Second Place
	Denise Cosgrove, who is an active member of the Snohomish gardening community and second-place winner in the latest Pacific Northwest Competition for Home Gardeners, has welcomed many a plant enthusiast at her garden gate during open-house tours.

It placed second in the ninth-annual Pacific Northwest Competition for Home Gardeners. The prize includes round-trip air fare for two to the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, with two nights' lodging, plus a $100 Swanson's Nursery gift certificate awarded earlier for being among the top contenders. She'll take her sister, Tammy Sargent, as a reward for her help during compost-spreading season.

No doubt her sister has earned it. Many a truckload of rich mulch has been shoveled behind the garage, where a wooden gate opens onto an oval-shaped lawn. Opposite this entry is a carefully crafted playhouse used by Cosgrove's daughter, Lauralee. Seen from a few feet away, this house in miniature plays tricks with perspective and bolsters an illusion of expansive green space. An old child's bike, its scale confirming the impression, is propped by the miniature porch and holds a basketful of flowers.

This dollhouse-like cottage, built by neighbor Gene Ruthruff, has a Clematis 'Dr. Rupple' winding along the eaves and stitching into the hillside garden just behind. Clematis 'Ville de Lyon' climbs a tree, its purplish flowers matching shutter paint.

Cosgrove, her husband, Carl, and their daughter, Lauralee, sometimes have meals under this arbor in their cottage garden. The spot is surrounded by flowers.

Nearby are trellises, an arbor that supports both a golden hops vine and a chandelier, plus statuary, mirrors, a candelabrum, wooden benches, metal garden furniture and a dainty waterfall with pool. (Examples, certainly, of Cosgrove's conviction that with a 35-by 40-foot planting area, every inch counts, and a little stagecraft never hurts.)

All are props in service to the stars of the show, those hundreds of healthy perennials, annuals, trees and shrubs packed so densely into a horseshoe-shaped border that it is best to stand in one place to appreciate the diversity. One visual slice: flax and large grasses exploding out of a tumble of Asiatic lilies, golden feverfew, dark-leafed heuchera and golden millet grass.

Cosgrove enlists various strategies to bring about balance in a space that might otherwise seem cluttered. The grassy area, for example, provides enough openness to allow a viewer's eyes to rest. A Japanese paper umbrella brightens a dark corner in back. A white, oval-framed mirror on a trellis near a garage corner elongates an otherwise truncated piece of garden and echoes the lawn's shape. Similarly, container planters serve as dividers and attractive accents. Ceramic pots, woven baskets and wooden boxes — including one made to look like a vintage wheelbarrow — are frothy with contrasting colors.

Together they define the entry, disguise the feet of a metal arch and fill between-season holes in the main planting beds. Cosgrove's show-stopping front-window planter changes with the seasons as she rotates plants from other parts of her garden.

She has talent for aesthetic arrangements. Her container plantings won praise at all levels of judging in this contest, and hold particular fascination for her. By early spring, though, the cottage garden has Cosgrove's closest attention. As she tends to chores, she glories in the show amid "early filler" — hundreds of tulips, crocuses and alliums that have burst into bloom.

		Left: The sign eliminates guesswork: Lauralee's Secret Garden is found behind the playhouse. Just follow the mosaic stepping-stones. Below: Denise Cosgrove's daughter, Lauralee, has this playhouse just opposite the garden entryway. Clematis vines and an old child's bike add to the charm.

By summer, lilies scent the air. Meanwhile, there are cardinal flowers, astilbes, heucheras, amaranth, phlox and chrysanthemums. "I used to be scared of red and orange," Cosgrove says with some amazement. There's no hint of color timidity now.

Behind a Japanese maple is Rosa glauca with its gray-green leaves, a Southern elderberry and a variegated dogwood. The last she calls "light for the eyes."

Geranium 'Ann Folkard' does well on the shady north side, as do hostas, astilbes and astrantia.

Cosgrove believes roses belong in every garden, and has found David Austin English varieties to be all-around good performers for hers. She gives leaves an occasional squirt with the garden hose and uses a product with neem oil to help control aphids.

Although this is primarily a three-season garden, Cosgrove has planted a number of species for winter interest, including hellebores, a mountain hemlock and a birch, Betula jacquemontii.

Though Cosgrove's garden is about six years old, her planting impulse is older. Even if you live in an apartment, as she has, containers can be made into something beautiful. When she and her husband, Carl, moved into their brand-new house, she tended window boxes and a few scruffy foxgloves before planning and digging. Since then, she has planted every tree, perennial and annual in the garden. Carl added the pond and concrete stepping stones along one side of the house.

This is Cosgrove's second entry in the contest; she won honorable mention two years ago. Since then she has refined her plant selections and sharpened her focus. Her enthusiastic nature now is clearly expressed in her gardenscape.

Cosgrove, a native of Waxahachie, Texas, is a flight attendant who uses her layover time to pore through books and magazines on gardening. She has long been interested in color combinations, and faithfully photographs her plant collection over the seasons to muse over how it can best be rearranged.

"Since I can't see the garden from the house, it's always a surprise to walk around and through the gate and see what's new," she says. "My garden makes people happy." Herself foremost among them.

Top: A small grotto with cobblestones, moving water and shade-loving plants is a cool place to be on a warm day. Bottom: Climbing vines, petunias, grasses, geraniums and perennials common and unusual change with the seasons in a window box near the Cosgroves' front door. Cosgrove often recycles plants back into the main garden when their seasonal tour of duty is over.

Top: An oval mirror and trellis are attached to a wall near a corner of the house, effectively opening a new landscape in a section of garden that would otherwise end abruptly. Left: Lauralee's Secret Garden may be a little less secret now, but you still have to be just the right size to slip into the chair and shoes.

Dean Stahl is a Seattle writer, editor and lexicographer. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.