WRITTEN BY VALERIE EASTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY JACQUELINE KOCH

All the cool green of a foliage-rich, hedged garden is warmed by Robyn Cannon's choice of hot-colored flowers such as these apricot and scarlet daylilies, pink roses and spires of blue delphinium.

You'd expect a steep Queen Anne hillside either to be swathed in naturalistic shade or retained by groundcovers punctuated with jutting magnolias. The tree-lined approach to Robyn Cannon's south-slope garden does nothing to dispel this notion. But as you round the corner and see the network of hedges, walls of weathered brick and graceful urns and statuary, the idea of Northwest naturalism fades away as you're transported to an earlier century somewhere in Europe.
 

	A cherub, framed by the effervescence of white roses and pale lilies, is the focal point in one of the little garden rooms.

Cannon's garden is filled with decorative tricks and space-enlarging ploys. "A lot is going on here in not much space," she points out, for the series of petite garden rooms are carved out of the hillside around the 1907 house. Paved in brick or decked in pale gray trimmed with white, the garden is ornamented, decorated and detailed. The lively use of color keeps it from being precious, as does the extravagant use of spilling-over hydrangeas and brash stands of phormium.

Every inch is made to count in this garden of cleverly designed illusion. Pink and white Rosa 'Double Delight' are pruned into standards so they take up not much more than vertical space. Below the house is a yew hedge, clipped flat and interspersed with urns holding spiky splays of bronze flax. In just a few feet of space, squeezed onto a steep slope, Cannon's created a rhythmic juxtaposition of forms, a distinctive edge to the garden, as well as the atmospherics of a grand estate.
 

Purple agapanthus just opening their round, flowery heads creates impact when planted en masse.

Despite its formality, brick and straight-line forms, the garden is sumptuously feminine. "I love rich color in a garden — that's where I deviate from the truly formal," says Cannon. And it's true she has planted an abundance of hot-red daylilies and magenta phlox. But the femininity and playfulness lie in how the plants are used, as much as in the wealth of color. Pots of boxwood topiary are softened with a ruff of fuchsia and impatiens. Terra-cotta pots filled with boxwood cones flash petticoats of white lobelia and pink geraniums. Urns sport tufts of liriope engulfed in hot-pink fibrous begonias. Throughout the garden, candles hint of romance, and urns are elevated on pedestals or atop walls so their flowery underskirtings can best be appreciated.
 

	The hillside behind the 1907 house is awash in pale 'Sally Holmes' rose bushes, contained by boxwood hedging trimmed with white-edged hostas and snowy impatiens.

The crisp hedging and strictly edged hardscaping are the elements that lend formality to such abundantly planted spaces. In her own garden, as well as the classically styled gardens she designs for clients, Cannon paves and builds walls with used brick for its traditional look as well as the permanency and patterning it brings to the garden. And how about all those hedges? Cannon recommends planting the boxwood tightly, root ball to root ball for a filled-in hedge in just a few months. She advises feeding the foliage with liquid fertilizer a couple of times a season and using soaker hoses to deliver water right to the boxwood's roots. You only need clip the hedges once in early spring, by hand with sharp shears, to encourage them to flush back out and look lush all summer.
 

Formal geometry defines the garden; here a squarely hedged garden room is centered by a two-tiered circular fountain set atop a pedestal and surrounded by agapanthus about to burst into showy purple bloom.
The strong architectural lines of dark bronze phormium add drama and winter structure, as well as an effective backdrop to pale and hot-colored flowers.

Cannon relies on a variety of shrubs and architectural plants for structure besides the plentiful hedging. She grows an entire hillside of pale, blowsy Rosa 'Sally Holmes,' as well as dozens of hydrangeas. Her favorites are the tidily-sized Hydrangea serrata 'Preziosa,' with pink blossoms that turn brick red over the summer, and 'Oregon Pride' for its burgundy stems and oversized purple mophead flowers. She credits husband Don for inventing "a magic rose formula." He mashes up 20/20 fertilizer with alfalfa pellets, a timed-release fertilizer and water to form a sludge that encourages the roses to grow large and bloom long.

A fluffy, flowery cottage garden was Cannon's first vision for her hillside property. Before she married Don, she'd gardened only in containers, so she learned her skills through trial and error. But too many overgrown perennials and an all-too-bare garden in winter discouraged her early attempts at creating the cottage garden. Inspired by a photo from an old House Beautiful magazine showing a garden of boxwood hedging, white roses and lavender, she began dividing the garden into little rooms, each with its own focal point. Now, more than 2,000 dwarf boxwood plants later, she has a garden that looks great in all seasons.

Night lighting adds drama, for Cannon illuminates trees, statuary and architectural plants like phormium and acanthus with uplighting so the garden can be enjoyed after dark. Low-voltage spots line the pathways, and Cannon adds flicker and ambience by lighting candles throughout the garden. "Lighting hides problems while accenting what you want to see," she says. Cannon's flare for night lighting reaches its peak in an ivy-draped corner where a lit path of knot-patterned hedging and feathery astilbe leads to a larger-than-life winged concrete torso.

Despite its emphasis on structure and hardscape, Cannon considers her garden to be more classical than formal, which she defines as tailored and even austere. The aged brick, division of space into garden rooms, and statuary with a historic air evoke the quaint and comfortable feel of idealized European gardens. Add the urns, architectural plants and lengths of clean-lined hedging, and Cannon has created an elegantly old-world retreat with year-round bone structure.