Landscape Masters

Landscape Masters

The East Bay has some of the most talented landscape designers around. Find the perfect one for your patch of Earth.

For many of us, placing a new plant—still dewy from the nursery—in what we hope will be just the right spot in the garden might bring a few flutters to the stomach.

Sure, it looks lovely now. But will this fuchsia thrive here in the shade of the Australian tree fern? Is there enough drainage? Did we amend the soil enough? Like a new parent, we might fret about whether we’re up to the task of caring for this now-flourishing life. Come back in a year, we think, to see if we can really be trusted with anything slightly less hardy than an oleander.

That’s what makes professional landscape designers so amazing. With the perspective of a seasoned gardener, they bring both a hard-won and intuitive ease to the job of creating gardens. And if building environments where both people and plants can thrive together in harmony isn’t a little bit godly, then what is?

“ We don’t give recommendations for landscape designers, we give referrals,” says Paul Dotey, owner of Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. “And we encourage people to interview all the designers we’ve given them. Most homeowners don’t realize how much is involved in a landscape-design project; the client and the designer have to be able to communicate with one another.”

Ideas in bloom: Diane Bloom incorporates a client’s aesthetic into her designs. At top, plants in attractive pots create a pleasing, and mobile, centerpiece in a corner of one client’s yard. At bottom, Bloom in her Richmond garden. Top photo courtesy Diane Bloom; Bottom photo by Aengus McGiffin.

Blooming Genius
Diane Bloom may have the perfect last name for her job, but designing gardens is just one of her talents. She’s also a photographer and has worked as a therapist and dancer.
“ [Landscaping] is moving through a space, so having been a dancer helps,” says Bloom, a trim woman with sparkling blue eyes and a quick smile. “But to be a good landscape designer, you need to have been a maintenance gardener first.”

Which Bloom was, before starting her own landscape business, Bloom Gardens, in 1983. But her experiences as an artist and therapist still shine through. She’s an active listener and trusts her instincts.

“ Nine times out of ten, the first idea you get is the one you end up doing,” she says. “But you also do a combination of listening to the client and considering the demands of the site.” If a homeowner wants privacy and foliage screening in a space, then Bloom might choose taller plants. For a client who likes to entertain, Bloom and her crew design lovely rock patios and seating areas.
“ And you always have to ask to walk through their house,” she adds, “to get ideas about what style they might like.”

Bloom planted her first tree at age eight in the garden behind her family’s home in wooded Maryland: a willow she’d ordered through the Sears catalog. There was a stream behind the house and a tulip tree. But her very first garden was on the fire escape, sprouting seeds with her grandmother, when her family lived in New York City.

Bloom has designed for vast spaces, including an elegant garden in Kensington with multiple levels, a formal rose garden, and a rock area. Her imaginative work in smaller yards is also breathtaking. In a San Francisco backyard, seen from ground level as well as from a high deck, Bloom placed sculpture with faces that smile up at the viewer above. She created a butterfly garden for Children’s Hospital and for a home in North Berkeley, in the space where the driveway had been, creating a meandering enclosure of salvia, penstemon, daylilies, and verbena.

Overall Bloom likes to plant an eclectic mix of things, from traditional shade gardens to California natives or Mediterranean plants. Whether creating a space with the feel of an English garden, but requiring less care and water, or a water-conscious dry garden, Bloom and her crew do all their own work, including building rock paths, stairs, patios, fences, and drainage. But she will call in other experts, like arborists or engineers, when necessary.

“ A professional landscaper,” Bloom says, “is going to give you something that’s more than the sum of its parts.”

From the Heartland
After growing up on the edge of rural cornfields in Illinois, Lou Dixon has found his true home in the Bay Area.

With weather that allows for year-round gardening, this area is habitat to so many types of plant life, it’s enough to keep a horticulturist like Dixon busy the rest of his life.
“ Several zones come together here,” says Dixon, a tall, lanky man who came to Cal in 1988 to work as a plant biologist. “You can grow palm and protea and even get some freezes. From a plant lover’s point of view, it’s a playground.”

Always looking for some new, unusual tree or vine for clients of his company Bio Friendly Gardens, Dixon has a style which mimics both the biological diversity of nature and the whimsy.
If Dixon’s education was in botany, he’s since schooled himself in the craft of walling and building with rock. Bio Friendly Gardens specializes in “stonescaping,” creating walls, patios, waterfalls, fireplaces, outdoor cooking areas, paths, and benches.

