SECOND PLACE Gladys Smith and her husband, Raymond, have added vibrant color and several outdoor rooms to their vintage home in Tacoma.

Smith's gardening personality is more freely expressed behind the arbor gate twined with clematis and the climbing rose `Jacob's Coat.' There, the brightly patterned leaves of hot-country plants mix with hardy perennials in a bold but sophisticated arrangement. The nontropical parts of her private garden include outdoor rooms that incorporate English and Japanese influences.

Judges for the Pacific Northwest Competition for Home Gardeners took a close look and awarded what Smith calls her "garden of the world" second place in the eighth-annual contest. As first runner-up she receives a trip for two to this year's San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, with round-trip air fare, two nights' lodging and tickets to the exhibition.

Early in the competition, preliminary judges gave this relatively small garden high marks for skillful plant combinations that lent a personal, unique and somewhat theatrical flair to its several viewing areas.

They praised Smith's use of challenging or unusual plants and her juxtaposing of structures or green borders with contrasting color schemes. The original and deft interplay of plant choices suits the personality of the gardener, and judges responded to this.

"It's the feeling - whether it's right," Smith says. "You have to have your heart into it and then your own personality will naturally come. You decide what you like. Your idea of beauty may not be another's, but it says, `This is me!' "

A birdbath at one edge of the property line is flanked by a curve of clipped boxwood, vividly colored geraniums and blue-gray hostas. The tableau is not a focal point, per se, but it helps pull the eye away from a fence and nearby house.

Smith's definition surely includes balance and unity. Near the arbor gate, a lace-cup hydrangea has been pruned into tree form and helps visually link arbor and house. An intense palette of blues, yellows and greens bursts from the base of tall hornbeam trees screening this edge of the 50-by-100-foot lot. Included in garden beds here are phlox, Geranium `Ann Folkard,' a small fan palm, gooseneck loosestrife in a pot, elephant ear, buddleia and many other species in a cheery, elongated grouping. Magenta flowers and vivid greens brighten dark spots, with coleus, chartreuse-hued nicotiana and a Fuchsia magellanica hybrid standing out. Despite the tight company, plants are vigorous and healthy.

Toward the end of this pathway, somewhat out of the house's shadow, raised beds fully embrace the tropical theme, with banana, Amaranthus caudatus, flax, canna, impatiens and dahlia hybrids - many planted to look as if they are spilling out of or engulfing several large clay pots from Colombia.

Gardening trend-makers have embraced warm-country plants, but in this garden there is a personal subtext. Smith loves the vivid colors of her native Colombia, where she worked as a bacteriologist. (She now teaches medical and conversational Spanish in the Tacoma area.)

The unifying garden vision came in 1998, when one of her sons and his girlfriend helped dig and level a patio area behind a library and den addition's French doors. Smith installed the brick pavers herself. Suddenly, the concept of outdoor rooms that she had read about metamorphosed into reality.

On the west side of the house, an Asian-style garden room has a Chinese ceramic pot that has been converted to a basin fountain. The pot was picked up as a bargain several years ago in Vancouver, B.C.

Today, the pergola here supports a tender but vigorous Chilean jasmine that frames an outdoor dining table. (To help the jasmine survive Northwest winters, she covers the main stem and root zone, first with straw, then plastic mesh. She uncovers it in March.) A few paces away, a 6-by-3-foot pool is stocked with duckweed, a white-blooming water lily and goldfish. Smith describes this as a room for peace and meditation. A small statue of a winged cherub stands in memory of her sister. A lofty, pruned forsythia shelters a nearby bench. Stewartia and Parrotia persica trees screen the area.

Ivy, clematis and other robust climbers camouflage the chain-link fence on the south side and spill into an alley. Twisting through the branches of an old apple tree is a trumpet vine that is highly valued for seasonal spot color.

The cheery south border is nicely layered with white hydrangea, white roses, primroses, bright-purple petunias and cotoneaster. A variegated horseradish, with splashy cream-and-green leaves, caught the eye of more than one judge.

A few paces away, under a bay window, a low partition of clipped boxwood edges a compact, English-style knot garden. Featured here are rosemary, white nicotiana, ajuga, anemone, dahlias and a number of roses to lend a formal atmosphere.

Various leaf shapes and nuances of green serve as foils for the red beacon of a bromeliad, one of many delicate species nurtured by Smith in her prize-winning garden.

This theme blends into a mostly shade garden along the west side of the property devoted to an Asian-garden room. The tone becomes softer, with a trellised golden hops vine, a white-flowered rhododendron and red-blooming azaleas. A large cotoneaster has been trimmed into an arbor. Close at hand are a cast-iron Japanese lantern and Chinese ceramic urns used as fountain basins. A gate opens to the front garden and the street to complete the loop around the house.

About 5 percent of Smith's vegetation are cold-sensitive perennials or tender annuals and require special attention in the fall. She covers the banana plants in October, roots coleus cuttings for the next season and brings in bromeliads until June, when she once again sinks them in the garden in their pots until late September. Sometimes, too, she uses burlap sacks to protect New Zealand grasses from winter cold spells.

The itch to be a top-drawer gardener began about 20 years ago, when she and her husband, Raymond, added the library and den to the back of the house. The expanded backyard access made landscaping possibilities more interesting. About six years ago they added the pergola and she got truly serious about finding ways to make home, personality and landscape a harmonious whole.

A variegated hosta and lamb's ears contrast with the vivid-green leaves of a tender geranium along a border in the Smith garden.

She mined the local library, visited many gardens and attended seminars. She continues to meet with an informal gardening group in north Tacoma and frequently exchanges plants and constructive criticism with a neighbor.

The couple and their two boys feel fortunate to be up on the bluff, with Puget Sound just to the west. They say the neighborhood chemistry is unusually positive. They felt that rightness 23 years ago, when they moved into their 1907 house, and if anything, the fit gets better as time goes by. Just like the garden.