Steve Bloom/The Olympian
Leslie and Joe Miller incorporated play areas for their children in their garden design.

Steve Bloom/The Olympian
Leslie Miller hired a consultant to help plan her garden landscape.

Steve Bloom/The Olympian
The Millers chose unusual plants for their garden.

A garden from scratch

Miller family started with boring lawn, bare dirt

SARAH JACKSON, THE OLYMPIAN

Originally published July 21

OLYMPIA -- When Leslie and Joe Miller moved into their home on a one-acre lot in Olympia, they knew they had lots of work to do.

With a boring, builder-landscaped front lawn, a bare, dirt back yard and two young children to entertain, there wasn't time to waste.

Leslie -- with only limited gardening experience on a "postage stamp" plot in San Francisco -- felt the challenge.

Scotch broom had invaded the back yard, heavy equipment had squashed the soil, and near-dead grass sat on sandy land out front.

"Back here, there was nothing," Miller said of the back yard. "It was brown dirt and that's it."

That was three years ago.

Next weekend, the Millers' surprisingly mature garden will attract hundreds of garden enthusiasts for Garden Rhapsodies, an annual tour of local gardens that spotlights environmentally safe gardening.

"It's particularly beautiful," tour co-organizer Jane Mountjoy-Venning said of the Millers' garden. "She uses a lot of compost. Improving the soil has made a big difference."

"It's done a lot in three years," Miller acknowledges. "I like to use unusual plants. I'm not a big fan of the standards."

Variety

That's right. No rhodies or roses for Miller.

Instead, Miller's yard explodes with strawberries, fragrant herbs, ferns, ornamental grasses, flowering ground covers, colorful perennials and an occasional false cypress to give the garden year-round appeal.

Festive, red beebalm flowers and pink, fuzzy Queen of the Prairie plumes stand tall in the garden while Zebra and switch grasses soften the landscape.

Tour-goers who trek to the Millers' home -- the farthest out on the tour -- will receive a list of 295 plants in the yard, from Corsican pansy to Japanese Anemone.

Miller's garden includes 13 species of ground cover and 15 grass varieties.

Kid garden

Visitors may also notice the kid-friendly nature of the Miller garden, another reason the Garden Rhapsodies committee selected it for the tour, Mountjoy- Venning said.

"It's a good design for having kids be able to play and have a garden," Mountjoy-Venning said.

Rock steps -- surrounded by durable ground covers -- lead to an understated, wooden playset, subtly set to one side of the garden on a bed of fir chips.

Children can also frolic in the grassy yard area near the house and play on crushed rock paths that carry foot traffic through an array of shrubs, trees and tall sedums.

Cleverly placed garden spikes and stone sculptures add whimsical touches, along with a natural birdbath in one of the massive garden rocks.

"I'm glad to say my kids enjoy the garden," Miller said. "They play hide-and-seek behind the plants. They just love to run through the paths. We've got a play structure, but it's not glaring."

Miller's children -- Joshua, 7, Avery, 5, and Colin, 3 -- rummage for juicy raspberries and snap peas from the fenced vegetable garden, where corn, beans, squash, lettuce, onion and tomatoes grow, too.

"They do fine," Miller said of her children. "They know they'd better be nice to Mommy's plants.

"My daughter's favorite is the vegetable garden. She picks whatever's ripe."

Low maintenance

When they set out to create their gardens, the Millers worked with consultant Dave Baird, co-owner of Fairie Perennial and Herb Gardens in Tumwater, who designed the basalt rockwork and initial plant placement.

"I looked at his garden and said, 'This is the kind of feel I want'," Miller said of the popular demonstration garden and nursery.

Miller, a self-described lazy gardener, wanted a soothing sanctuary, but she also knew the large area had to be low- maintenance.

Miller and Baird selected many drought-tolerant and native plants for the backyard.

Good soil and proper plant placement, Baird said, have helped the garden mature quickly.

Recently, Miller has carried similar themes around the sides and front of her house.

Compost

Since the summer of 1998, she has learned loads about gardening. She came to rely heavily on compost -- lots of it -- some commercial and some of her own making.

Next Saturday, visitors can check out the Millers' three-bin compost system, which, she admitted, would be more productive with more maintenance.

Though she's used weed killer from time to time, Miller said she won't use weed-and-feed products to spruce up the lawn.

Instead, the couple rented an aerator and supplemented their grass with compost.

"It has changed completely," Miller said. "We got a very fine compost that we raked in."

When their fruit trees seemed to lapse on the same sandy soil, Miller added compost all around them, too.

"That was when I learned the soil was very weak," she said. "The compost has really helped."

Compost as groundcover in the garden beds also helped keep weeds to a minimum.

"The first year, I had weeds galore," Miller said, adding that plants such as stonecrop helped, too. "Each year I've had fewer and fewer."

Spectator to spotlight

Looking back, Miller is glad the home builders didn't landscape the backyard with "ho-hum" style.

With a blank canvass, Miller created a garden all her own -- a refuge.

"It's wonderful," she said. "It's quiet. It's therapy."

After two years as a spectator on the Garden Rhapsodies tour, Miller is excited that hers will be a featured garden.

"This is my first really big garden," Miller said. "The tour is a really neat way to see what other people have done -- to get ideas for gardening."

Sarah Jackson writes for The Olympian and can be reached at 360-704-6871 or olyjax@yahoo.com.

Garden Rhapsodies

- What: The sixth annual "Garden Rhapsodies: A Tour of Local Gardens," sponsored by Thurston County's Common Sense Gardening Program, the Master Gardener Foundation, the Olympia Symphony Guild, the city of Olympia and the Washington State University Cooperative Extension's Native Plant Salvage Project.

- Where: Seven Olympia gardeners open up their private yards to share tips, ideas and the beauty of their gardens, with a focus on environmentally safe pest control, water conservation and composting.

- When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 28.

- Tickets: Available for $12 at the Bark and Garden Center, The Barn, Fairie Perennial and Herb Gardens, Courtyard Nursery, Boulevard Nursery, Vintage Garden, Olympia Federal Savings (all branches) and at the Master Gardener's booth at the Olympia Farmers Market. Tickets include maps and brief descriptions of each garden, including directions. Tickets are also available at the gardens on the day of the tour.

- Shuttle: New this year on the tour, a free shuttle bus will stop at the four in-town gardens and at Roosevelt Elementary School every 15 minutes. Tour-goers can park at Roosevelt, at 1417 San Francisco St. N.E., and check out the Native Plant Salvage Project garden at the nearby San Francisco Street Bakery.

The Olympian Copyright 2001

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