STYLE : STYLEMAKER : Designing Places of the Heart

To roam a garden designed by Isabelle C. Greene is to follow the trail of a highly charged imagination: Boulders loll like craggy dinosaurs in sweeps of periwinkle, honeysuckle and wild sour grass; broken-rock rivers splash among silver islands of snow-in-summer. At times, plants seem painted into her landscapes, in pale washes and inky greens, in startling, primitive forms that suggest the first flora on the planet.

A Santa Barbara landscape architect with a degree in botany, Greene has, over the past 25 years, created a range of exotic garden worlds from San Diego to the Bay Area and points east. At the famed Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia--once the property of industrialist Pierre S. du Pont--she dreamed up an undulating landscape that suggests an underwater grove of cacti, succulents and other arid-climate plants. On a mountain lot in Montecito, she sculpted terraces and planted them with various ground covers to imitate an aerial view of farm fields.

Greene traces her individualistic style to growing up in Pasadena and being the granddaughter of Arts and Crafts architect Henry M. Greene, who passed down his affinity for naturalistic forms and materials. Much later, at UC Santa Barbara, an art teacher encouraged her to draw left-handed as a means of adding spontaneity to her overly polished botanical illustrations.

Known for her silver-threaded palette, Greene has always appreciated native California and other dry-land plants. Silver-gray foliage, she says, “reminds me of white ceanothus just starting to bloom--and its freshness has a way of knitting things together.” Another favorite material is rock--in many colors and sizes--which she sometimes substitutes for water and even for plants.

“Design is love for an object,” Greene says. “When you design well, you leave a message behind--that someone loved what they were placing here, and that they loved this place.”