WRITTEN BY VALERIE EASTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY BARRY WONG

	The strong formal lines of the garden designed by Platt and Shipman on Capitol Hill have remained largely unchanged for nearly a century. The pavilion at the back and the round central pool are original; the curlicue hedging in the side beds was added by landscape architect Thomas Church in the 1960s.

Perhaps our fledgling gardening tradition lies in our inclination to work with natural conditions rather than impose an order dictated by history or fashion. Which is why one local garden — hidden behind an austere old mansion on Capitol Hill and crafted by several of the most famous designers of the last century — is such an impressive and surprising anomaly. Complete with its 17th-century-style French parterres, this is a seriously formal garden.
 

California landscape architect Thomas Church's boxwood hedging brings a touch of 17th-century French patterning to the already seriously formal garden.

The highly designed garden was among the earliest commissions given to Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of the first female landscape architects in the country. And of more than 600 projects she ultimately designed, it was the only one on the West Coast. In 1915, Shipman traveled west from Cornish, N.H., to work on a garden created by her mentor, Charles A. Platt, for lumber baron R.D. Merrill. The house, also designed by Platt, was pushed up close to the street to leave a spacious, flat back garden, in part built on top of the garage roof facing the street below. The house's long and illustrious history is no doubt the reason the garden retains most of its original design.

Since no published photos remain of the garden Shipman designed for the Merrills, it's impossible to be sure how many of her ideas became reality. Drawings show an ambitious scheme including a vegetable garden, bowling green, tennis court and rose garden. Her plans included generous plantings of narcissus, primroses, tulips and columbines for spring, followed in summer by densely planted perennials such as delphinium, phlox, lilies and asters in pale tones. She called for tree peonies, roses growing over arched arbors, crabapples, lilac, tidy boxwood hedging and an evergreen backdrop of rhododendron, azaleas and cedars.
 

	Gardener Kevin Harvey has planted strongly shaped and colored perennials into the gravel beds to add year-round interest. Near the back of the garden, a boxwood curve embraces the spikiness of pink-striped flax alongside a clump of yarrow about to bloom in sunset colors.

While the garden's central circular pool, anchoring pavilion at the back, and formal beds and paths remained relatively unchanged for decades, various designers shaped the plantings over the years. So did Eula Merrill, who was an enthusiastic gardener and member of the Seattle Garden Club. More tea roses were added during the 1920s, and during World War II, Victory Garden vegetables filled in where lilies and hollyhocks had grown. Venerable old Belgian fruit trees were espaliered along the garden's side walls in the 1950s, and yet more roses were added in colors to harmonize with the annuals that replaced many of Shipman's perennials.
 

A stone statue and its mate, thought to be original to the garden, emphasize its classic formality. The other one of the pair stands guard at the opposite end of a long brick walkway.

The most significant change to Shipman's vision occurred during the 1960s, when California landscape architect Thomas Church dabbled in the garden. Merrill daughters Virginia Bloedel and Eulalie Wagner (Church designed Lakewold garden in Tacoma for the Wagners) hired him. But instead of updating the garden, Church went back in time, eliminating what was left of Shipman's perennial borders and adding topiary yews, as well as expanses of colored gravel and ornate 17th-century French-style boxwood parterres.

Current gardener Kevin Harvey has spent the past several years mitigating the severity of the Church-designed gravel beds and fleur-de-lis-shaped hedging. The garden's scale is so vast that it takes a huge number of plants to make much impact; a master plant list from the 1930s shows that in one year the gardener put in more than 6,500 new plants.
 

	Aqua pots planted up in perennials, canna lilies and yellow bamboo enliven a stone terrace that stretches the width of the house.

Harvey first concentrated on bringing the 800 hybrid tea roses back to robust health, then added generous swathes of lavender. The Church-designed parterres, near mirror images of each other, outline four rectangular beds. "The patterning of the boxwood hedges is such a strong graphic that we need a tapestry of plantings to play off it," explains Harvey. The fluffy mounds of 'Grosso' lavender, chosen because it stays fairly short and dependably reblooms, help modify the severity of line, and the perennials and shrubs Harvey planted to complete the side beds introduce varying heights, shapes and seasons of bloom. Columbines, lady's mantle, hardy geraniums, phormium, yarrow and Russian sage fill out the borders.
 

More than 800 roses fill four central beds, each of which Harvey has outlined with Lavandula x intermedia 'Grosso.' Short-growing, with dark, especially fragrant flowers, it reblooms dependably in late summer.

The old Belgian apples and pears espaliered against the cement walls since the 1950s no longer receive enough sunlight to thrive. Harvey plans to replace them with Camellia sasanqua for winter interest "so the garden doesn't look as spiky and bald in the off-season." Turquoise pots are focal points on the back terrace, modernizing the garden with flashy plantings of canna lilies, African daisies, palms and yellow-toned grasses.
 

	The two long side walls of the garden have been freshly planted with a medley of hydrangeas and perennials.

The history of the garden has come full circle while its architectural grandeur remains undiminished. Garden historian Judith Tankard speculates in Pacific Horticulture magazine ("Shipman in Seattle," volume 58, summer 1997, pages 30-37) that Shipman was brought in to soften the overly severe geometry of Platt's original design for the garden. Tankard writes, "Apparently what the garden needed was a more delicate, artistic hand than Platt was able to provide." Today the current owners and Harvey are again planting to soften the garden's formal lines, adding the flower artistry that Shipman was hired to create nearly 100 years ago.