A Garden Expedition : The 6 Locations Featured in Fullerton Tour Are Diverse but All Are Low-Maintenance, Involve Low-Water Use

Mike Riley’s garden is about a mile from Marilyn Ediss’ garden. But the two are worlds apart in style.

Riley’s half-acre in Raymond Hills is exotic and tropical. Stately King and feathery Kentia palms, glossy green leatherleaf ferns and towering euphorbia trees--like the ones in “Out of Africa”--grow here.

Rare potted plants from Morocco and South Africa are identified with custom-made plant markers.

And that’s just up near the house, on the first of six levels that spill down the hill.

At Ediss’ garden in north Fullerton, the roses are about to burst into bloom. White impatiens surround the base of a fountain, a Pan figure playing the pipes. Simple ceramic markers label the vegetables growing in raised beds.

The plants are more familiar here--colorful foxglove, salvia, statice, lavender, Shasta daisies and the showy white flowers and silver green foliage of Snow-in-Summer ground cover.

Ediss’ charming cottage garden and Riley’s commanding tropical garden can both be seen on the annual Open Garden Tours to be held Sunday, sponsored by Fullerton Beautiful Inc.

They are among five residential gardens included in the tour, which begins at 11 a.m. at the Fullerton High School farm at Lemon Street and Berkeley Avenue and ends at the Fullerton Arboretum, Yorba Linda Boulevard and Associated Road. The four-hour tour is free, but donations to cover expenses will be accepted. Tour information is available by calling (714) 525-8336.

More than 1,000 visitors are expected to pick up maps at the farm and drive to the featured gardens, according to Sylvia Jarvi, president of Fullerton Beautiful.

The gardens are diverse but all have something in common.

“We try to focus on folks who have solved problems. The gardens are all low-maintenance and low-water use. And they all look good, too,” said Jarvi.

Ediss, for example, planted ficus benjamina trees to screen off a busy street, built a grape arbor to shelter a hot patio and installed an automatic watering system which she says has changed her life.

“I used to spend my summers with the hose. Now I can go away and leave it,” she said of her garden, which encompasses the front, side and back yards of her home--squeezing out the rectangle of lawn she once planned to put in.

Other homeowners on the tour have used landscaping to expand the living space of a small home and tie together areas that were divided by a new room addition.

Even Riley’s expansive garden, with its 2,400 square feet of redwood decking and 185 sprinkler heads, is low-maintenance. Some plants, such as the white and yellow cistus (commonly called rock rose) cascading down an upper hillside in the tiered garden, need no watering at all once established.

Riley didn’t begin with a master plan but simply designed as he went. Yet he created a well-planned garden that includes hoses at various viewing levels. A large wooden greenhouse holds potted plants and cuttings from his collection, which he began at age 10.

Many of the plants are 70 to 100 years old and most come in unusual shapes--some with lethal-looking thorns, others with straight trunks supporting a tangle of succulent branches.

Other stops on the tour include a garden full of water-saving succulents such as agaves, euphorbia and cactus, large aloe specimens and an orchard in containers.

The Fullerton Police Department front garden, being transformed by Fullerton Beautiful volunteers, is a recommended sixth stop on the tour.

Unusual cactus and succulent beds, and drought-tolerant plantings are being added to the department’s garden. Donated plants and cuttings have come from police officers and those who have just passed by and noticed the project.

Tour participants are encouraged to talk with homeowners on the garden tour. But in true California fashion, the tour includes one house you can view from your car. Bright larkspurs, perennials and annuals bloom in this front yard.

And if you do catch the gardener at home, Jarvi said, he may give you a handful of larkspur seeds.