“Let’s make a jungle!”
Linda Schoener and her husband, Andy Dulin, like to say they wanted an easy-care garden to complement the Mediterranean-inspired home they built in Edmonds’ Meadowdale neighborhood.
The idea of no lawn and nurturing a landscape of leafy vegetation and luscious low-growing plants captured their imagination.
“We wanted a wild feeling,” said Schoener, who owns Schoener’s Interiors, a home furnishings and accessories store in Lynnwood.
The couple was inspired by the Jurassic Parklike garden of Pat Repetowski, a West Seattle friend who offered considerable advice and numerous plants to get them started.
“It works,” Schoener said. “You just have to pack in the plants.”
That was four years ago. What you see today offers a hint of what must take place in real jungles, where plants grow before your eyes, the ground is obscured by foliage and fronds, and a thick canopy of 2-foot- long leaves provides shelter from the elements.
Abundant, yes. Carefree, no.
“The idea was that there would be no maintenance, but we were dead wrong,” said Dulin, an insurance agent who finds himself spending weekend hours armed with a machete to cut back wayward stems of bamboo and tame fast-growing kiwi vines.
“It isn’t just pulling weeds,” Schoener said. “We put in this garden and it keeps coming.”
A surprising lineup of hardy tropical plants surrounds the couple’s two-story residence. The home’s warm sandy-yellow color provides an excellent backdrop to the garden’s glossy green, chartreuse and burgundy-streaked foliage.
And the giant plants help soften the relatively geometric lines of the home, not to mention provide screening between Schoener and Dulin’s house and that of their friendly neighbors.
The land here has welcomed nearly everything this couple has planted. Many of the Mediterranean and tropical plants thrive in the sandy soil. The couple has added several feet of organic compost, which helps retain moisture and slow drainage.
“Our biggest problem is slugs,” Dulin said, offering a spray bottle of undiluted ammonia as his favorite attack against leaf-chomping slugs.
“And horsetail,” Schoener added. “The wild doesn’t know where to stop.”
She’s hoping that a recently planted row of laurel shrubs will eventually help define the outer edge of the garden. While it won’t halt the spread of horsetail, at least it might obscure the prolific bottlebrush-looking weed.
Promising even better surprises to come, the garden begins several hundred feet before you reach the house, along a descending driveway. The drive edges their undeveloped ravine, but Dulin and Schoener have appropriated a level section to plant a kitchen garden.
Adding formality to wine grapes and a strawberry patch are two life-sized marble figures, each depicting a season; (a third appears in Schoener’s cutting garden, while the fourth figure stands in their neighbor’s English-style garden).
The vegetable garden is planted with raspberries, artichokes, garlic, pumpkins, tomatillos, tomatoes, corn and a proliferation of herbs.
A cobble-paved driveway creates the feeling of a European auto-court. The area is studded with large-scale pots planted with hardy palm trees that Schoener inherited from one of her clients.
Vessels are also the best way to display some of the few tender plants that must be moved into the garage during winter, such as the Japanese red banana tree and Australian tree fern, which need protection from frost.
Planted in the corner of an L-shaped space created by two outer walls of the house, hardy bananas remain in the ground, wintered over with a good dose of mulch. By late summer and early fall, these glorious giants will reach dramatic heights of eight to 10 feet or higher – tall enough to walk beneath.
The smooth, paddle-shaped foliage reaches massive proportions, draping above complementary leaf shapes such as slender bamboo fronds, the windmill palm’s stiff fan-like blades, the classic acanthus leaf and boldly striped cannas.
“It has all this texture,” Schoener said.
“Everything is long and spiny or a mass of broadleaf evergreens,” Dulin added.
A small planting island at the crest of the driveway provides a showcase for many of the delicate-looking (but quite durable) glass art pieces that Schoener displays in her landscape.
Here, in the shade of a graceful mimosa tree, nestled between two New Zealand flaxes, a small pool provides the trickling sounds of water. You can’t help but look closer at the blown glass “lily pads” that dot the water’s surface. Elsewhere, colorful glass blooms mounted on stakes are displayed among lower growing plants, adding light-catching surprises in verdant places.
“I love to stick glass in the yard,” Schoener said. “It might be pieces from a light fixture or something from the store that has broken.”
Said Dulin: “She even uses glass Christmas balls.”
The use of glass in the garden echoes the couple’s collection of Northwest art glass. Many of these pieces are on display in the stairwell of their home, but they can also be viewed from the garden through a wall of clear glass that backs the display shelves.
Interior and exterior lighting illuminates the vibrant grouping at night.
In the distance, views of Admiralty Inlet provide constant entertainment for the garden’s owners and guests alike, especially when cruise ships and U.S. Navy aircraft carriers pass through the shipping channel.
A staircase from the side garden descends to the lower garden, pond and flagstone patio, which are also accessed through the downstairs family room. The pond curves around the outer edge of the patio, creating a focal point with water irises, lilies and grasses. Blown glass balls float on the water’s surface, helping to distract hungry herons from the resident koi.
A life-sized pair of ornamental herons also stands guard over the pond. But Schoener questions their effectiveness, especially after she happened upon a real heron perched at water’s edge in search of a meal.
“One of his feet was on a floating glass ball and he was reaching into the pond for a fish,” she said.
When asked whether she tried to drive the bird away by shouting, Schoener shook her head.
“No, I had to watch. After all, it’s just nature.”
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