The Spirit of Place

I had a great morning yesterday visiting a garden here in the Santa Cruz Mountains which demonstrates dramatically the sense of place Page Dickey writes about in her book Gardens in the Spirit of Place. Dickey says she profiles 'gardeners who have responded to their surroundings with simplicity, daring, and originality.' Here in Bonny Doon, an area of the Santa Cruz mountains, many of us have fought the spirit of this place in an effort to have the roses, lawns, and lilies we dream of in other, often British, gardens. In fact we have a Mediterranean climate, and elevations from sea level to 2500'. Mostly very dry, with no rain from May to November. Our area supported logging and vineyards in its early years, the mid-1800's, and since then has been a haven for booleggers, rural hippies, and other escapees from civilization, until now when it is being settled by well-to-do folks who want closer contact with nature. Some old-timers remain, and some, like us, who have lived here 40+ years are interested spectators to this demographic change. Recently I've been visiting some of the local gardens, particularly those whose owners find a way to speak through their garden designs with a clear vision and voice. One I've visited, Karen's garden, celebrates the spirit of this place with ancient oaks, drought-tolerant plants, and gravel groundcover, all arranged very beautifully to highlight the glorious view. The garden I visited yesterday, however, Sharon's garden, is quite different. Amazingly, it has water, and lots of it. Water! In springs! In rivulets! In ponds! What a concept! Sharon's task has been to channel the water that flows from springs on her property, and to keep it from simply creating a swampy, mucky mess. She gets as little summer water as we do from the skies, but her ground provides her with more than she needs, and in fact almost more than she can handle. Her garden reflects this water abundance, with many little runs and rills, small bridges, and one glorious pond. Sharon has further honored her setting by using stone from the nearby quarry for much of the hardscaping she has had installed. She has remodeled the small cabin and the barn on her property so that they are good for another century while retaining their look of rural California. Dickey says the gardens she profiles 'stem from an appreciation of where they live, rather than a yearning for somewhere else'. Both Karen's garden and Sharon's garden breathe the spirit of the Santa Cruz mountains, here in Bonny Doon. They capture the essence of the surrounding beauty of the mountain and the chaparrel, the creeks, the rocks, the towering trees. They inspire in me a dream of my own garden, hoping that one day my garden will also clearly reflect the spirit of its place in this world.

'ensnared by flowers, I fall on grass...' Marvell

I've been mulling over the stuff I saw and heard last Saturday at the Mediterranean Garden Society/Pacific Horticulture seminar and field trip. Monterey and Carmel are spectacular by definition, and the two gardens we saw were certainly dramatic. One was beautiful, the other rather stark, astoundingly expensive, and not, for me, inspiring, but the two did further call into question my issues about planting, and, in particular, the lawn. It is not currently politically correct to have a traditional lawn here in the California mountains, and certainly, the lawn is a huge consumer of both water and time/energy. On the other hand, a level green plane, as supplied by mown grass, does design things that nothing else I can think of seems to do. In my case, the visual busyness of the surrounding forest of tan oaks, Douglas firs, madrones, and redwoods needs calming down. I have walled off a smallish area, put flower borders around the perimeter, and centered it with - gasp - a lawn. It gets watered and mown twice a week in summer. To inspire myself with possible substitutes, I did purchase two books that were for sale at the seminar, The Dry Gardening Handbook by Filippi and California Native Plants for the Garden by Bornstein, Fross, and O'Brien. The first has great material on cistuses and lavender, and the latter is particularly exciting, since both Fross and O'Brien presented at the seminar, and were interesting and persuasive. Neither, however, gives me a good lawn alternative. The Bernard Trainor garden we saw has his usual koeleria meadow/lawn. The grass's sort of humpy, bumpy green does not do it for me. I really don't know how to get rid of my lawn in any way that will be visually satisfying. People sometimes have lawns also as play areas for grandchildren, croquet, etc., and that was a consideration for us early on, but now that our grandchildren are grown and our lawn is full of the remains of mole runs and gopher holes, making it not croquet-appropriate, the visual calm is its main function. So far nothing else works - but I'll keep trying. I certainly don't want to be a water hog, and less labor would be a blessing. So - onward!