Practically Elegant

Her trademark may be the simple elegance of reflecting pools, moody groves and flower borders, but when Sydney Baumgartner designs a garden, she often recommends chickens. “They eat the snails, make eggs and fertilizer, fluff up the compost and sing to you!” says Baumgartner, one of Santa Barbara’s most respected landscape architects. Practical, poetic and as full of beans as a Rhode Island Red, she’s been designing for 20 years--from San Francisco to Malibu, for clients such as Pat Benatar and Dennis and Ali Miller. She learned her craft from Elizabeth de Forest, a legendary Santa Barbara plantswoman and wife of Lockwood de Forest, who taught her how to shape space, borrow views and think in terms of outdoor rooms. De Forest also taught her to weave silver plants among greens and build surprises into formal compositions. “Turn a corner,” Baumgartner says, “and you should encounter something wonderful.” In one of her own designs, a window cut in a hedge offers a glimpse of apple-laden trees. In another, an oak grove harbors a tranquil retreat walled by westringias.

Provenal farms, English cottage spreads, Spanish courtyards--Baumgartner works in many styles, but what everyone seems to want, she says, are romance and serenity. Increasingly, she finds, even non-gardeners are knowledgeable about plants, with so many to choose from in local nurseries. “When I started, I had to scrounge cuttings from friends or grow things myself. All you could buy were juniper and rhaphiolepis.” Her backyard is a collector’s paradise of rare plants and gifts from other gardeners. Naturally, among the tall cardoons and exotic bulbs, there is a small palace for her chickens.