It's garden-tour season! Creative California gardens is the theme of the Gamble garden tour this year, which traditionally has featured big splashy gardens. The “splash” this year is livable spaces adorned with personal touches and created largely by the garden owners.
Each of these Palo Alto gardens shows the owner's thumbprint, according to tour coordinators Anne Taylor and Leslie Huey, who showed me one of the gardens one day in late March. This year's gardens feature lots of ideas for creating functional outdoor rooms that are extensions of indoor living space.
In the Arts and Crafts Garden that I visited, I noticed whimsical garden art here and there, adding blasts of color even in the dormant season. Over the 6 years since the garden was laid out, it has evolved into a place where the owner tries out various ideas.
A low, dense citrus hedge marks one edge of the raised-bed vegetable garden. The greenhouse, where vegetable starts are grown from seeds, is conveniently located next to the food garden. A garden shed, an orchard, and a composting area round out the working garden. It was early in the season, but the abundance of trellising materials suggests the owner has fun with vertical gardening as well.
This garden, the biggest one on the tour, has a few surprising garden rooms. Open a modest gate to find the spa and sauna. Look past a fence adorned with potato vine, and way down below is a big patio, an extension of the family room. On the patio walls are a fountain and mosaics, which I imagine would give the room a feeling of being far away from the rest of the garden.
Another gate, another opening in the hedge...another garden room! Because this garden is young, it feels open and expansive. Yet I still had a sense of a secret room lurking somewhere.
Other gardens on the tour are an African Sculpture Garden with statuary from Zimbabwe, an Arid Garden with native grasses and a Southwestern feel, an Artisan's Garden with unusual (even for California) plants, and an Andalusian Garden with hints of Spain, France, and Italy. A sixth garden, created by iconoclastic garden designer Topher Delaney, is not officially on the tour, but it's located between a couple of tour gardens and visitors will have permission to peek into the front yard.
Gamble Garden's 22nd Annual Spring Garden Tour will take place on Friday, May 4, and Saturday, May 5, 2007. Tickets, $25/30 (members/nonmembers) in advance and $35 on tour days, are good for entrance to 5 private gardens from 10 to 4 on either day.
Even if you don't go on the tour, visit Gamble Garden, located at 1431 Waverley (off Embarcadero) in Palo Alto for the annual plant sale, held the same days. Volunteers propagate interesting plants from Gamble's collection and sell them once a year. Garden-related vendors, a luncheon, and information booths round out the celebration. For more information, call Gamble Garden at 650.329.1356.
© 2007 Tanya Kucak