry, an old friend who designed her house in town. Terry also advised on the garden, suggesting more perennials and conifers.

'Perle D'Azur' is the bluest of the clematis, shown off by the leaves of a shrubby dogwood.		Designers Glenn Withey and Charles Price have added unusual plants, creating a rich tapestry of color, foliage and fragrance. Here lilies consort with nicotiana and the dried heads of allium.
A billow of the fragrant white rose 'Darlow's Enigma' nearly obscures a lattice fence at the courtyard entrance.		Withey and Price have orchestrated a vivid blue-and-yellow color scheme in the warm, sunny courtyard. A yellow strawflower lightens the intense blue flowers of Salvia patens.

For the past several years, designers Glenn Withey and Charles Price have been refining it, installing new borders and irrigation and creating dramatic color symphonies with unusual plantings. Because Hauberg spends July, August and September on the island, she called for a garden that reaches its peak then, looking its best for summer parties. "I want the garden to be a bowl full of flowers," she says — plenty for picking and for filling the air with fragrance.

Withey and Price have made a garden rich in the yellows and blues that Hauberg prefers. They've planted shimmering summer bloomers like daisies and white hydrangeas to emphasize the gracious white house with its wrap-around porches, French doors and rows of multipaned windows. White lattice fences and gates are used throughout the garden to repeat the window pattern, extending the rhythm and color of the house out into the garden.

"Pink is everywhere in gardens," says Hauberg, "and pink is so feminine. I wanted different colors to give the garden more distinction." Earlier designers put in too many plants that bloomed only in June, and made the mistake of using too much pink.

"I realized that no matter what you ask for, most people come back to the same few plants," says Hauberg of her decision to choose well-known plantsmen Withey and Price to design her garden. "Glenn and Charles have built up an amazing vocabulary of plants," she says. Two of her favorites, now blooming in the courtyard garden outside the kitchen door, are Magnolia wilsonii, which she admires for its huge, glossy leaves, ethereal white flowers and red berries, and Rosa 'Golden Wings,' which has single, pale-yellow flowers.

Hauberg is a stickler for using true blues to contrast with the yellow flowers. Early on, Withey and Price planted Scabiosa columbaria 'Butterfly Blue,' which, despite its name, proved to be far too lavender. It is long gone, replaced with, among other things, the pure blue of Salvia patens, Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue of Zurich' and ornamental morning glories (Ipomoea tricolor 'Heavenly Blue').

The intensity of the courtyard's yellow and blue color scheme is complemented by white. Long-blooming 'Dana' marguerite daisies are planted in the stone pots around the pond, emphasizing the water and fountain as the courtyard's focal point.

The entrance to the garden was originally on the water side of the house. Everyone approached the house from the beach, coming up the hill and across the lawn. Now a road and the driveway lead to the courtyard entry at the street side of the house. But a white arbor still marks the old entry, serving as a gateway to the long slope of lawn with views of the water and Mount Rainier. The arbor is trimmed with a sweetly fragrant yellow honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum 'Graham Thomas') that drapes and twines along its arch, creating a perfect spot to stand, inhale the perfume and admire the wide sunflower borders (so called because of all the high summer bloom). New stone steps lead down to the lawn, its length flanked with roses for cutting, stands of stately delphinium and masses of white and yellow daisies. Withey and Price brought the antique delphinium seed back from a trip to Ireland, and now the same strain of delphinium that grew in Irish gardens in the 1800s thrives here, two centuries later, on the shores of Puget Sound.

Plants must pass the deerproof test to win a place on the street side of the house. That's because hungry deer all too often visit the wide borders along the gravel driveway here. Withey and Price have designed thickly planted borders in tones of silver, purple and yellow, although they admit it has been hard to keep the purple going. A blue atlas cedar, lamb's ears and catmint (Nepeta) provide the cool tones, as does the silver-gray, toothed-leafed Melianthus major, a pleasing surprise contrasted with the rough trunks of Douglas firs. Yellow asters and Jerusalem sage (Phlomis fruticosa) with its soft yellow, tiered flowers lighten the scene, as do the white blooms of Cornus kousa and the pale trunks of birch trees. "Anne loves anything silvery white and yellow out here," explains Withey. "She wants it to be country, not sophisticated."

A similar color scheme of yellow and blue is repeated in the smaller entry courtyard. But here the silvery shades are replaced with glowing white, mirroring the play of blues and yellows. With stone paving, a fountain and a round pond in the center, the courtyard is more formal than the rest of the garden.

A white lattice fence surrounds the courtyard on three sides, continuing the window-grid theme, although the squares are mostly obscured by cascades of climbing roses. Two red Japanese maples flank the entry to the enclosed space, and the gate is festooned with the fragrant white flowers of Rosa 'Darlow's Enigma.' Withey describes the orchestration of fragrance in the courtyard as "not a horrible potpourri, but rather something fragrant in bloom all the time." A mock orange supplies the perfume in spring, star jasmine in summer and Cimicifuga simplex 'Brunette' with its tall, white wands of sweet-smelling flowers, in early autumn.

One reason Hauberg can be so clear about what she wants in her garden is that she has known it so long and so well. Her mother planted a box hedge in the courtyard, for instance, but Hauberg wasn't willing to commit to such a high-maintenance shrub. She replaced it with a low, looser hedging of the yellow dwarf yew Taxus baccata 'Bright Gold.' The paths and terraces throughout the garden remain original, however, built of sandstone left over from her father's museum project. "So much of Seattle's history is here," says Hauberg. Also remaining are several roses that Hauberg's mother planted, including the crumpled and sweetly scented, pale-pink R. 'Dr. Van Fleet.'

Hauberg remembered that 50 years ago, two mock oranges grew at the entrance to the lawn. Withey and Price recently planted a pair of updated, long-blooming mock orange cultivars (Philadelpus 'Belle Etoile') in the same location. Fringed flowers from these new plants are now arranged in a vase on Hauberg's desk, scenting the rooms of the old house with the perfume she remembers from her childhood.

Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian who writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. Jacqueline Koch is a freelance photographer who lives on Whidbey Island.