Julie King's cottage-style garden in Seattle's University District is a stunning example of how much can be achieved in a limited space. Astute color combinations, bold plant pairings and scores of unusual species or cultivars of shrubs, trees and perennials — all come together in proportion to the small lot.
 

	King makes careful use of plant color, height and texture in her collector's garden. She finds dark foliage works well with the house's quince-hued exterior.

This balancing act grew from King's fertile mind, starting about eight years ago, when she focused seriously on gaining expertise. In her 22 years in this 1920s-era house, she has removed a tall laurel hedge on the east side, put up a wood fence, added a small lawn and built brick-sided raised beds, lath privacy screens and trellises, as well as a brick patio.

The King garden placed second in the 10th-annual Pacific Northwest Competition for Home Gardeners. Her prize includes round-trip airfare for two to the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, with two nights' lodging.

A venerable apple tree hovers over the patio King fashioned with brick. Autumn-blooming clematis winds through the tree, which has been grafted to produce three varieties of fruit. Here, King has added a slice of lawn, with hostas, aspidistra (often called cast-iron plant) and Clivia miniata joining in for the fair weather.

King has an artist's background and sensibility, and enjoys thinking about plant combinations. "I find it's useful to ask myself why I like something," she says.

A brugmansia adds oomph to the east corner of the house. A few steps away, by the south gate, a richly textured, red-leafed coleus and a pieris that blooms salmon-pink add to the hot border. "It reads well, with green behind," King says.

She has inserted Nicotiana langsdorffii to play its dangling sprays of bright-green flowers against the coleus and a germander with crispy leaves.

Grasses flank the path to soften or accent; cannas stand tall with dark-purple leaves that pulse in the sunlight. A variety of phormiums contribute their vertical accents to a cohesiveness that is rich with creative tension.

Because of her arts background, King is naturally attuned to color relationships. Consider the house paint. Yellow, for example, though useful to brighten corners, isn't suitable against the quince-toned building, so she harmonizes her palette accordingly.
 

Cats have a stylish way in and out of King's garden, thanks to her handiwork. Bits of white tile on the garden side make a fine welcome mat.

Elsewhere, away from the house, she has paired a dark hebe with a gray santolina, and a senecio with extravagant foliage next to a cotinus. Such groupings are intriguing, blend into the overall fabric and manage to seem natural.

Lately, as her garden matures, she is using fewer plant species and making larger groupings of them. From the long view down her main path, pairings relate effectively. As she phrases it, taking stuff out is as important as putting stuff in.

"I try not to be a snob about plants and to enjoy them on their own merits," King says. "But with so many new plants available, you move toward improvement."

This push for excellence includes tweaking the sight lines, adding slight curves to the main path — the axis — "to keep you going, but the slow way."

King, who describes herself as a graphic designer, a musician and a gardener on a budget, is well-known in the plant-aficionado community for her design skill. She has found value in joining garden-related groups and has opened her collector's garden to many others, including fellow members of the Northwest Perennial Alliance. She also volunteered at the Bellevue Botanical Garden for a time, where she helped work on the perennial border and learned how to use perennials more effectively in her own garden.
 

	An old window has been recycled to serve as a visual stopping point at the east end of Julie King's main garden path. The panes are reflective or revealing, in turn, and the object itself is intriguing in its soft setting.

King grew up in Kirkland, where both parents gardened. They had the family house built in the 1950s and later landscaped the raw land themselves. The black bamboo framing her back patio came from that childhood home.

King's garden is at its peak in late summer and early fall. Recently, she added a lot of small-flowered lilies, but her interest is leaning toward grasses and foliage that offers winter interest.

Her preference is to let plants grow as they're intended, though selective pruning keeps things balanced. She has lots of containers — some decorative, others holding new arrivals for the first year until they can go in the ground on their own. A friend with a greenhouse helps with cuttings and seed starting.

"What I do builds on the appreciation I feel," King says. "Spending time working in the garden is not a frivolous pursuit. Part of the pleasure is in sharing."

She shares her garden with passersby, to be sure, including two female hummingbirds, who liked what they saw and stayed. A Chilean vine, Eccremocarpus scaber (also called glory flower), helps them out.

Though she enjoys the public aspect of her sidewalk-view garden, she's created a couple of privacy areas. In one, she can sit on a bench behind the arrow-shaped leaves of an evergreen potato vine (Solanum jasminoides), unobserved, free to muse and weigh.

Not surprisingly, given her foothold in the neighborhood, her thoughts sometimes turn to how the garden might look 20 years from now. She expects cryptomeria will be the main plant, eventually. Sometimes she takes a photo and then manipulates the image in Photoshop to see how a particular area could look.

It's not instant gratification, King says, but then what is in gardening?
 

A small pump, a Chinese ceramic pot and an old sprinkling can are transformed into a fountain the gardener can hear inside the house.

Julie King takes pride in having created her paradise of rare, unusual or just plain beautiful plants while sticking to a budget.

 

Climbers and twiners embrace or soften the wood fence around King's garden, including this blue-flowered morning glory.

The orange-red flowers of clivia add dash to the garden in summer. King has had this plant for 15 or 20 years and moves it outdoors to bloom.