At Piante Gardens, the Landscaping Choice Is Yours
I’ve spent a good part of my life secretly snarling at people who say they know what they want. To me, they’re beyond irritating.
They’re the ones who knew, and knew absolutely, that they were going to be lawyers when they grew up. And they knew it at age 4. And now they’re lawyers.
They’re the ones who home in on personal goals like a Patriot homes in on a Scud. They make all those toothy motivational TV infomercial guys look like basset hounds. They’re as inexorable as the rotation of the earth, more dogged than the Mounties. Nothing distracts them. They’re as flexible as a titanium brick.
And about as appealing. How, for instance, can you claim to be a Fun Guy when you’d rather force a leveraged buyout of GM than make a spur-of-the-moment, no-sleep, late-night banzai run to Vegas to see who can blow their Christmas bonus before the sun comes up?
Fun, however, is not in the goal-oriented zealot’s sphere of worldly experience. His portable daily planner is his salvation and choice is his enemy. You’ll find him at his club, sitting where he always sits, eating what he always eats, relentless as time, jolly as a tax audit.
You won’t, however, find him at Piante Gardens. To people whose decisions are always final, the place must be as terrifying as the mummy’s tomb.
Freedom of choice is Piante Gardens’ raison d’etre. It’s a kind of outdoor supermarket for people who are ready to do some serious landscaping but who may be seriously indecisive about how they want their yard to look.
The gardens’ owner, Jo Anna Matranga--who specialized in interior design before opening Piante Gardens--calls the place “an outdoor design center,” comparing it to the multishowroom complexes that cater to the interior design trade. The idea, she said, is to present homeowners with a compact yet diverse nursery where they can be bombarded not only with dozens of plant choices, but landscaping ideas from masonry to outdoor cooking units to fountains.
The gardens, located a few hundred yards from the entrance to Coto de Caza, are visually appealing, but about as homogenous as the product of a quilting bee. On one end is a huge covered patio filled with decorator outdoor furniture. All around are various styles of outdoor sculpture, planters, fencing, gates, wall materials, balustrades. A large cascading waterfall is built into an adjacent hillside.
And if you think the surroundings at eye level are eclectic, you’ll be thrown into a paralysis of indecision when you finally look down. The walkways around the garden are paved with different materials every few steps, a virtual catalogue of paving beneath your feet. If Dorothy had had to follow this sort of thing, she would have collapsed before she ever made it out of Munchkinland.
Matranga designed the gardens over the last two years as a showcase for a group of landscaping contractors to whom she refers business. A resident of Coto de Caza, she said she kept hearing “horror stories” from her neighbors about how the landscaping projects for which they had contracted had not turned out the way they envisioned.
She resolved, she said, to assemble a group of regular contractors whose work would be on ready display. Visitors to the gardens can fill out a referral card that indicates what sort of landscaping services they’re interested in and Matranga will call the appropriate contractor, who in turn calls the potential client for consultation.
Yet another service likely will appeal to the truly indecisive--that is, the truly creative. It seems designed for would-be landscapers who show up at Piante Gardens and think absolutely every plant, bird bath, sundial and fountain displayed there would look supremely wonderful in their own yard. It might if you happen to be Rod Serling, but if harmony and balance have a place in your life, you might want to avail yourself of the gardens’ computer imaging service.
This is the landscaper’s answer to the high-tech cosmetics boutique, in which hair and makeup overhauls are shown to clients first in computer-generated incarnations before the actual goop is applied to their faces. At Piante Gardens, the computer produces a rendering of the client’s yard, then fills it with a variety of plants, walks, sculptures, trees and other design and horticultural elements to see how it all fits together--or doesn’t.
None of this, of course, will appeal to the severely goal-oriented who, like as not, long ago decided on a severely groomed Japanese garden that involves hourly pruning for the optimum in order and symmetry. But if you love to visit airports just to look at all the destinations on the screen, if you dally at the pumps occasionally trying to talk yourself into buying super unleaded, and particularly if you drive waiters crazy if you’re in a restaurant with a big menu, then Piante Gardens may be your meat and potatoes.
Just try to remember that their hours are not unlimited: 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.
