A Personal Eden -- A Sleepy City Lot Turns Into A Lush And Green Creation

THE FIRST TIME KEITH GELLER and Richard Irvine visited their Central Area home, the front steps were so choked with blackberries the pair had to enter the yard through the alley in back. There were no foundation plantings or borders around the house, just a sleepy lawn with a plum tree in the middle and a couple of overgrown cypresses out front.

That was in 1981. Although the place wasn't much, the men could see its potential. At 70 feet wide and 120 feet long, the property was half again as big as the standard city lot. The house was perched atop a steep hillside, affording some privacy from the street below. And the price was hard to beat: just $55,000.

"You couldn't find anything with more land for that price," recalls Geller, a landscape architect.

Today, that spartan garden is a sylvan oasis. Leafy limbs shelter groves so dense with greenery the air itself seems to take on an emerald hue. With so many ferns, trees and birds, it's hard to believe you're just minutes from the center of the city.

Because the site didn't offer much in the way of views, Geller turned the focus inward, screening out neighboring homes with a fence, and selecting plants that would edit the surroundings even further. Now all you see beyond the boundaries of the yard are the side of a house, a neighboring maple and a distant hill crowned with poplars.

To heighten the sense of enclosure, the landscape architect planted trees that would form a canopy overhead, sheltering the garden under a verdant veil from April to October.

Geller divided the area around the house into a series of outdoor "rooms." Each room was designed to respond to a particular function or climate condition. The shady brick terrace in front, for example, acts as an entrance hall, providing a transition between the garden and the interior, as well as a cool retreat on a sultry day.

Since the bulk of the garden rests on the shady north side of the property, Geller planted a woodland garden similar to those he admired back in his native New England. The dense, forest-like grove is dominated by a trio of river birches: shaggy, russet-barked trees with lacelike branches and leaves that turn golden in autumn. The floor of the grove has columbine, bleeding heart, welsh poppy, meadow rue, false lily of the valley, ferns, and other plants that thrive in low sunlight. A side path leads to a weathered meditation bench, half-hidden by strands of vinca minor.

Although you'd think such dense plantings would make the yard feel small, they actually have the opposite effect, blurring the boundaries of the garden so it's unclear where it begins and ends. And because each area of the garden flows naturally into the next, without hedges or other obstructions to break up the view, your eyes are continually drawn to the area beyond.

To counteract a drainage problem on the eastern edge of the woodland garden, Geller dug a shallow pond to collect the runoff, and filled the surrounding area with plants one might find around a New England bog: sweet pepper bush, daylilies, irises, marsh marigolds and blueberries.

The sunny western half of the garden is given over to a pair of terraces fashioned from bricks Geller salvaged from neighborhood remodeling projects. Reclaimed tiles and rounded stones alternate with the bricks, giving the terraces a more casual, hand-crafted appearance. The upper terrace is bordered by a perennial garden and a pathway leading to an arbor draped with clematis, grape vines and roses.

Brightly colored Adirondack chairs add a fanciful footnote, as do the carved bird sculptures by Mike Zitka, which adorn fence posts and furniture throughout the yard.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the carvings from the real thing. An avid birdwatcher, Geller cultivated fruit-bearing plants such as myrica, native currant, hawthorn, ivy berry, cotoneaster, columbine, huckleberry, and pear and plum trees to attract migrating songbirds. Aside from its nutritional value, the dense layer of foliage allows birds to hop from branch to branch without exposing themselves to predators.

Since the soil was poor on the sunny front slope, and it would have been expensive to extend the irrigation system there, Geller covered the hillside with drought-tolerant plants. The lush mounds of Pacific wax myrtle, and colorful clumps of wild lilac, viburnum, rock roses and nandina certainly belie the conventional image of the drought-tolerant garden as a parched preserve filled with cacti and rocks.

Originally, a concrete stairway led directly from the sidewalk to the front door above. Now a staggered wooden stairway weaves its way up the slope, making the ascent less imposing and allowing visitors to interact with the garden as they climb.

To give the house the feeling of "a cottage in a garden," Geller planted pine trees and vine maples against the corners and walls, diminishing the scale of the structure and blending it with its surroundings. The plantings improve the view from inside, as well.

"It's good to bring trees closer to the house, so you get the feeling there's more depth when you look out the window," says Geller. "When you see tree trunks in the foreground and tree trunks in the background, psychologically that reads to you that you're in the garden, even inside your house."

The homeowners encouraged that perception, enlarging a few of the windows and adding French doors in the kitchen to expand the view. Built-in bookcases surround the windows in the study, framing the outlook onto an intimate courtyard presided over by a statue of St. Francis.

Despite these improvements, the house still maintains much of its 1930s charm. "What was nice about this house was that nothing had really been altered," says Irvine, a development researcher for a local university.

The home still sports its original wood floors and coved ceilings. The cozy, informal rooms are furnished with antique pine pieces, and Moroccan rugs and wall hangings purchased during the owners' travels abroad.

Geller converted the old single-car garage into a home office, hanging drywall inside and installing windows purchased from a demolition crew for $5 each. Sitting at his drafting table, binoculars at the ready, he can observe the parade of flycatchers, warblers, orioles and tanagers flittering past.

"Those birds aren't that amazing to see," admits Geller. "But they're amazing to see in an urban garden."

Seattle writer Fred Albert reports regularly on home design for Pacific, and is co-author of "American Design: The Northwest," published by Bantam. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.