On the Land

"When we bought this place, it was just a little trash cabin, and we’d come up on weekends,” Wendi Montgomery says of her family’s home in the Madrona Heights community on Camano Island.

But a day at the beach just wasn’t enough for the Montgomery family, so after two years, they took down the little cabin on a bluff and built a home.

The next step was to create a livable outdoor space on the half acre of land immediately surrounding the house—a garden that would help feed them seasonally, be interesting throughout the year and yet leave a light imprint on the land.

The soil was poor before construction, so there was little to no landscape, Wendi recalls. “This whole area had been logged, and this is second or third growth.” What she, her husband, Kevin, and their three children wanted was a natural forest as a buffer along the upper road, with a more structured space near the house and plenty of room for gardens and entertaining.

In Harmony Sustainable Landscapes, a Bothell-based company known for its sustainable approach to garden design, turned the family’s wish into reality. Co-owner Mark Gile and his crew built the Montgomerys a Northwest landscape that enhances its setting, instead of altering it beyond recognition.

The first order of business was to offer visitors a place to park and then find a way to draw them toward the house. A flagstone courtyard near the parking area opens onto expansive steps down to a patio next to the house. “I wanted big rocks, and I wanted the stairs to fan out in a grand entrance,”  Wendi says.

“It’s a rustic home in a natural setting, and it was appropriate to use Cascade granite in this Northwest setting,” Gile says. The granite steps and terracing form a substantial space that draws visitors to stop and admire their immediate surroundings.

In summer, the beds on both sides of the stairs billow with flowers—peonies to begin the season and, later, hardy geraniums such as the  
violet-flowered ‘Rozanne’ along with soft mounds of Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Yaku Jima’). The season of interest for ornamental grasses lasts into winter, when their tawny dried foliage provides both movement and sound with every breeze.

In Harmony chose plants that provide year-round interest in 
texture, color and form and are at the same time easy-care. The installation crew dug in organic matter close to the house, but “we didn’t amend the native areas at all, because the soil there was good,” Gile says.

The family’s small flock of chickens lives in high style in a coop by the grand entrance, near enough to the house for quick egg gathering. “We built them a little palace,” Wendi says. Other food sources, including the vegetable bed, are just as handy, and ornamental plants, such as the dark-leaved ninebark shrub Physocarpus opulifolius ‘Diabolo’ decorate the corners and edges of the beds.

Small elements add elegant touches to the design: The sinuous edge of the patio resembles the coastline, for example. Pebble mosaics made from smooth river rocks placed on end fill in gaps at the corners, creating a visual rippling effect much like a bit of choppy water out in the passage.

The path around the north side of the house—made from crushed recycled concrete, which is also used as the base layer under paving—leads past the fruit garden. In Harmony built beds to hold some of the family’s favorites: raspberries, marionberries and tayberries that ripen all summer for snacks or harvesting. A cherry tree provides fruit from which, Wendi says, “we make one pie a year,” before the birds get the rest.

On the west side of the house, the dramatic scenery upstages the garden, so there the landscape opens up and allows the prospect of narrow Saratoga Passage and across to Whidbey Island’s Penn Cove to take center stage. Here, the house, second-story deck, terraced rock walls, plants, fire pit and seating areas stand back and let the view speak for itself.

More massive rocks, including a 15-ton outcropping, form terraces, steps and seating around the fire pit. At each end of the house, plantings of upright feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’) stand as sentinels. The grass tops out at 5 feet high with its brown flower stalks, so the designers carefully kept them to the side and the view unobstructed.

Warm tones mark the plantings, such as black-eyed Susan and Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Jenny Bloom’. Blue accents come from low-growing Lithodora and both Spanish and English lavender. At the edge of the lawn, a buffer of native plants marks the drop down to the beach, another 75 feet away.

Near the parking area, a remnant of the past remains. “We had to take down a big redwood to make room for the house,” Wendi says. “I hated that, but we kept the trunk and use it as a nurse log.” The log also helps hold up the hill for the level parking area.

Between the parking and grand entrance lies the natural area. “I love meandering,” Wendi says of the forest path that leads a casual trek through the trees. “And my son wanted a bridge,” she says, “so we included a dry stream bed” over which her son’s bridge now spans.

The family loves the new garden, and their only disagreement is in identifying the house’s aspect. “No one can agree on where the front of the house is,” Wendi says. Windows, deck and the large rock fire pit face west and the water, and so the children call that the front. But Wendi calls the grand entry and stone patio the front: “That’s what people see first.”

This article originally appeared in the July-August 2010 issue of Seattle Homes & Lifestyles. All information in the article was accurate at presstime.

Landscape Design & Construction: Mark Gile, Bryan LaComa, In Harmony Sustainable Landscapes, Bothell, (888) 472-7748.