Lake Forest Park Secret Garden Story

By Lee Rolfe

Last week, I visited one of the six Lake Forest Park Secret Gardens that will be on display on June 15th Secret Garden tour. As the owner and I walked the much thought over portions of the yard, I could see that every garden has a story.

Imagine you’re a young couple, moving into your new, maybe forever home in shady Lake Forest Park with two kids and a load of classic old shrubs you can’t leave behind. 

Equipped with your memories of relatives who gardened and the instruction of your former neighbors, you’re faced with making the compacted, sloped and barren strip that surrounds your house into a place where the kids can frolic. 

Crossed fingers, you might host BBQs and relax in a future oasis there, when you one-day retire.

You attend to the immediate, establishing the kids’ swing set/play area and getting those transported shrubs in the ground. 

The more you come to understand the site, you realize it needs better enclosure, regrading, and enriched soil amendment. 

You recognize the gold that is compost and realize it’s all over your back yard if you’re willing to gather fallen maple leaves and process them in the fall. 

You recognize the value of the maturing conifers onsite and take your time in deciding whether they’re truly hazardous to your property or can provide needed framework and shade.

As your kids mature and you find more time, you join the garden club, learn to cast concrete leaves, install a fern garden and circulating creek on the back slope, and keep studying the potential of your lot. 

The path that encircles your house grows narrower as you deepen the garden beds, anchored with woody structures like rhodies (‘Lem’s Cameo’), azaleas (scented ‘Quazar’), berberis, varied enkianthus, and hydrangea. 

Specimen trees like styrax, weeping conifers, stewartia, parrotia, oxydendron, Japanese maples, yew, larch, and beech are installed over the years. 

Some things like vine maples may overgrow their places, but you learn to cut them back hard, and have the patience and skill to cloak them with showy neighbors during their awkward regrowth.

Now being Pacific Northwesterners, you recognize there are treasures to be found at the LFP plant sale, plant catalogues, the Seattle Flower and Garden Show, Everett’s Sorticulture, Fred Meyer’s, Home Depot, and Costco.

You splurge on things like a box of enormous Persian onions, or perennials like dramatic voodoo lily, Spanish mouse tail plant, and rodgersia. Some of these are gathered on road trips to Port Townsend’s Far Reaches Farm and other specialty nurseries. 

Your collection of ferns, perennial geraniums, dahlias, clematis, hostas, peonies, and roses (‘Knock Out’, ‘de Rescht’, ‘Sally Holmes’), thrives and declines, depending on that downspout issue, the irrigation system, successive pests, and prolonged winter freezes. 

You give up the lawn weeding and consign yourself to installing a ribbon of artificial turf with zero regrets. Your 1989 aim to entertain, relax, and easily self-maintain your retirement getaway, although achieved, still invites further addition and creativity.

Sign up for the Secret Gardens of Lake Forest Park Garden Tour and gain rare access to this well loved garden, and five other gardens. Learn the secrets of the custom designed fence, circulating water feature, bed-edging groundcovers, a starter greenhouse, and use of annual flowers to offset all that green. 

Ask a Master Gardener and the garden owners how to keep down weeds, divide perennials, propagate with cuttings and enhance your property and your leisure and get more ideas for your own garden story.

Secret Gardens of Lake Forest Park Garden Tour and Market
Saturday, June 15 · 9am - 3pm PDT

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