A Lesson In Self Reliance -- Gil Schieber's Back Yard Was An Overnight Success

YOU KNOW YOU'VE REACHED Gil Schieber's house when the crisply edged concrete sidewalks and neat handkerchiefs of neighbors' front lawns give way to a sprawl of shrubs, perennials, groundcovers and grasses. There, in the heart of Seattle's densely built Ballard district, Schieber harvests immense personal satisfaction from tending the garden on his 75-by-100-foot city lot, which is so intensively planted it looks like a country acre.

Though there's no shortage of Seattle yards that burst from their seams, Schieber's is a landscape apart. First, although the plantings look as though they've been in place for decades, the garden reached its present, filled-in state in just two years and is only six years old now. Second, this natural-looking harmony of textures, colors and shapes didn't just happen - it came through meticulous crafting.

And then there's what it gives back.

Schieber, 35, who designs gardens for others, began his own project with a whopping 3,000 plants. Perennials became the main fabric of the plan, thanks to 300 different species and cultivars he acquired from a single collector. He soon wove dozens of food plants into the tapestry - enough so that last year he and his wife, Carolyn, plucked 60 pounds of apples, 40 pounds of kiwis, 120 pounds of grapes, three gallons of serviceberries and bulging baskets of raspberries from their urban plot.

"This is my style," Schieber says. "I put edibles and ornamentals together based on their soil and exposure needs - plant environment being No. 1 - and then I go around with deliberation and ask myself what colors go with what, and what is the aesthetic value. Nothing so mysterious. It's just smart planting and a certain amount of trial and error." As a result, the garden is interesting to look at all year and, because he also propagates plants as part of his business, it constantly undergoes a flux of refinement and experimentation.

"When you ask me to define what I do, all I can say is that I try to be a good gardener," he says. "I don't use any pesticides, for one thing. Even fertilizer troubles me here because I'm altering a situation and don't have time to test for the long-term effect."

This style of gardening was an evolutionary process for Schieber, who received a degree in horticulture in 1980 from Delaware Valley College of Science and Agriculture in Pennsylvania. His studies in commercial fruit and vegetable production were "chemical farming all the way," Schieber says, as were some of the jobs that followed.

He bicycled to Seattle soon after he graduated and credits his discovery of Seattle Tilth in 1982, and his later volunteer work as lead gardener at Seattle's Arboretum, with nudging him along his current path.

The low-impact style of gardening he practices must baffle some of the neighbors, Schieber thinks, especially on nights when he's on his knees in the front yard with a lantern at 10 or 11 o'clock, picking cutworms off a godetia.

Gardening is Schieber's life now, as it has been since his teens. He's a self-employed garden designer, operates an appointment-only specialty nursery and is the lead groundskeeper for Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, which he refers to affectionately as "my back 40." He's an active member of The Seattle Tilth Association, as is Carolyn, and an ardent volunteer for various plants-and-people causes around Washington state. He also opens his garden twice a year - the second Sunday in June and October - for public viewing, giving plant-sale proceeds to local charities.

Fittingly, it was volunteering that laid the cornerstone of the Schiebers' own garden. The project took shape in February 1987, when friends assembled for a potting party and readied the perennial collection for the move. A convoy of 20 friends with pickup trucks - 10 for household belongings, 10 for the potted plants - brought the Schiebers to their new home.

That winter Schieber took a course in landscape design at South Seattle Community College. For his class project he drafted the whole layout of the Ballard property - yard, house, windows, power lines and hose bibs. He's basically stayed with that design.

Seven plant islands and their borders undulate through the back yard. Filling in are winding paths, a duck pond, and a greenhouse and a glass-enclosed room addition that is used to heat the main house and to overwinter frost-tender citrus trees. Schieber conducted a pepper-growing test there this spring with more than 20 sweet and hot varieties, and is experimenting now with figs native to the Himalayas.

Before any of this could happen, the first chore was undoing the original yard and building the foundation for the new one. Problem No. 1 was a familiar one: sod.

Starting with a drab lawn, Schieber peeled sod off areas marked for pathways and in 2-foot-wide strips outlining the borders of the future plant islands. He punched holes in the unpeeled sod, piled the stripped turf on top and gave it all a good sprinkling of rock phosphate and granite dust, green sand and kelp. Next he covered these areas a foot deep with 60 truckloads of horse manure, which Carolyn shuttled home from stables near her job on the Eastside.

That April, Schieber planted the manure-covered yard in potatoes and buckwheat as a cover crop to build soil. "We pulled 250 pounds of potatoes that first year," he recalls. He chopped in the buckwheat, and that fall the potted plants went in. The garden was on its way.

The first year he hand-watered. The second year he installed an eight-zone micro-spray irrigation system, monitored by an electronic timer. "This has been very freeing," he says, although he is mindful of hand-watering's benefits: "It's a good way to see the garden."

Schieber's original collection of plants is redefined now to about 1,500 different species, varieties and cultivars (with multiples of many). Plants, seeds and cuttings of rarities are always coming and going, his being a creative enterprise. He reserves the greenhouse largely for propagation, and one island is set aside for experimental plant material.

Still, there are 20 kinds of apple, about 10 berry species - just the brambles, that is - as well as five blueberries, four varieties of persimmon, five grape varieties, various pears and quinces, edible viburnums and so on. Schieber uses multiple grafts on his fruit trees to get the most varieties in the least amount of space.

The front garden, which faces west, wasn't watered at all during last summer's dry spell. It includes drought-tolerant plants such as serviceberry, various ornamental grasses, lavenders, native ceanothus, manzanita and cape fuchsia (we counted 27 plant species in just one 4-by-4-foot section). Schieber makes generous use of hardy, self-seeding annuals and biannuals - such as toad flax, larkspur and rattlesnake grass - to fill the gaps. He waters new plants their first year, but has learned to do his transplanting between October and March, if possible, to take advantage of seasonal rains.

Though all of this may sound like a maintenance nightmare, Schieber calculates he spends about a day a month on yard work, "including looking and thinning and some weeding."

A recent addition to the landscape is a front-yard patch of fescue for the couple's infant son, Scotland, to enjoy.

"Fescue, left uncut, can be so beautiful," Schieber says, as he gets on hands and knees to pluck a strand of chickweed, then lets his fingers swim through the grassy hummocks. Weeds are a rarity in this garden because the dense plantings, natural leaf-litter culture and chipped-wood paths provide little opportunity for them to take hold.

One approximately 4-by-10-foot plant island shows how dense the plantings are to achieve this. The plot holds a contorted mulberry and golden variegated cherry laurel for basic structure, plus foam flower, a wild rose from Cape Cod, anemone, sedge, purple plantain, strawberry, purple Peruvian potato, osmanthus, hosta, variegated horseradish and various Mediterranean herbs.

For self-seeding filler the island includes larkspur, Welsh corn poppies, verbena, all the verbascums (mulleins), wintercress, columbines, campanula, feverfew, calendula and borages.

Schieber, who doesn't agree that "intensive gardening" is the best description of his handiwork, says "I suppose you could call it an exuberantly naturalistic garden that tends to tend itself. That sounds like a book-jacket blurb, but it comes pretty close."

Dean Stahl is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Seattle. Greg Gilbert is a Seattle Times photographer.