Dixon’s stonework is worth lingering over. The rock wall along the street outside his own Berkeley hills home is an artful arrangement of Napa basalt, with the reddened moss and algae that is so common on rocks along the East Bay ridge. Hopping out of his truck, Dixon can take a sip from the streetside drinking fountain built into the rock wall, where water spills into a small rock basin.
As one enters the garden, the Asian-inspired wooden gate leading up to stone steps Dixon has built is decorated by dried grapevine wreaths. Inside, bare cabernet and merlot vines curl alongside the staircase.

Chris Cohn, who hired Dixon to landscape her Rockridge home after interviewing three landscape architects, says Dixon was “a total pleasure to work with.
“ I have a very strong sense of color and texture,” says Cohn, a realtor in Rockridge with Grubb Co. “Lou was open and excited to share the journey with me. Had I simply told him to make it beautiful, he would have been willing and able to do that as well.”

On a landing up the stone steps inside Dixon’s garden, which he shares with his Japanese-born wife and their children, a stone tskubai, or traditional Japanese wash basin, is placed for visitors to use. A wooden ladle bobs in the water, cool in the shade of an overhanging deck.
“ Japanese gardens were never really my thing,” Dixon says, dipping his hands in the rainwater. “But when I visited Japan and saw the legacy of gardens that began hundreds of years ago . . . after absorbing it all I borrowed some techniques.”

Mixing the look of Western gardens with Japanese aesthetic, Dixon likes to balance wildness with a more controlled, clean simplicity. “Colors don’t splash out. Keep it simple and green,” he says, “with different shades of green, from pale to dark.”

Not that Dixon avoids color. On his deck is a potted Paulownia, or Empress, tree. Dixon planted several of the fast-growing trees in a client’s garden, and then bought one for himself when he heard they brought good luck for families with daughters (Dixon has three). Further into spring, this new tree will produce impressive leaves, some 12 inches across, and lavender bell-shaped flowers similar to a foxglove.
“ It’s one of my current favorites, this tree,” says Dixon. “They’re hard to find.”

No Job Too Steep
Where some landscapers fear to tread, there boldly goes Chris Hecht.
“ We’ve done some jobs that were basically totally vertical,” says Hecht, seated in his wife’s shadowy painting studio at their Oakland hills home. “On hillsides, that’s where the challenges lie.”
Hecht’s company Chris Hecht Landscapes designs many flat and slightly sloped gardens, but their specialty is the tough stuff: creating access, retention, irrigation, and drainage to a yard that’s super-steep.

Using a lot of rock and pressure-treated timber to hold hillside gardens in place, Hecht says many of his projects are more monument than typical garden. His firm’s work has been awarded several times by the California Landscape Contractor’s Association.
Growing up in the steep redwood canyons of Mill Valley, Hecht is at home on the slippery slope. An animated, friendly man with a droll sense of humor, Hecht studied music in college and continues to compose choral music from his backyard studio office. By swiveling his chair around his workstation, he can switch from the computer where he monitors his landscape business to his state-of-the-art composition hardware.

The garden surrounding his office is an overgrown paradise, draped with abundant, upside-down, orange abutilon blossoms, bordered with a rock walkway, and crowned with a large pond. It serves as an example of Hecht’s expertise: building hardscapes with boulders, timber, waterfalls, decks, lighting, and even creeks—projects made to last.

“ You want something that is really durable, that will outlive the homeowner,” Hecht says. “Modern, pressure-treated materials, and durable filtration systems, should last a long time.”
Since plants aren’t his specialty, Hecht turns to colleague Wendy Wilde of WildeWood Gardens for the placement of plants in his imaginative spaces. For the past six years, Wilde has provided distinctive plants to partner with Hecht’s dramatic rock hardscapes, creating sculptural flora that can stand up to the size and stature of a boulder or waterfall.

“ I try to be aware of what the clients can see from inside the house,” Wilde says. She uses dramatic foliage like Chondropetalum tectorum (Cape thatching reed), which thrusts upward forming a sculptural shape that can stand up to boulders and rock staircases. “It has the right kind of impact and all you need is one,” Wilde says. “I tend to prefer big bold things and then use something with that that will transition through the whole work.”

Hecht, who started his company in 1981, donated his time to landscape the Gateway Emergency Exhibit Center, a sculptural memorial near the site of the 1993 Oakland Hills fire, built on Caldecott Road near Hiller Highlands. The main exhibit, an iron and rock skeletal framework of a home, was designed by architect Peter Scott with informational signage by Sue and Gordon Piper. Hecht’s work includes the surrounding landscape—situated on a hillside—and a stone pathway leading to terraced boulder “rooms” that create a ghostly feel of a house destroyed yet still teeming with flowers and life.
Hecht placed 250 tons of boulders and created a creek that meanders through the site on a rock bed. It’s a tribute to the work that can be accomplished with no client, no budget, and no ongoing maintenance.

