Green, White and Gravel

 Last week I attended a garden tour in Newport Beach.  We visited Sherman Gardens,  a local "environmental center", and four private gardens in the area.  Sherman Gardens was looking fabulous, so that will be a different post.  This post covers the not so fabulous part.

We met at the Newport Beach Civic Center, which I visited and blogged about recently.

 Time to get on the bus and visit the first private garden nearby.  

Properties are generally very small in Newport Beach, of which this was an example.  The home was recently remodeled inside and out.  We walked through the home to get to the back garden, something I am always extremely uncomfortable doing on garden tours.  The home was beautiful but I feel like I'm invading someone's privacy, and I don't want to.  Homes private;  gardens, fair game. 

If you say so

Increasingly smaller Southern California properties increasingly have tall, narrow privacy screens.  You may hear your neighbor blowing his nose, but you can avoid seeing him.  This Podocarpus screen looked mature and I would bet predated the remodel. 

 There's not a lot of space for plants in small gardens that also contain the current popular must-haves of outdoor kitchens, outdoor seating involving fire, and dining spaces.  Formal parterres seem to be mandatory in Newport Beach as well, something that goes decades.  Is it an upper middle class thing?  

Dining area with outdoor kitchen and tasteful decor

Dining table with tasteful decor

  Sitting area with fire

 More decor

Formal parterre with white and purple flowers.  This was a trend throughout the day. 

More space out front, but not more interesting.  An Agonis tree planted too close to the house, a 'Tiny Tower' Italian Cypress, meatballed Westringias, and gravel.  

 The next private garden was larger and more established, but not all that different.  Green and gravel with white and purple flowers.  

 Parterre area with tasteful decor

Agonis tree planted too close to the house more mature here. 

 The back of the property was different.  It backed up to the bay.  There is a public beach that residents don't want anyone to know about. 

Military helicopters, coast guard antenna, and volleyball

 View from the back of the property.

 The plastic lawn was explained;  it was either part of the property but the city maintained it, or it wasn't part of the property and the homeowners maintained it.  Next door, they had real grass.  The Lilliputian strip of clipped hedging and ivy was part of the garden.

More decor

 The third private garden, another small property with a sitting area, dining room table, wall decor, a formal parterre, boxwood hedging, and tall screening cut narrow. 

 The entrance was made of old shutters and a pergola.

 Hedges and gravel.  Twenty or even ten years ago the gravel would have been grass.  Gravel is an improvement in most respects--no mowing saves gasoline, no watering required.   

 Tall screens

 Hedges

 Most of the flowers at all of the gardens were white.  Green and white is a great combination, but there are other fine combinations, too. 

 There was one more garden, and it was by far the largest and newest.  It has appeared in a book called "Sun Drenched Gardens:  The Mediterranean Style".  My camera battery died and I got no photos, but rest assured there were box hedges, tall screening hedges, white flowers, gravel, tasteful decor, and a formal parterre.  Actually there were two parterres.  

Besides these private gardens we went to the "Environmental Nature Center", which was originally an unused (and unusable) drainage ditch adjacent to the area's public high school--you could see the high school football field if you peeked through the fence.  It has been developed into a native plant garden with a Platinum LEED certified building containing educational facilities.  Local school children visit the center to learn about the local native plants, wildlife, and geology.

The Center's building is roofed with a photovoltaic array so large it produces more electricity than the Center uses.  

 Native California plant gardens are not at their best after a particularly hot summer.  It had a fine wild feel to it, though more maintenance would have improved it further. 

No formal parterre, either.

Agave bovicornuta? 

 There was a small plant sale area containing a few potted plants, either dead or in fairly dire shape after a summer that was brutal even this close to the ocean.  I was astonished to see a local native Dichondra--didn't know there was one.  Due to habitat loss it is vanishing from what wild lands remain in coastal Southern California.

Great addition to a formal parterre?  

 For a gardener, the garden is never big enough.  The private gardens were lovely properties, but hauntingly impersonal and depressingly small.  No quirks, personal vision, eccentricities, just significant resources tastefully applied and regularly maintained, in an affluent city.  Good taste that played it way too safe. 

The public property, the school district center, was ragged, low budget, under maintained, but it well reflected, at least, the landscape that once existed in the area.  The air carried the scent of foliage, not money. 

We were to end the day at a local garden center and restaurant complex nearby.  After the bus dropped us all off at our cars, I drove over to the garden center where there was a mad mass of cars containing mostly restaurant customers looking for parking spaces, of which there were none.  So I drove on, to my quirky, irregularly maintained, not overly tasteful, parterre-free garden.    

Vastly superior photos and comments on this tour here and here.