Simply Green

This Santa Barbara acre featured little more than oleander, pittosporum and some fine old oaks when a retired East Coast garden designer and her husband snapped it up 12 years ago. First they focused on replacing a rundown 1950s ranch-style house with a tile-roofed villa, designed by architect Don Nulty. Next they attacked the garden, hiring landscape architect Heide Baldwin to create some structural stone walls.

Wanting a largely green palette for her garden, the retired designer chose a subtle mix of native and Mediterranean plants that thrive in Santa Barbara. For horticultural advice, she turned to her friends Don and David Harris, brothers who have practiced landscape gardening in Santa Barbara for more than 20 years. “We said ‘yes’ or’no’ to certain plants,” David says. “She really knew what she wanted. She just wasn’t sure what would work here and what wouldn’t.” She adds, “When I made mistakes, the Harrises never said, ‘I told you so.’ But I could see it in their eyes.”

Successes far outnumbered failures as a series of green rooms evolved. An entry motor court took shape around olive trees. A walled perennial and rose garden bloomed off the master bedroom near a sunken pool terrace with a rosemary “lawn.” Outside the kitchen, a dining courtyard began to fill with herbs and foliage plants.

With the exception of orange zinnias in a vegetable-and-cutting patch, colors have stayed subtle and controlled, ranging from the creamy whites of ‘Sally Holmes’ roses to the blues of ceanothus and scabiosa. But since she feels that “a small space has to look good most of the time,” she composed her garden scenes around texture more than bloom. Outside the bedroom, for example, silver artemisias and variegated euonymus contrast with darker rose leaves and jasmine vines. In the courtyard, the gray-greens of teucrium and westringia set off the deeper greens of rosemary and clematis.

The couple have since sold the house and built another a few miles away. There, despite her love of leafy tapestries, the gardener of the pair has developed a thirst for colored succulents, amassing jewel-like potted collages as garden focal points. “At first, I just liked not having to water them,” she admits. “Now I’m obsessed.”