RENTON, Wash. - The Southern garden writer in me was in deep trouble from the moment I saw the landscapes that were meant to convince me to give up our Panther Branch Shangri-La and move to this beautiful suburb of Seattle. I could feel my slightly lunatic alter ego that is Artist Woman emerging. Artist Woman whispered, "There must be a huge pasture somewhere nearby where garden writers wander around praising the garden goddesses and watching the dust build up on their keyboards -- be very afraid, Writer Woman."

I shuddered. This is a spooky place, where nongardening seems to reap considerably more than is sown by human hands. But it is a place for the painting of pictures -- whether with words, or brushes, or cameras.

I would happily explore all the joys of these non-gardens, even if my background in Southern gardening might come in handy only to catalog the same plants that we find difficult to cultivate east of the Blue Ridge. Plants thought of in these parts as "highly prized specimen" or "suitable for experienced gardeners" were blithely volunteering along roadsides and sprouting in the cracks of a busy cobblestone street in downtown Renton.

Let's back up a bit. In the four years since my daughter Dawn moved to her little orange house on a hill overlooking Renton, she's been trying to persuade the rest of the family to join her on the other coast. This year, she surprised my better half and me with a trip to Seattle in the guise of a 40th anniversary gift.

We knew her true motives. But we weren't prepared to be awestruck by the panoramic views and abundance of both ornamental and volunteer vegetation.

Planning and maintaining a Southern garden can consume so much time, money and energy -- in sweat equity and fossil fuels. Even the finest gardening skills here rarely achieve more than adequate to good results in sustaining our landscapes over long periods.

But knowing there are places on this broad continent that offer greatness with little more than reliance on Mother Nature's good graces is nice to know.

For example, the Japanese maple in its myriad varieties is a Southern favorite for its brilliant foliage, adaptability to soil types, cold and heat tolerance, and style. We call them focal points or specimen plants with architectural interest. In Seattle, Japanese maples are in such abundance that if one specimen was plucked from every front yard in Renton, there would still be more in that one town than on all of the Eastern Seaboard.

Try as I might, I never found a view that didn't include astonishingly colorful flowers and enormous, lush evergreens. Rose gardens abound with no evidence of blight, bugs or viruses. And cousins of those cute little "Fuzzy Face" sunflowers that I seeded into every sunny container last spring in my hot, humid garden mocked me from every street corner. When we got home, I searched for evidence that mine had even germinated, and found three little bedraggled blooms nodding weakly in the shade of a lemongrass plant.

The non-garden

The second part of our gift trip included a rental car cruise down Interstate 5 to see my sister's new house. We veered off on a short jaunt through ancient non-gardened evergreen forests for a peek at Crater Lake, then on to Joyce's place, which includes a view of Mount Shasta, in the high chaparral country of northern California.

Her hubby, Larry, single-handedly built the house and non-garden. In a place where the deer and the antelope played, they live in harmony with nature. Except nature, in the form of deer and other critters, kept trying to reclaim their stomping grounds on the side of a mountain formerly known as a wild place.

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