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  • Before & After: A 1940s-Suburban House Grows Up Gracefully in Mill Valley, CA – Gardenista

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    In the first decade of America’s post-war boom, a million and a half new houses were built, creating vast tracts of suburbia and giving young families their first opportunity to own a home. Nowadays, however, homebuyers who stumble on a 1940s relic in vintage condition often wonder if it’s worth it to buy a house that needs a major remodel?

    For Raleigh and Michael Zwerin, the answer was yes. In 2004 they bought a circa-1944 cottage in Mill Valley, California. From the moment they moved in, baby in tow, they started thinking about the house they wished they had. Nearly a decade later, after having a second baby (and learning firsthand that the charming creeks that crisscrossed the neighborhood were prone to flood in winter), they asked architect Kelly Haegglund for help.

    For Haegglund, who lives just a few blocks from the Zwerins, the challenge was to design a modern-family-sized house that didn’t loom like the Hulk over the rest of the neighborhood, where one-story bungalows and cottages were built on narrow lots. The result? A modern three-bedroom bungalow with pleasing architectural details borrowed from the Arts and Crafts era. A low-water landscape, designed by Mill Valley-based Bradanini & Associates, surrounds the house in year-round greenery.

    Photography by Mimi Giboin.

    After searching for months for just the right dark stain color, Raleigh Zwerin suddenly saw it by accident when she drove by a house under construction in nearby San Francisco.
    Above: After searching for months for just the right dark stain color, Raleigh Zwerin suddenly saw it by accident when she drove by a house under construction in nearby San Francisco.

    “I went back to that house in the city several times until I met the lead contractor and asked him for the color, but he said the owner of the house said it was proprietary information and he didn’t want to give it out,” says Raleigh. Luckily, though, the contractor took pity on her plight. “He said, ‘I’ll meet you somewhere and give you a shingle so you can match the color.’ We ended up in a rendezvous by the side of the road. He brought two shingles in his truck, I brought a box of cookies, and it was great.”

    The custom trim color? The Zwerins also gleaned it from the same side-of-the-road exchange.

    A curtain of cape rush (Chrondopetalum elephantinum) will reach heights of from 4 to 6 feet, creating an airy screening layer behind the picket fece.
    Above: A curtain of cape rush (Chrondopetalum elephantinum) will reach heights of from 4 to 6 feet, creating an airy screening layer behind the picket fece.

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  • Louise Wrinkle: ‘A Garden in Conversation’ Is About the Landscape in Alabama that Inspired Her Gardening Journey

    Louise Wrinkle: ‘A Garden in Conversation’ Is About the Landscape in Alabama that Inspired Her Gardening Journey

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    “I think time is the fourth dimension,” says Louise Agee Wrinkle, in the kind of Southern accent you’d hope to find in Alabama but so rarely do. She continues in a way that is dramatically unhurried: “Time, and change, and the garden, all tied together. Every time you deal with plants, you’re dealing with change.” In a remarkable half hour film presented by The Garden Conservancy (A Garden in Conversation: Louise Agee Wrinkle’s Southern Woodland Sanctuary), we are pulled into Louise Wrinkle’s world, the one she grew up in, and the same garden that she called “the jungle” as a child. On returning to the garden and the town of Mountain Brook 40 years ago, she was not tempted to give it a more formal and conventional look. Her approach, summed up in the title of the new edition of her book, Listen to the Land, is more responsive: “I’d rather stand back and look at the landscape, and let the landscape speak to me.” Let’s go for an amble.

    Photography courtesy of The Garden Conservancy.

    Above: What it looks like when nature guides the design.

    The region around Birmingham, Alabama, is mountainous and essentially wooded, with an enviable abundance of native flora. Mrs Wrinkle’s decision to gently guide the woodland rather than aggressively cultivate was logical, especially when described in her own no-nonsense voice: “The design is what nature gave me to work with,” she says, noting that there would be little point in pursuing an English, French or Japanese-style garden. “They are an imposed pattern on the landscape.”

    Above: Louise Agee Wrinkle. “Every garden is an autobiography, whether they’re prim and proper, or wild and woollier.”

    In forging her own path as a gardener, Louise Wrinkle has had a great influence in her region, and was a founding member of The Garden Conservancy, while taking an active involvement in the Garden Club of America. Now in her tenth decade (having published her book in her ninth), gardens all around Mountain Brook have held on to a strong sense of place, even with development going  on all around, because of visits and advice from the informal garden doctor. Recalls one member of the Little Garden Club, Louise would point to a garden’s essence, with the mantra “Play up, and clear out.”

    Above: A garden of pathways and streams, that asks visitors to look around, and then look around again.

    Louise Wrinkle assembled some of the region’s most interesting garden figures to help her in reinvigorating the garden. John Wilson of Golightly Landscape Architecture points to the rock work along the creek bed: “They look like they’ve always been there but every rock was meticulously thought out.” Landscape architect Norman Kent Johnson, a member of Louise’s original team, describes the garden as collaborative; it is not the result of garden plans, but was designed on site.

    Above: “It’s a designed landscape, not a preserved landscape,” says James Brayton Hall, CEO of the Garden Conservancy.

    A Garden in Conversation is the longest film that The Garden Conservancy has made so far (beautifully photographed by Michael Udris), and it is the first one to interview a garden’s creator. James Brayton Hall, CEO of the Garden Conservancy told me: “It’s a wonderful thing to hear a living person talk about how they design their garden, and why they garden. The Garden Conservancy is not about the ‘how’ of gardening; it’s about the ‘why’ of gardening. Gardening is a cultural activity and as Americans we’ve lost sight of that a little bit.”

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