Sights and scents: Mukilteo tour features garden that blooms all year

Published 10:33 pm Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Lois Brown doesn’t let just any old plant into her garden.

It’s a relatively small space, after all.

Disciplined editing is essential on her 50-by-100-foot property, which is also home to a garage, a greenhouse and the quaint white cottage she shares with her husband, Bruce, in the heart of Mukilteo.

“I call this my shoehorn garden,” said Brown, a Snohomish County master gardener and president of the newly founded Mukilteo Community Garden. “I came from five acres.”

Plants are allowed in Brown’s impossibly tidy yet playful garden when they offer exquisite blooms, fantastic foliage or both.

Most plants have more than one season of interest and many offer mind-bendingly beautiful fragrance.

“This is a garden of scents all year long,” Brown said while walking a hazelnut-shell path near her herb and vegetable gardens. “There is a continuous bloom going on.”

This time of year, jasmine is flowering along with multiple potted brugmansias, featuring large fluted blooms that emit a sweet essence every evening.

In spring, it’s the honeysuckle that smells heavenly. In autumn, Brown enjoys the caramel cologne of falling katsura leaves, followed by the vanilla perfume of sarcococca in the winter.

Saturday, curious locals can see and sniff it all for themselves during the Mukilteo Garden &Quilt Tour, presented by the Mukilteo Way Garden Club and the Mukilteo Lighthouse Quilters, featuring 10 gardens creatively decorated with 140 quilts.

Fans of funky, colorful leaves will be happy to explore Brown’s oasis.

In one front-yard bed, neon-gold smoke bush shares the stage with the lacy, sexy, maroon leaves of Black Negligee cimicifuga and the purple-blushed leaves of Lady in Red hydrangea.

“Isn’t she a master with leaf textures?” said outgoing garden club president Pattye Snyder on a recent walk-through of Brown’s garden. “You can tell by the plant combinations and the colors. She’s incredible that way.”

In the backyard, three canna plants stretch their dramatically veined leaves to the sky while three metal leaf sculptures poke in the soil behind them.

Who needs blooms with that kind of display?

Brown’s garden, however, isn’t without its showy flowers. Roses and lilies are two shining stars.

Low-growing white carpet roses alternate with Autumn Joy sedum in an informal hedge in the front yard, for example, while peachy-pink Brass Band roses and huchera do the same kind of dance near the covered front porch.

Lilies shine their faces not only in a special 4-by-12-foot bed but also in pots and mixed borders throughout the garden for stunning summer displays.

One potted vignette in the back yard, just outside a back bedroom door, features pink bloomers exclusively, including carefully selected varieties of clematis, lily, sedum and hydrangea along with the pink-edged leaves of a Japanese maple.

Despite its modest size, Brown’s garden is also a mecca of backyard entertaining ideas.

Black tables and chairs of all sorts create three outdoor sitting areas on an aggregate concrete patio. Water trickles through a tiered bamboo fountain nearby. Leaf-motif metalwork pieces are tucked in everywhere.

If all that weren’t enough, Brown’s garden will have the added one-time tour interest of quilts by local quilters to coordinate with her plants and themes.

Just outside a courtyard dedicated to a hot tub and frog-themed garden art hangs “Frog Woman,” a handmade quilt by Ann Lindquist of Mukilteo.

Cathy Carter, a member of the garden club and a quilter, too, said quilt colors, shapes and creativity make perfect sense in a garden, if only for a special day of touring.

“Somehow you just put a quilt there and it speaks,” Carter said. “It’s like putting in a beautiful plant.”

Take the tour

What: The Mukilteo Garden &Quilt Tour, presented every two years by the Mukilteo Way Garden Club and the Mukilteo Lighthouse Quilters, features 10 gardens with 140 artfully hung quilts.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: Mukilteo

Cost: Tickets, which include maps and directions to the homes, are $12 and are available online and at The Needle &I, Pacific Fabrics &Crafts, Pacific Stone Co., all in Everett; Aunt Mary’s Quilt Shop at Smokey Point; Emery’s Garden in Lynnwood; Gallery Homes Real Estate in Mukilteo; Gathering Fabric Quilt Shop in Woodinville; and Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville.

Information: Call 425-361-0757 or see www.mukilteogardenandquilttour.org.

Three tips to take away

Autumn Joy: This type of sedum tends to flop easily in its fall blooming prime after a summer of growing. To keep this perennial tidy and sturdy, cut its new growth down by about half every Mother’s Day.

Small wonders: To gardeners who want a winning plant that is slow- and low-growing, Lois Brown recommends select varieties of pieris japonica or lily of the valley shrub. “They are wonderful, perfect garden plants in this area,” said Brown, who has multiple varieties of the shrub in her small yard. Brown also recommends green-flowering Limelight hydrangea, which grows as tall as most hydrangeas but not as wide for a more vertical, space-saving shape.

Don’t get overgrown: If you don’t have much space in your yard, look for slow-growing plants with either dwarf or nana in the name. You can also look at the expected 10-year height of plants. Be careful, however; some plants hit their stride at the 10-year mark and can take over your yard as they mature.

Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037; sjackson@heraldnet.com