WRITTEN BY VALERIE EASTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY JACQUELINE KOCH

The view from the Hotel De Haro's windows clearly reveals that, despite recent changes, the underlying geometry and circulation patterns of the century-old rose garden remain intact.

	The clean lines of old hedging and cobbled walkways contain the profusion of new plantings used to rejuvenate Roche Harbor's waterside gardens. "Everything grows larger, darker and healthier here," says designer Christy Erickson, due to the well-drained, lime-rich soil.

Built in 1886 by Tacoma lawyer John S. McMillin, the hotel stood for many years at the center of a company town grown up to mine the copious deposits of lime in the surrounding stone. The ghostly, once-elegant hotel housed McMillin's quarry customers, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, and generations of vacationers as it slowly listed to one side, settling and aging. Its darkly paneled, creaky, sloping interior has never been renovated, but the past couple of years have seen a renaissance in its formal gardens.
 

Designer Christy Erickson has added big, bold plantings to the hillside at the back of the harborside garden. Phormiums, buddleia, cardoons, euphorbia, red barberries and purple verbena coat the steep, stony bank in height and color.

For decades, the Victorian-style gardens between the hotel and the water greeted boaters, hosted weddings and set the tone of formality so surprising on remote, rocky San Juan Island. The gardens grew gradually more shabby over the years, their properness lapsing into overgrown shrubs and past-their-prime roses.

Five years ago, Christy Erickson of Zizania design was hired to rejuvenate and enliven the harborside gardens. "If I'd known all the history, I might have been intimidated," she says, "but nothing was sacred, and I was encouraged to experiment."

Many garden designers had been employed over the years since McMillin's wife, Louella, planted her rose gardens at the turn of the 20th century. Perhaps the fact that the place is so entrenched in history worked in Erickson's favor, for who could be expected to study all those historic photos and grasp the numerous changes over more than a 100-year span? No matter how formal and strictly laid out, gardens remain ephemeral creations, subject to wind, rain, decline and death, as well as the enthusiasms, neglect and changing tastes of the people who plan and plant them.

The setting remains much like it must have been nearly a hundred years ago when Teddy Roosevelt visited his friend, John McMillin. From the hotel windows you look out across the gardens and white picket fencing to the reflective waters of Roche Harbor and the flutter of Canadian and American flags on boats and docks. The harbor is sheltered by Pearl Island at its mouth, as in turn the gardens are protected and lent mild by the hillside-hugging hotel to the east and the expanse of water to the west. Today row after row of motorboats, yachts and sailboats are tied up to the dock while their owners relax, eat and drink on the sunny decks or stroll through the gardens.
 

	The Hotel De Haro has presided over Roche Harbor since the late 1800s. Vacationers and boaters are greeted by fragrant, textural plantings within the outline of the old, formal rose garden.

Erickson started out with plenty of hedges, some impressive heritage plants, a hugely dark and dramatic copper beech, a charming waterside setting and old lampposts crying out for hanging baskets. She brought to the task a modern sensibility, lively sense of color, and determination to mix in new textures, larger leaves and more contemporary plants.

"We took it walkway by walkway," she explains of the process of removing "tired old stuff like deutzia." She saved a few good heritage plants, and the deer mostly took care of the roses. She added lots of llama compost to the well-drained, lime-rich soil. She left the white picket fences, cobbled pathways, box hedging and shaggy lollipop-shaped trees that anchor the corners of the garden. Within this historic outline, Erickson has created an updated cottage garden of dramatic color play, a new-world Sissinghurst, rich with unusual textures and burnished with burgundy foliages.

The garden now moves through the seasons with a succession of showy flowers, both quaintly old-fashioned and newly introduced cultivars. Erickson and crew have planted more than 7,000 tulips for a May bluster of red and yellow, followed by stands of fat purple allium globes. In June, white campanulas, blowsy peonies and towers of blue delphinium evoke the past. In summer, the shady side garden under the copper beech comes into its own with pink and white astilbe, ferns, hostas and hardy fuchsias. In the F-shaped hedged beds that used to be rose ghettoes, familiar flowers like phlox, lavender, nigella, daylilies, foxglove, snapdragons and nasturtiums mingle with newer plants like astrantia, cimicifuga, heucheras, ornamental grasses and barberries with a full range of dark, mottled and variegated leaves.

Every year, the pots and baskets that hang from the lampposts and line the cobbled street sport a different theme. This year Erickson focused on hot colors beloved by the hummingbirds that hover around the flower-laden, moss-lined baskets. Vibrating hummers sip the lobelia and verbena set off by ruby-toned coleus and hot-orange zinnias. Erickson has extended out from the original gardens so that every inch is planted, with lush pocket gardens where the docks meet the land, pots holding phormium, coleus, geraniums and ornamental grasses emerge from the flower beds and decorate walkways.

Despite its more contemporary vibe, the garden remains steeped in history. A 1926 photo of a garden party thrown by the gregarious McMillin shows a 13-foot-high hollyhock sprouting up in one corner of the garden. Today a towering dark hollyhock grows in the exact spot. Is it the very same plant? The American pillar roses clambering over the white arbor in the heart of the garden are believed to have been planted in the 1920s and have been going strong ever since. They certainly look identical to the roses in the old sepia photos. It was once said, "There was enough limestone here within the radius of the eye to supply the world for years." The lime that has leached into the soil over so many years is what grows the stupendously huge, healthy peonies, and perhaps explains the height and longevity of that heritage hollyhock.