Re. Re. formal vs. natural

---

Hi Sean, Hi Nan,

Thanks for your comments.  I agree with both of you, actually.  What to me is most important in a garden is its relationship to the place it's in: ideally, it's a dialogue between the gardener, the plants, and the surrounding space outside the garden.  I actually like untrammeled nature, but a garden has to serve practical functions as well: I look at it as a habitat zoo for me.  I also am interested in habitat gardening, or creating habitat for some of the creatures we displace by our existence.  As humanity increases, we are confronted by the frightening possibility that we actually might "have dominion over all living things".

We live in an oversize house on an oversize lot (the house is superfluous, but I like the lot: 15000 square feet) in a new subdivision creeping up the hills of Simi Valley.  The neighboring houses, most of which have been professionally landscaped, are very conventional: lawns, stamped concrete, Queen Palms and White Birches (now that's a natural!), and indestructible perennials and shrubs (Dietes, Agapanthus, Rhaphiolepis, etc.).  I think my leaning toward formality is a passive resistance to the universally curvilinear "naturalistic" swimming pools and rock waterfalls, the bendaboard beds of flowers, and the general absence of any straight lines anywhere in the landscape.  It all strikes me as unimaginative and aesthetically, well, lazy.

The surrounding hills are magnificent, in an austere way.  Burned in 2003, they're a grassland with widely scattered Rhus laurina and Rhus ovata, green as Killarney in winter, brown as Isfahan as I write.  This year I notice Artemisia californica re-colonising the grassland, so hopefully it will revert to Coastal Sage Scrub.

Our own garden is a work in progress, with most of the work done by me.  My partner Tom is an executive at Disney, while I've given up a landscape contracting business to be a full-time father to our two adopted children Alex(5) and Annalise(3).  Both of the kids were born with spina bifida, and crawl when not in their wheelchairs, (which brings a whole new element to garden design, but that's another story).

Anyway, the garden is evolving, slowly as I don't have a crew anymore, to be a mediterranean garden with a generous amount of California natives, the latter planted more for their wildlife value than for their looks.  I try to combine natives with non-natives, and to use natives in non-native ways: a pergola planted with Vitis californica 'Roger's Red, or Penstemon 'Margarita BOP' woven into a perennial border, a boxwood parterre surrounding Heuchera 'Genevieve', Fragaria chilensis as a groundcover beneath olive trees.

Replacing the lawns my partner enjoys (though our kids are indifferent to: even for kids who can run around, I think lawn as playspace is over-rated) is the big task, but it takes time, and I already have a full-time job.  I'm working on (or should be working on right now) our side yard, which when the Fragaria and Dymondia have grown I'll post photos, as well as the smaller chaparral garden, and the front berm of lavender, rosemary, and toyon.  I'd love to see photos of your gardens if they're more photogenic than mine right now.

yours,

Ben Wiswall