Frontier Land
The story reads like a gardener’s fantasy: five years ago, a client of lawyer Eric Van De Water died and left him a house and eight acres in the hills above Santa Barbara. Around the rambling, 1920s house (packed with Western memorabilia) there was a blank slate--weeds and gopher holes, dramatic boulders, a scrim of native oaks that sets off the nearby mountains.
Though he wasn’t a gardener, Van de Water loved historic California and the idea of planting greens that might have grown on this bluff naturally. What’s more, he had horticulturist friends, the brothers David and Don Harris, who had helped Van de Water and his wife, Alice, plant an earlier, rose-laden garden in Montecito. In contrast, the new property was windswept and baking hot. Any garden there would have to be drought-tolerant and full of tough plants. And once Van de Water cleaned house, dusting off carved chests, spurs and cowboy paintings, uncovering windows that brought the outdoors in, he saw that the landscape was part of the house: They had to speak the same language.
Accordingly, says Don Harris, as paths and patios were laid and walls built from local stone, “We tried to stay within the Western theme and use the plants of early California.”
Before they developed their California palette, they were offered a chance to buy scores of aloes for a bargain price. In fact, the aloes--fleshy succulents from Africa--worked well with the New World plants on the Harrises’ list, especially succulent agaves, which they had been gathering in Mexico for years. Of the 150 agave species in the garden now, more than half came from their own collection. These include Agave schidigera from Puerto Vallarta and the jagged-edged Agave horrida from the foothills near Mexico City.
Woven among these are other dryland and succulent plants--giant furcraea, feathery palos verdes and dozens of spiny yuccas. Winding brick paths link these plant collages, from a Wild West-style succulent hill to mixed borders flecked with poppies, and lead to a terrace where Alice Van de Water likes to sit with daughters Brooke and Anne to watch sunsets.
And while the garden is “Eric’s style more than Alice’s,” says David Harris, parts were planned for her alone: rose-and-iris plots, vegetable beds, a citrus orchard.
Behind the house, though, where the view opens out to the Pacific and the Channel Islands, lies one of the landscape’s most compelling scenes. In a gravel field beside a stone wall, round and flat rocks and bleached shells swirl in patterns on the ground. These are sculptures that the busy lawyer made in the quiet last months of his life. Once he was diagnosed with cancer, his daughter Anne reflects, “The garden became like a meditation for him. He could retreat there and lose himself in little details.”
One of the last details her father oversaw was a seating spot constructed outside an Airstream trailer that he had bought for travels through the West. Though he died last year and never made the journey, the shiny icon has become a fixture, a symbol of adventurous dreams.
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The Harris brothers’ favorite agaves
A. victoriae--reginae--small, compact and low.
A. americana--the common century plant.
A. geminiflora--a medium green with white filaments.
A. ferox--big architectural.
A. bovicornuta--medium, with fat, cabbage-like leaves.
A. parryi huachucensis--a rosette reminiscent of an artichoke.
