STYLE : A Garden of Ornamental Delights : Designing the Landscape With Accessories to Surprise the Eye
Cushion-like shrubs and carpet-like ground covers may abound, but a well-dressed garden isn’t complete unless it has what the English call “garden ornament.” Not just knickknacks, these accessories have a higher purpose: They both organize and emphasize complicated garden designs. In Agatha Youngblood’s Rancho Santa Fe garden, the exceptional pieces include concrete turtle steppingstones, grass beehives and a topiary woman bending down to tend a pot.
With a little help from her nursery-owner friends, Youngblood, a dedicated amateur gardener, designed and built the three-quarter-acre garden herself. She raised many of the plants from seed or cuttings in her lath house, turned the soil with her favorite spade and made her own soil amendments from compost. Going on 4 years old, the garden appears more mature, due in part to the ornaments, most of which are copies of antique English designs.
Though Youngblood modestly claims to have never had an original idea, she came up with her own method of design. Dividing her three-acre property into manageable chunks, she started with one favorite plant, found the perfect spot for it and then added other plants for harmony or contrast. In this way, a favorite pink buddleia became the Pink Buddleia Garden, and a topiary rabbit scampering away from a topiary Farmer MacGregor became the Peter Rabbit Garden. Each of Youngblood’s dozen or so gardens has its own ornaments, carefully placed so that a visitor can see only one group at a time, she says, because “I wanted them to come as a surprise.” Even the trellised roses, bright yellow Royal Golds and pink First Prizes, work as garden signposts, announcing at a bend in the path that another garden is yet to come.
Some of Youngblood’s garden ornaments are clearly functional additions--birdhouses, bird feeders, sundials--and some are not what they appear to be. In the vegetable garden, for example, the modern sculpture turns out to be cedar supports for beans, peas, tomatoes and cucumbers. And the greenhouse in the herb garden actually houses pool equipment.
Youngblood considers her garden “an English garden, California-style. All those English garden books can be real heartbreakers when you find out that those plants won’t grow here,” she says. “But if you do your homework, you’ll find there are substitutes.” At North San Diego County nurseries, such as Judy’s Perennials, Youngblood found many, from alstroemerias to zauschnerias, which grow well enough in Southern California to create a flower garden as full and lovely as any in England.
