WRITTEN BY VALERIE EASTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY BARRY WONG

	Smooth white-birch tree trunks emerge from a thick bed of moss at the entry to Adelle Lloyd's Medina home, setting the stage for the Asian style back garden.

When Lloyd bought her house in 1984, it was in pretty bad shape, even though it was only 10 years old. "Elizabeth did all this," says Lloyd, waving her arms to indicate the openness that allows you to see all the way from the back yard to the front door. Seattle interior designer Elizabeth Fuller helped Lloyd tear out walls and arrange spaces to take full advantage of garden views outside while orchestrating the play of light inside. Now sufficient sunshine pours into the kitchen to keep a hot-pink bougainvillea in luxuriant flower, and Lloyd's hearth is lined with a collection of orchids. "The weirder they are, the more I like them," she says of the exotically striped and splashed blossoms she nurtures in a tile-floored greenhouse off the living room.
 

Adelle Lloyd has taken full advantage of her double lot in Medina, planting for privacy with a stately Hinoki cypress, (left) plenty of bamboo, rhododendrons and pines.

Large windows and glass doors are placed so the garden is a living, growing presence in nearly every room of the house. An expansive window next to a Jacuzzi tub frames a walled garden so serenely planted that its tranquility seems to seep into the room. Moss creeps over a fat stone Japanese god that presides over the narrow, one-plant-deep garden. The television room is painted such a dark brown that the garden outside the floor-to-ceiling window appears brightly lit even on an overcast day. From here Lloyd can watch the birds hard at work tearing up the moss in spring to build their nests. She encourages the moss to carpet the ground beneath the trees and rhododendrons, particularly admiring how it glows a bright emerald green after the rain.
 

	An interior courtyard houses Lloyd's waterbed, surrounded by lush plantings and roofed all in glass for a view of moon and stars.
	An old stump at the back of the garden, colonized by oxalis, lends a note of naturalism among the clipped forms of azaleas and pines.

Lloyd, sister of actor Christopher Lloyd, grew up in the green of Connecticut, but decided to move to the Northwest after falling in love with the area when she visited relatives and the World's Fair in 1962.

While most of the garden is Asian in feel, Lloyd's courtyard bedroom is pure tropics. Protected by a glass ceiling, the bedroom is lushly planted and floored with smooth stones Lloyd sweeps daily. A waterbed floats at floor level, a wide swathe of sky clearly revealed overhead. A little stuffed zebra, brought back from Africa long ago by Lloyd's mother (when trade in exotic game was legal, she explains) peeks out from beneath an arch of fern fronds. Entering the interior courtyard, you feel as if you're stepping outdoors rather than into a bedroom, which is just what Lloyd intended. What a spot to take a nap or watch the moon move across the night sky. You couldn't have a boudoir that felt more like it was outside unless it actually was. But here in the Northwest you wouldn't have the lush plants and radiant warmth that filters through the glass ceiling, let alone the zebra.

This equatorial fantasy of a bedroom, just inside the front door, comes as a surprise after the simplicity of the entry garden. Slabs of stone lead to the front door. Tall, white-trunked birches grow out of a thick bed of moss. Clumps of dark violets and weeping hemlock add color and texture. Dramatic stalks of black bamboo create an arresting rhythm arrayed against pale horizontal wooden screens framing the parking area. "Yamasaki said to think of it as a painting," says Lloyd of the advice she got from designer Dick Yamasaki, who, along with his brother, put in the garden's water courses as well as the stone and plantings of pine, bamboo and azaleas.
 

A wooden deck juts into the garden like the prow of a ship affording an overlook of the double lot planted in pines, maples, rhodies and azaleas.

The back yard is as much a stroll garden as a space to gaze at from the house, deck and painting studio. The deck juts into the garden like the prow of a ship, edged with hedges of clipped evergreens and shaded by a pergola draped in a hefty wisteria vine. Lloyd's studio is so well integrated into the garden that it appears part of the tapestry of maples and pines that surround it. Skylights bring in plenty of natural light. "I used to travel a lot," says Lloyd, "but I have so many unfinished paintings, I need to stay home and finish them up." The studio is lined with paintings of people Lloyd has known and places she has visited. She keeps busy with gardening, too, putting in at least an hour a day of weeding, raking and pruning. "I'm a real gardening freak," says Lloyd, who enjoys it as both exercise and therapy.
 

	Adelle Lloyd's little painting studio is framed in black pine and Japanese maple, but she still gets plenty of light in through the glass doors and skylight.

Northwest naturalism and Japanese aesthetics combine harmoniously in the back garden, where a little bridge crosses over a cascade of river stones, and ornamental grasses and rhododendrons droop over streams and waterfalls. The pines and azaleas are carefully trimmed into smooth, rounded shapes that contrast with the spread of delicate Japanese maples and the rustle of bamboo. Clumps of low-growing black and green mondo grass mound along the edges of the stepping stones. Masses of pink-blooming oxalis have colonized an old stump.

While the water sparkles, splashes and reflects as it runs over rocks and collects in still ponds, the flash of fish is missing. The ponds were home to 26 koi and goldfish until last fall when a windstorm blew a big branch down across the nearly invisible electric wires that protected the fish from predators. The blue herons that keep hopeful watch over the garden somehow sensed their prey were unguarded and descended for a fine fish dinner. Lloyd laughs about the expense of that meal. Nature prevailed, even in this most detailed and tidily tended of Medina gardens.

Adelle Lloyd takes a break in her backyard painting studio, where she works mostly on portraits and landscapes.

A stuffed baby zebra, brought back from Africa by Lloyd's mother long ago when such things were legal, stands guard among the foliage plants in the interior courtyard bedroom.