File this under Seemingly Antithetical but True: The tinier the outdoor space, the more verdant it should be. “We find that minimalist garden strategies work well on large, vast spaces, while smaller gardens are more conducive to wild, exuberant approaches,” says David Godshall of LA- and San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Terremoto. “Therefore, in this small space, we got wild.”
The garden in question belongs to architect Fredrik Nilsson of Studio Nilsson, a neighbor and friend of David’s, and was, when the pair began, “mostly just dust,” David remembers. Construction had just wrapped on the compact, architecturally forward LA house Fredrik designed for his young family, and the remaining space on the lot was tight—some of it set at an incline. Still, the family “wanted to make the most of it. They have a young daughter and wanted to spend family time together outside as well,” David says.
Creating the feeling of an oasis, even in a busy urban environment, was key. “Through conversation and walking onsite together, we realized we want to create privacy from the street, and thus we planted jasmine to intertwine with the steel fence and make the garden smell wonderful,” says David. A mix of native California flora, low-water plantings, places to lounge, and artfully hardscaped paths complete the pocket-sized escape.
Join us for a look at this garden that’s every bit as lush as it is compact.
Photography by Caitlin Atkinson, courtesy of Terremoto.
Above: The house, designed by Fredrik, is set on a petite lot. When Terremoto took on the project, David remembers, “Fredrik had designed the concrete aspects of the hardscape, and those were in place.” Fredrik had also designed the powder-coated wire-mesh fence: “It’s designed to allow vines to grab hold and take over with time while still preserving a visual connection to the street and into the property,” he explains. “The fence facing the two neighboring properties is cedar planks. It has the same materiality as the house but untreated, allowing it to weather over time.” Above: Tiered gravel steps lead to a small sitting area. “The planting plan is really a mix of native Southern California species and low-water regional species as well,” says David. “The garden is as much for local insects and wildlife as it is for the family.”
Like every public garden, the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA, closed when the pandemic struck. Wanting to connect with gardeners during that time, the garden began offering online classes. “After a year we had a pretty good idea of what people were interested in as well as what they needed to know—but maybe didn’t know that they needed to know,” explain Cricket Riley and Alice Kitajima, two of the book’s coauthors. In March 2021, Riley and Kitajima helped the Ruth Bancroft Garden launch their Dry Garden Design Certificate Program, which hundreds of gardeners have since completed. Now, Designing the Lush Dry Garden is meant to bring the ideas taught in this course and the deep institutional knowledge of the Ruth Bancroft Garden to an even wider audience.
Photography by Caitlin Atkinson for Designing the Lush Dry Garden.
Above: The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA. This is what the authors mean by a “lush dry garden.”
So who is this book for? Fellow Gardenista contributor Kier Homes, the third coauthor of the book, tells me, “It’s for gardeners curious about switching or tweaking the way they currently garden to an approach that is more water-conscious, sustainable, resilient, and in-sync with their climate.” Riley adds the book was written with both the novice and experienced gardener in mind. The lessons in the first part of the book lay out the basic steps to design a low-water garden, but “we also provide extensive lists of dependable, low-water plants that many people experienced in the field might not know about,” she notes. (The favorite plant lists alone might be worth the cover price.)
Above: Aloe ‘Creamsicle’ in full bloom under a mature Aloe ‘Hercules’ in the Ruth Bancroft Garden.
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista contributor Clare Coulson is from June 2022.
In the summer of 2017, I planted a gravel garden along a scrappy stretch of land that edged a recently renovated studio. I wanted to create a small garden that was a space for guests to look out to or sit in. I knew that this was a sunbaked area—it faces south and has no protection from either the summer sun or the wind that whips through the fields it faces out onto. And with extremely free-draining sandy soil, whatever was planted here had to be resilient and, as I had no plans to irrigate, drought-tolerant, too.
Photography by Clare Coulson.
Above: Stipa tenuissima is the star plant in the garden, acting as a tactile and shimmering base for the spires of verbascum and verbena to move through.
I signed up for the excellent gravel garden study day at Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex, which was a step-by-step with David Ward (he worked with Beth when she created her famed gravel garden in the 1980s). His key tips were: 1) choose plants carefully (Beth’s mantra, after all, was ‘right plant, right place’); and 2) start those plants off well. That means digging in some compost at the outset to ensure that you’ve got good soil and then soaking plants really well before you plant them, ideally leaving each plant soaking in a bucket of water for an hour before planting. Water everything well, but beyond this do not get out the hose.
