Verdant Vistas
In moviespeak, you might call this garden “a stiff upper lip meets langorous Mediterranean charm.” Deborah Walker, who got married here last summer, found it a perfect wedding bower--rose-heaped, herb-scented, crossed with paths and encircled with hedges.
Designed five years ago by Sydney Baumgartner for a Montecito spec house, the grounds were at first quite simple--an acre of lawn, pool and trees that fell away toward a seasonal creek. As if that weren’t drama enough, the home’s first owner, an interior designer, called Baumgartner back to carve the outdoors into rooms. Hailing from the Midwest, he wanted things to stay green year-round. He liked clipped order and subtle color--blues, lavenders, whites, absolutely no yellow. He loved the flavor of Provence and enjoyed dining alfresco.
To turn his wish list into a garden, Baumgartner, a Santa Barbara landscape architect, graded the property into different levels, added pepper and New Zealand Christmas trees and planted hedges. Close to the house, where guests would gather, she created terraces of faux sandstone with bits of real stone mixed in to fool the eye. Green lawn softens the edges, and so do walls heavily swathed in snail vine and bordered by lavender and ‘Simplicity’ roses. An earthen path winds away among the roses to a rustic seat twined with evergreen grapes. In this meditative spot, unusual raised beds hold not the predictable flower show but cake-like topiaries of herbs: fragrant gray and green santolina and silver and lemon thyme. From there, beyond fall-blooming hydrangeas, lies an orchard of evergreen ‘Anna’ apples within a rosemary frame.
Around the pool, there are plenty of garden seats as well as a blue-green wash of succulents and an arbor crowned with white potato vine, which is where Deborah married Stephen Walker and became the mistress of the garden.
“We don’t know all the plants, but we’re learning,” says Deborah, who moved from Dallas two weeks before the wedding while Stephen moved down from San Francisco. Since then, she and her husband have lived the romance of a movie--scarcely eating a meal indoors or spending a day without a long lounge beneath the sycamores.
