Orange Blossom Special
Pamela Burton’s friends never show up at the front door of her Ojai house. Instead, they head around to the kitchen door, off the patio with its grape canopy, comfortable chairs and view of orange groves. “That’s the room we live in most,” says Burton, a Santa Monica landscape architect whose small ranch speaks volumes about her gardening philosophy. Its five acres are planted with commercial orange and tangelo trees and a mix of California natives, succulents and roses that spill around rough stone walls like the ones built by Chinese laborers throughout Ojai during the late 1800s. Combining agriculture and pleasure gardening delights Burton, and so does blending formal structure with relaxed living. “Structure is all-important,” she explains. “You have to plan how a space will look and feel when you move through it as well as when you stop and linger.”
Burton began plotting her garden as soon as she saw the ranch with her husband, Richard Hertz, more than a decade ago. They were in Ojai to celebrate their anniversary and decided impulsively to shop for property. When they arrived at what they now call Rancho Dulce, she recalls, “we glanced at each other and said, ‘We’ll take it.’ ” Both had grown up amid citrus groves and were taken with the property’s fragrance of orange blooms and its charming 1920s stone house. Two lofty sycamores flanked the entry to the garden, which was overrun with ivy and wild violets but featured a beautiful jacaranda tree, twining 50-year-old grapevines and fragments of original dry-laid stone walls. “I saw the mountains wrapping their arms around this place,” Burton says, “and then the groves encircled it. So I extended the walls to further surround the house and frame the planting.”
Over the years, she has chosen tough plants--including no-mow buffalo and grama grass--that fend for themselves between weekend visits. Along the path to the front porch, cistus and lavatera thrive with Carpenteria californica and other natives. Roses clamber around windows (‘Cecile Brunner,’ ‘Golden Showers,’ ‘Joseph’s Coat’) and appear in older, regal forms (‘Eglantine,’ ‘Madame Berkeley’) amid more common stuff. “They’re so uncomplaining,” Burton marvels at her roses. But then so are her native irises and blue oat grass and the acanthus that arises each spring in a green wall along her patio, marking the route to her kitchen door.