Above: Dianthus carthusianorum is the perfect dry garden plant; from a low mound of fine leaves, it sends up leggy stems topped with hot pink flowers. They will occasionally re-flower if deadheaded.
We used a sub-base to stabilize the areas where we would walk around the beds and this was topped with gravel. I was left with two organic shaped large beds and once everything was planted I added some gravel around the plants, too, which helps minimize weeds but also retains some moisture.
To save money I grew almost every plant from seed. Some of those plants were incredibly easy to grow: Stipa tenuissima, Dianthus carthusianorum and Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’. Others, including Verbena bonariensis and Eryngium giganteum, I found much more tricky from seed, but they were brilliant self seeders; from a couple of verbena plants, there is now a self-seeded verbena forest in high summer of hundreds of plants that have just placed themselves in any available crack.
Above: Considering a garden from inside a house or building is crucial, creating vistas and sightlines from the place where you might sit and look out.
And the garden has really evolved to be a garden of self-seeders. Poppies have introduced themselves, flowering earlier than everything else in the summer and providing some color. These are followed by hundreds of white verbasums in June and July before the verbena peaks in late summer. I’ve also added some bulbs too—Narcissus ‘Thalia’ for spring and then Allium spaerocephalon for a later color pop around late June.
Light and movement are key to the garden’s success and I can’t say I thought that much about either when I was starting out as a gardener. The sun rises directly behind the garden providing some jaw-dropping moments in the morning. When the grasses here, which include Stipa gigantea and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foester’ and especially the Stipa tenuissima, move gently on the breeze, it becomes a mesmerizing highly, tactile space. But this is also a garden for insects, and through the summer the garden hums all day and evening with a succession of bees, hoverflies, and butterflies.
Self seeders can, of course, be a pain to garden with. Each summer something edges more into focus and threatens to take over. There’s a constant battle with bronze fennel; its hazy clouds of foliage provide beautiful texture in spring and I love the towering umbels and incredible aromatic element they provide, but leave them to seed at your peril.
When Stephanie Wong and her partner, Daniel Watson, found their future home in Atwater Village back in 2021, they saw potential behind the concrete lot and dated details. “During the search, we saw so many quick flips with cheap finishes and cookie cutter design choices. Although the property needed work, we were glad to design it in a way that matched our personal vision,” Stephanie describes. It was their first renovation and first landscape project. The result is a thoughtfully updated 1920s Spanish-style property the couple dubbed Finca Glenfeliz. Join us for a tour of the garden.
Above: The building seen here is former two-car garage converted into a small studio the couple now rents for production through Peerspace. The etched terracotta pots at the entrance are from Plant Provisions. Photograph by Marc Gabor for Finca Glenfeliz.
Stephanie works as Brand Director for ORCA, an LA-based landscape design and outdoor product studio founded by Molly Sedlacek. “The garden renovation was actually what brought me to work with ORCA in the first place,” she says. “I fell in love with the landscape design process. It truly is an art form.”
Above: Shown here is a Catalina Ironwood tree, a California native found at Devil Mountain Nursery. As for the grass, “we went with a native California no-mow mix which requires less water, feels more wild, and looks less manicured,” Stephanie explains. “We wanted this zone to feel like a meadow so we brought in a chunk wood stool from Angel City Lumber and natural stone.” Photograph by Marc Gabor for Finca Glenfeliz.
Above: For added privacy from the street, they replaced the open wrought iron gate with a cedar gate. The gravel is Del Rio Pea Gravel and the path is made up of Utah Sunrise Flagstones from Bourget Bros. It’s lined with two vegetable gardens that Daniel built of redwood and a mix of California natives and Australian species. Photograph by Marc Gabor for Finca Glenfeliz.
For the first phase, Stephanie and Daniel worked with landscape designer Nola Talmadge at Field Sound who created the overall layout and plant palette while procuring hard-to-find materials like the flagstones, plants, and boulders. Inspired by the gardens of Mexico and the Mediterranean, the couple brought it in a warmer palette of pebbles, grasses, and stone. They demolished the concrete driveway that runs the length of the property from the street to the garage. From there they brought in bigger trees, boulders, laid flagstones, and pea gravel.
For the second phase, Stephanie and Daniel focused on the finishes themselves. Since joining ORCA, they’ve installed ORCA pavers to create a landing off the back studio and cladded the front porch in ORCA tiles to hide the cracked concrete. “The most rewarding part was seeing so much life in our garden after we removed the concrete and dying grass. I started seeing butterflies, bees, and birds creating a mini ecosystem in our backyard,” says Stephanie.
