Wild In The City

A RIVERSTONE PATH curves beneath old rhododendrons, past ferns and down a half circle of stone steps. Ahead is a grotto of a garden thick with maples, a flush of green native plants and the rush of a waterfall tumbling over boulders. Two steps down the path and you've left the city far behind. Not only the city, but also the 21st century, for across an oval of grass looms a tall, hundred-year-old Craftsman home with such distinctive paned windows and dark shingles that it must be an Ellsworth Storey.

"It's such a great house, it deserved a great garden," says Noel Angell, who with her husband, Emory Bundy, has created a nature sanctuary around the notable old home. It was Storey's first project as a young architect, a compound of two houses overlooking Lake Washington, built in 1905. This one, designed for his parents, was the home of architect Victor Steinbrueck for years and is on the National Historic Register.

The home's original garden was a series of terraces with masses of perennials, long gone by the late 1980s when Angell moved in. She tinkered with the garden for awhile before realizing it needed major work. Eight years ago, she hired landscape architect Keith Geller, whose own bird-friendly garden she admired. "I love gardening, but I don't have those kinds of skills," says Angell of redesigning the decrepit old garden.

Geller recontoured the property, adding the mossy stone stairs, a terrace off the kitchen and plenty of native plants to mesh with the wooded park next door. Angell and Bundy are dedicated birders on the board of the Seattle Audubon Society, so Geller planted a mix of native and non-native bird-friendly plants such as Garry elliptica, Mahonia nervosa, evergreen huckleberries, serviceberries, salmonberry, callicarpa, ferns, kinnikinik and Arbutus unedo. "This is mostly a no-sweat garden," says Angell, who waters only four or five times over the summer, cultivates a compost and worm bin along with the wide variety of plantings, and rarely fertilizes. "I've even gotten away from pots," she says. "They're like dogs — when you go away, someone has to take care of them."

Over the years, Angell has added more drought-tolerant plantings, such as rosemary, euphorbias and smoke bush, resulting in a relaxed tumble that thrives in both the sun of the open terrace and the shade of the wooded entry.

A few years after the garden remodel, the couple added a naturalistic pond and waterfall that have become bird magnets. "It's our evening entertainment to sit by the pond and watch the birds," Angell says.

She and Bundy nurture birds with a variety of strategies besides the native plants and water. They let brush piles stand in the woods for nesting and eschew deadheading, leaving flowers to go to seed. Nothing is sprayed. Angell is adding more butterfly plants, while Bundy encourages the pollinating talents of native Orchard Mason bees by putting out nesting tubes (available from Knox Cellars, www.knoxcellars.com).

The creatures aren't the only ones that enjoy this carefully planned yet casually comfortable garden. Not long ago, Ellsworth Storey's two elderly daughters came to visit, bringing along their daughters to see the house. Says Angell, "They loved the new garden."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.