“ I thought this project was really important,” Hecht says, looking out over the windy bluff. “My house almost went and half my neighborhood was burned.”
A Sculptor in the Garden
For Keeyla Meadows a garden shouldn’t just showcase the beauty of its plants, it should stimulate the creativity of its owner.
A sculptor and painter, Meadows creates planters and sculpture for the gardens she designs. In her own Albany garden, Meadows’s artwork and plantings provide a symphony of color and texture which accent and complement one another.

“ People need places in their home to feel connection to their joyfulness and to nature,” Meadows says.
Her own yard in Albany is not a large space, but Meadows, who has run Keeyla Meadows Gardens since 1979, has created a flow of varied levels and color that feels like a Mediterranean sculpture garden. In raised beds, which Meadows has painted on the sides with coral, yellow, and blue faces and flowers, is an edible garden—the height being easier on the back for harvesting. A large boulder forms a centerpiece of the raised bed area and, this time of year, red tulips are blooming in a nook at the rock’s base.

“ Before the tulips come up the rock is its own bold shape,” Meadows says. “At another point in the year, it’s a background for these beautiful flowers.”
Toward the back of the garden Meadows and her crew have installed tons of orange-colored Mexican rock—really more of an outcropping than a typical stone arrangement. Just beyond is the ceramics studio Meadows is having built, which will eventually support a rooftop garden.
Meadows leaps up the boulders like a deer bounding over a fence. “See, you’ll be able to just climb right up here to get to the rooftop,” she says. Such whimsy and imaginative placement in a small space is at play again in the farthest corner of the yard, where everything, from the planters to the blossoms themselves, are grape purple or avocado chartreuse.

At the home of a client, a small backyard in North Berkeley, Meadows has created another unique environment, this time incorporating metal and cement. Working with a drab, gray cement wall on two sides and a crumbling garage wall on another, Meadows’s work was cut out for her.
As with other clients, she worked with the owner to develop a color palette and figure out how the space would be used: for entertaining, child’s play, or gardening. In this case the yard was to be a meditation sanctuary.

Using thinned-out paint, Meadows covered the cement walls in a watery blue patina. She resurfaced the garage wall and created a tile mosaic there. A generous-sized palm and other airy plants have joined the garden’s few fruit trees, forming a shady oasis. A large, mossy Buddha head reclines against a rock under a blue, bronze, double Moroccan archway and gate that Meadows made of circular filigrees welded together. It’s a dramatic feeling of entrance and beginnings, created in a previously boxy backyard.

In a large urn grows a horsetail plant, striped in green and black. Its longest tendrils have hooked themselves around the blue archway nearby.
“ Isn’t that lovely!” says Meadows, gently fingering the horsetail. “It did that all by itself.”
“ Keeyla’s gift is that she’s not just a gardener,” says client Joyce Jamison, “she’s a healer, and the way she heals is through beauty, through plants, and the sculptures she does. It’s a meditation, a cultivation of joy.”
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Kate Rix is an editor at The Monthly.


Landscape Finder

Bio Friendly Gardens, Lou Dixon, (510) 843-5232; www.biofriendlygardens.com
Bloom Gardens, Diane Bloom, (510) 234-5196 Blue Ridge Landscape Company, Julie Kilbourn, (510) 847-4563
Chris Hecht, Chris Hecht Landscapes, (510) 654-9994; www.chrishechtdesign.com
Landmark, Eric Thompson, (925) 944-9655 Loving Gardens, Alisa Rose Seidlitz, (510) 525-5290
MacLaren Landscape & Garden Service, Brian Patterson, (510) 836-4769
Mu Landscaping, Larry Korn, (510) 547-4996
Keeyla Meadows Gardens, Keeyla Meadows, (510) 559-1026; www.keeyla.bigstep.com
WildeWood Gardens, Wendy Wilde, (510) 526-3395

 

May Garden EventsBringing Back the Natives Garden Tour: May 7, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
A free tour of 65 pesticide-free, water-conserving gardens throughout the East Bay that provide habitat for wildlife and contain 30 percent or more native plants. Registration required by April 20. For information, call (510) 236-9558 or visit www.bringingbackthenatives.net.
Secret Gardens of the East Bay: April 30, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

A self-guided tour of select private gardens in the East Bay. $45. Proceeds benefit Park Day School in Oakland. For information, call (510) 653-6250 or visit www.parkdayschool/secretgardens.

U.C. Berkeley Botanical Garden Plant Sale: April 29, 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
Many thousands of plants for sale, including succulents, hardy ferns, cacti, trees, and shrubs. Free admission. U.C. Berkeley Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive, Berkeley (down the hill from the Lawrence Hall of Science). For information, call (510) 643-2755 or visit www.botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu.

Faces of the East Bay