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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2016
Surfside gardener creates showplace yard on a shoestring
Miller is no stranger to
successful gardening
in the
garden
By LYNDA LAYNE
Special to EO Media Group
SURFSIDE, Wash. — George Miller’s
Surfside yard often stops trafic. He says he
doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
But one look at this spectacular colorful mas-
terpiece can prompt even the most shy person
to put on the brakes, roll down a window and
ask, “How’d ‘ya do all this?”
Miller’s brown single-wide, with a name
sign and lagpole in the front yard, is on 324th
Place, on the road to Surfside’s compactor.
“Living here is like going back in time 50
years,” Miller explained. “People walk by,
stop and talk, or they’ll stop their cars right
in the middle of the street and visit. That’s the
way we do it here. We’re on beach time.”
When questions start lying from onlook-
ers, what they ind out is wonderfully
mind-boggling. Miller created this landscape
on a shoestring, dividing plants each year,
using varieties that reseed, making his own
soil combination and cutting starts from gera-
niums, fuchsias and any other plants he can
propagate.
Another surprise is the age factor. Miller
will turn 80 this winter. Still, he maintains all
this on his own and he rather shyly comments
he has it under control, though he admits with
a quiet laugh that as he gets older, “It takes
longer to do things. I’ve slowed down a lot.”
Maintaining the beauty
All around Miller’s house there are low-
ers, plants and trees, but now that everything
is established, he has maintenance down to a
science.
“It’s work in the spring, because I’m out
there on my hands and knees, getting all the
weeds out, and in the fall, I’m out here clean-
ing everything up.” he explained. In those fall
weeks, he amends soil, cuts plants back and
transfers some into what he calls his garden
house. But right now, in the summer months
when everything seems to be blooming at full
burst, he can just sit on his porch with a cup
of coffee and enjoy the view.
Hanging baskets and containers are a big
part of Miller’s landscape and they’re the
only thing he has to regularly maintain in the
summer months. There are fuchsias, petunias
and other colorful plants. “This time of year,
I have to water them almost every day,” he
said. “It’s the wind that dries them out. The
ones I have hanging in the front have wires to
keep the wind from whipping them around.
They’re tied down.”
Garden beauty on a budget
Miller lives on Social Security and inds
ways to garden with little monetary output.
“Plants are getting so expensive any-
more, I can’t afford to buy them,” he said.
But speaking of some of his colorful annual
plants, he added, “I do buy some petunias
and impatiens every year. But all my gera-
niums and fuchsias that are in hanging bas-
kets, they all go into my garden house for
winter. I cut fuchsias back to the pot edge.”
he explained.
His geraniums, on the other hand, don’t get
cut back until early spring, but do share the
garden house in the winter with other plants.
He keeps a light on the plants for winter and
waters them lightly. Even though they’re dor-
mant for those months, “You don’t want them
to go completely dry.”
Lynda Lane/Submitted Photos
Miller checks a hanging basket full of petunias on the west side of his home. While
he does buy a few such annuals each spring, almost all of his garden has been es-
tablished by dividing plants each year and keeping varieties that reseed themselves.
He originally started with just three daisy plants and through dividing them each
year, he now has them “all over the place.”
Not just lowers
This year, Miller planted several squash
plants from seed, another money saving plan.
He also has potatoes growing near them, on
the west side of his house. But the big project
growing now in his garden house are toma-
toes, which are in containers set in heated
water trays. Most of the tomato plants are
Romas. “Also, I have some larger ones that I
haven’t tried before” he said.
With these homegrown tomatoes, he
makes tomato sauce. “I use it to make my spa-
ghetti and chili,” he said. And making chili is
a serious venture. “I’ve won irst, second and
third place in the chili contest we have here in
Surfside,” he said. These tomatoes are what
he calls his “secret ingredient” to this success.
Garden house:
For many seasons and reasons
Roughly 8 by 10 feet, Miller said his
current garden house used to be a laun-
dry room “for the people who lived here
before.” It had no windows, so part of the
conversion that Miller did was add a lot
of glass. “I got the windows for free from
the compactor,” he explained, adding that,
“This is the best thing I ever did. I use this
a lot. I can do my potting in the spring in
here.” And of course, he grows his trea-
sured tomatoes inside and winters over
many of his other plants.
Magical transformation
Glassing in the garden house wasn’t the
only transformation done by Miller when
he bought this place 12 years ago. “When I
came here, there were three rhododendrons
and dead grass. Weeds had grown over all
the gravel in the driveway. And the house
was yellow.”
