The artist’s eye

FOR their cliff-top garden overlooking the ocean, Charles and Katie Arnoldi recently replaced their lawn with a landscape that requires no watering or maintenance and is as visually captivating as the couple’s art collection. “We spent a lot of time selecting cactuses as if they were sculptures and as if each had an individual personality,” says Maureen Barnes, the garden designer who helped the couple. Some of the concepts that shaped their design:

Barrel cactus: “The unifying element,” Charles says, referring to “soft barrel cactuses arranged to appear as if they are blowing in the wind.”

Vertical contrast: Landscape contractor Chris Wilson scouted the property and found two old, tall trees – a Yucca elata and an Aloe barberae, also called Aloe bainesii (visible through the dining room window on Page 1) – that were transplanted in the new garden. They are powerful vertical elements in an otherwise uninterrupted horizontal plane running out to sea.

Space: Each cactus, Barnes says, has room to breathe and be itself – “like artworks.”

–

Bettijane Levine