Old Adobe Garden
The third garden I checked out was the garden on Old Adobe Rd. It’s an impressive garden with a large wildflower meadow and flagstone labyrinth, an extensive recirculating creek and pond system, and extensive stone work. It’s one of the most extensive private native gardens I’ve ever seen, up there in the same class as the Fleming garden, managing to convey the feeling of a house set in a native meadow, rather than just a garden next to a house.
Like with Town Mouse’s garden, the mid-day lighting was pretty harsh. A few more photos are below.
The garden includes some nice non-native specimens, the viburnum being the highlight. I always like to see a few non-natives in such a devoted native garden.
The shade area had one of the larger patches of ginger I’ve seen, with a variety of different plants rising out of it. There was a lot more to see, and I’d happily go back to see it or Town Mouse’s garden or the Greywater Wetland garden again on next year’s tour.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 at 10:41 pm and is filed under private gardens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 7th, 2013 at 9:34 pm
I’ve been crazy-backed up in reading but this is a good one to get my feet wet again. I like the use of water, and the shade area drops my blood pressure five points just looking at it. Really nice, all that green. The meadow-ey feature is really colorful, but in the opening picture the house seems to jump up from the flat plantings. I’m used to foundation plantings or at least something with some height to soften the transition. But looking at the other photos it looks like there are a few taller plants mixed in.
May 7th, 2013 at 10:23 pm
I know what you mean about foundation plantings. There were foundation plantings in other parts of the house, the Viburnum in one photo and the bit of trellis visible in another for instance, and with better light and a wider angle I could have bracketed the house in that photo. But at the meadow the foundation plants were Hummingbird Sage, Aster, and other perennial-type plants, which was pretty effective at creating the feeling that the house was sited within the meadow. Also, I feel like I’m starting to see that look a bit more now with landscapes designed with fire and defensible space more in mind these days.