Originally published Saturday, March 8, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

By Seattle's shore on Eastlake,
In the oyster light of spring
Tucked beneath the tide of progress,
On a hillside long forgotten
There she hauls in dirt and compost,
Coaxing beauty from the rubble.

-- Anon., Seattle, 1997

"I was burned out and bitter at the end, after 15 years of selling flowers on the street downtown, but I'm very happy now," said the smiling transplant from Michigan.

Layered against the early morning chill, she's at work in one of her gardens on what she and her several neighbors call "the last country road in Seattle," a little stretch of Fairview Avenue East hidden at lake level, beneath the shadow of new construction on the Eastlake hillside.

She's gone from selling single-stem blossoms to selling plants by the shovelful as the sole proprietor of Perennial Gardens. "I've planned and planted rooftop gardens on Queen Anne and I've done gardens on scraped-off, new construction at North Bend," she said.

"The money is in the commercial work, but the real fun and creativity is in residential work ... helping people become their own gardeners."

And she does it all from a rented lavender-pink and purple bungalow that was long ago a Lake Union fishermen's houseboat before it and several others were skidded onto dry land. Lisa has thousands of perennials, bulbs and shrubs planted in and on every available square foot of ground along an almost two-block stretch of this forgotten country road.

Most of the garden space actually is on her neighbors' properties or on vacant city-owned land and on the parking strips in front and the steep hillside rising to the east, in back.

The little homes, some of them without so much as a masonry foundation, do an earthquake rumba every time the heavy road and trenching machinery starts again on Eastlake Avenue East and intersecting streets above them. The corkscrew willows Lisa planted as twigs in parking strip boxes several years ago wiggle in time with the pile drivers.

But that heavy construction and the commercial boatyards across the narrow blacktop street haven't deterred Lisa. She has hauled hundreds of wheelbarrows of dirt, compost and potted plants up and down that street and hillside. Her particular pride is the "rubble garden."

"Can you believe that I got all that broken-up concrete from where people just dumped it along the other side of the street?" she said, nodding toward a terraced hillside. Each level is home to a different species or variety, all destined for someone else's garden.

"I'll sell the flowers from these hydrangeas to florists or arrangers, but the plants can tolerate wet feet and can help hold the hillside against all the seepage from above," she said.

The home she shares with her cabinetmaker husband, Andreas, really is lavendar-pink and purple. And it looks all the more story-bookish in the setting of shrubs, layered plantings and eclectic placement of fountains, garden sculpture and planters.

A wall fountain gives a gurgling signal on the sidewalk to the shaded backyard, directly below a sterile concrete office building and parking garage. Water runoff from that site plagues Lisa and her neighbors, but she's creating a sort of irrigation/drainage ditch that wends to a seasonal waterfall in a garden below the steep hillside.

"Would you believe that this all used to be some sort of an orchard, and that there's still a beautiful 100-year-old apple tree up in the back there," she asked, as we strolled along the string of garden spots.

"This backyard will be a shade garden, and my neighbor's back yard will be a holding area for plants. In the front, I'm installing a walk-through garden that will show different path treatments and plantings. I'll be able to show people what a particular plant looks like when it's mature."

As a garden consultant and planner, Lisa gets to go into other people's spaces and dreams. "But I'm sort of an 'exterior designer,' and I can show them how to work within a budget. When I first go in, it's 'my space,' but then I teach them what to, and how to, and they get it back."

Although she likes to work with families in new homes starting from scratch, she also delights "in going into a community like Ballard, where nothing outside has changed much in the past 50 years and showing new owners what they can do with what they've got."

Her own series of "borrowed" gardens back on Fairview Avenue get attention all year, but summer finds her dividing her time between landscaping and garden jobs away and at home. "I water by hand, at least two hours every day, which gives me time to spend with my plants and care for them. And I have a terrible habit of weeding in the dark.

"My husband will come to the door and yell: 'Wife, you can't even see anymore! It's time to come in!'"

Only a couple of her neighbors have even a few square feet of actual grass lawn, and Lisa openly lusts after that potential flower-bed space. "I don't even do lawns for customers. I've never used a lawn mower in my life, and I don't plan to."

Smack dab in the middle of what might be her parking strip sits a massive boulder unearthed by workers on the house-rattling road and sewer project nearby. "I was driving by and saw that rock and made a pitch for it," she said. "Ain't it beautiful?!"

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I. Perennial Gardens (Lisa Kröber) can be reached at (206) 325-9581.