Above: For the minimal outdoor shower, the idea was to feel immersed in plant life. They sourced two pieces of Deodar Cedar beams from Angel City Lumber and planted Acacia iteaphylla on either side. Photograph by Austin John for Finca Glenfeliz.
In the introduction to her epic new book, Visionary; Gardens and Landscapes for our Future, photographer Clare Takacs admits that in 2021 she set out to shoot only 30 to 40 gardens across the Mediterranean for the book. Instead the project, co-created with landscape architect Giacomo Guzzon, turned into an odyssey of sorts, with almost 80 gardens shot from Carmel Valley, California, to The Dandenongs in Australia, close to where she grew up.
The book showcases the way that garden design is attempting to keep pace with climate change and how it can respond to or mitigate the effects of prolonged drought, record-breaking temperatures, flooding, and extreme rainfall on our gardens. It’s a sumptuous survey of resilient garden design right now; the results are inspiring and thought-provoking, and illustrate how nature can thrive even in the most hostile environments.
Below, a peek at just a few of the magnificent gardens featured.
Above: In the Toledo garden, in Talavera de la Reina, Spain, designer Fernando Martos uses a limited palette and an understated approach to link this garden to the wider landscape. Enclosed by a curving dry stone wall, the garden features large boulders dotted around low-rise buildings and a farmhouse. The planting includes species that can cope with the exceptionally harsh environment including Euphorbia seguieriana, Stachys byzantina, Achillea tomentosa, Phlomis viscosa, and prostrate rosemary, as well as light-catching grasses including Sesleria ‘Greenlee’ and Stipa gigantea. Above: A guesthouse on an old estate in the north of Ibiza is entirely enclosed in terraced gardens with stone terraces matching the house and gravel walkways, and neat Mediterranean plantings of prostrate rosemary, ballota, achillea, Helichrysum orientale and Santolina chamaecyparissus.
Above: James Basson’s work in the south of France, where his landscape business is based, is well-known for its often trail-blazing response to climate change and reassessment of what garden design can be. His drought-tolerant plantings are more in keeping with the wild landscapes of the region. In this early project there are olive and cypress trees, clipped shrubs including rosemary, bupleurum and teucrium along with the intense blue flowers of pervoskia.
Above: The terraced gardens of The Rooster in Antiparos, Greece, meld into the landscape with native planting, fig and olive trees, along with Juniperus oxycedrus, Bougainvillea spectabilis as well as Sarcopoterium spinosum, a native species reintroduced by local nurseries. Above: A series of roof gardens designed by Piet Oudolf in collaboration with Tom de Witte, surround a private house south of Amsterdam. Plants including Allium tanguticum ‘Summer Beauty’, Amsonia hubrichtii, Calamintha nepeta, Eryngium bourgatii, Limonium platyphyllum, lavandula, Salvia yangii (syn. Perovskia atriplicifolia), Sesleria autumnalis, sporobolus, echinacea, Teucrium x lucidrys, agastache, Origanum laevigatum, Salvia sclarea, Sedum matrona,Stipa tirsa, Stachys byzantina and Festuca mairei are planted into six inches of free-draining substrate.
What happens beneath the gravel is key. Paths need to be built on a strong permeable sub-base of at least four inches. Most firms selling these products have a calculator so you can work out how many tonnes you’ll need. Once your sub-base material is spread out, you will need to use a vibrating plate to firm it up and make a stable surface. Gravel or other stones can then be spread on top of this stable base and around the plants as an additional mulch.
6. You may miss out on spring—unless you plan for it.
Above: Basalt stepping stones through a gravel garden designed by Annie Guilfoyle.
An additional layer of planting using bulbs will ensure that in spring and early summer, before many perennials have hit their stride, you can still have a good display. Choose a range of bulbs that will flower in succession, and will need little maintenance such as narcissi, Iris reticulata, Allium cristophii, and bearded iris, which will love the free-draining, sunny conditions of the dry garden.
7. Gravel gardens can be pollinator heavens.
Above: Richly layered planting around a graveled area at Tattinghall Hall in Cheshire, England. Photograph by Clare Coulson.
One of the most joyful benefits of a gravel garden full of bee-friendly planting is that it will be alive with insects, bees, ladybirds, moths, and butterflies all summer. By carefully combining plants and ensuring a succession of flowering you can boost this further; alongside summer-flowering perennials (such as buddleia, verbena, hebes) and herbs (like marjoram or oregano), add later flowering perennials, too, including sedums, eupatorium, gaura, and monarda to keep pollinators buzzing right through autumn.