His original intent was to “just have a lit-
tle porch and a couple of potted plants and
I could sit there and contemplate my life
that has passed by.” But each time he sat
and looked, he realized what could be. He
painted the house brown and in the front,
built a trellis and planted clematis that has
now thickly spread up and over.
“The clematis is a spectacular feature in
the spring,” he said. “Everybody just raves
about it.”
He dug out all the weeds from the drive-
way and put in a border on each side with
white-painted two-by-fours. And then came
what his calls the perennial bed, along one
side of the driveway. “All the things in here
come up year after year. It’s kind of like a
cycle. When spring irst comes, primroses
come up and they get big old-fashioned
clusters of yellow lowers. They’re spectac-
ular. The poppies reseed themselves, so keep
coming up.” He also planted trees, which
give him a screen from neighbors. The huge
daisies are really blooming now and the
dahlias are bright. He started out with just
three daisy plants and a few dahlias and by
taking advantage of dividing, now has these
“all over the place.”
Walking around his yard, he commented
on a number of plants, including sedums.
“They get a beautiful lavender color,” he
said. And there are also tall elegant tiger lily
lowers. The variety is endless.
Compost bins
Every weed he pulled, the clippings
from edging new borders and any pruning
and clipping pieces went right into the two
sets of double compost bins he has behind
his house. In the fall, when he has big pieces
from pruning, he burns them and then puts
the resulting ash in the bins. “I have made
my soil, because I compost everything,” he
explained, adding that sand mixed with all
these organic ingredients really helps to pro-
duce a luffy, clean soil mix.
Skills recognized
Soon, Miller’s gardening skills were
being recognized by many people in Surf-
side. And he became involved with the com-
munity. “I’m secretary of the board,” he
said. “So I started getting involved at our
cabana down here by the lake. It was run
down.” He designed the landscaping for that
area. The county brought him 10 truckloads
of ill dirt they were removing from another
place. “We made a berm. And then we had
a community garage sale and raised a cou-
ple thousand dollars to buy plants. This is
about 10 years ago. And then someone said,
George, you did such a nice job there, can
you igure out something for down at the
306th for the bridge, Veteran’s Park, so I
designed that, too. And I ended up doing a
couple other cabanas, doing the landscaping
for those, too.”
Tall daisies flank a fountain that Miller has
owned for about 30 years. Crows some-
times land there to soak their food in water.
It didn’t stop there. Miller said, “Two
years ago, at the end of the lake over here,
me and a couple of my friends, we call our-
selves The Old Guys, got in there and started
cutting the brush and stuff, because that
belongs to Surfside. We took all of the brush
out of there. Cleaned it up. The community
relations committee donated the bench and I
made a little sign that says Deer Lake with
stick-on letters. In my blog — I’m famous
for my blog — I put on there about that
cleanup and sign and I got an email from
a guy that lives in California who wants to
stay anonymous. He said, ‘I’m sending you
something UPS.’ About two weeks ago, it
came. It was a carved sign that says Deer
Lake on it.”
Sixty-ive years of gardening
Miller didn’t learn his gardening and
design skills overnight. It all started when he
was a teen. “I grew up in Camas and when I
was a kid there, I was a member of the Cam-
as-Washougal Garden Club. I was about 15
years old. They told me I was the young-
est member they’d ever had. So, I’ve been
doing this for a long time.”
Throughout his life, he has gardened,
a skill very much recognized by his wife,
Joyce. They were married for 35 years and
21 years ago, he lost her to cancer. At the
back of his Surfside property is a memo-
rial to her, which he brought with him from
where they lived in Clark County. “We were
out in the Yacolt area. We lived in the moun-
tains. I had 3 1/2 acres. If you think this
place is something, you should have seen
that. I had such a park there and I opened it
to the public to come in. Up in the woods on
a little hill there, I built a covered memorial,
like a gazebo. I had this memorial (plaque)
and lights and a bench. I had a guest book for
people to sign. I had a sign out on the road,
open to the public. I had a pond built. Peo-
ple would come in and walk around. I had 50
rhododendron plants. People would tour the
grounds and then sign in.”
He recalls all “the nice things people
said,” when they signed the guest book. But
perhaps, for Joyce, what he says often now
is the biggest gift of all. “My wife was the
most wonderful woman in the world. When
I lost her to cancer, it very nearly killed me,”
he said.
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