Norma, my dear departed wife of fifty years and I owned and lived in four homes. We bought our first home in 1984, a dilapidated house near the southern border of Piedmont, CA, just a block from Oakland’s Grand Avenue. We lived there for five years, fixed it up, sold it, moved to Sonoma in 1990 and bought a six-room B&B on West Spain Street, where we lived. Eight years later, as a place to get away, we purchased the cheapest house in town on 5th Street East, originally a WW2 troop shack on Mare Island; we improved it and enlarged it. We sold the inn in 2003. This year we decided to downsize and recently moved to a condo off 5th Street West, the fourth home we have owned.
What all these homes had in common was a place for me to garden. Accordingly, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life taking care of plants while creating aesthetically pleasing outdoor spaces. Looking back, I’ve been thinking about the gardens I’ve created and wondering what drives me to repeatedly alter our homes with plants and gardens?
My mother was a terrific gardener and growing up I watched her transform our suburban backyard. And for her, aesthetics was all important, both inside our home and out. She filled the house with beautiful objects and art, each placed carefully and thoughtfully. Entering a room, one experienced a sense of harmonious whole; in her words, “it works.” I took that experience to heart and create gardens that “work” for me.
For me, a garden is both a place of refuge and an artful living sculpture. My palette is comprised of the colors, textures, and shapes of living things. The plants and I age alongside each other, like members of a family, and it gives me pleasure to be in their company. Some nursery owner friends of mine coined the term “hortisexual” to explain themselves, and I embrace that designation. For me, there’s something about the life energy and expression of plants that goes beyond just liking them.
In Piedmont, the garden was small, but I filled it with handmade redwood planter boxes on a gently sloping yard. A network of paths provided a way to meander, creating the illusion of greater space.
At the B&B, I created garden “rooms” associated with each inn space; they all were different, some with flowers, some with ferns, some with small fountains or succulents.
On 5th Street East, I filled a courtyard dominated by a ninety-foot tall Black Walnut tree with gardens of shade tolerant plants, timber bamboo and exotics (photo at top). At our condo, I’ve been working hard at creating spaces for my collection of staghorn ferns and exotic plants.
So part of the answer about my drive to garden is passion, a passion for life. But it’s only part of the answer. I am prone to impose my aesthetic on the world, in the words of my late wife, “to mark my territory,” much as a wild animal does, to declare my space. It’s all rather primitive, admittedly, primal actually: I like getting down and dirty with the world. I expect all devoted gardeners feel this way.
I will mix my wife’s ashes with the soil in the garden and when I’ve died, I want my ashes mixed into the garden soil too, where together, our old atoms can combine into the new living bodies of exotic plants.
