A Hush Behind the Hedges : Where Ornaments and Greenery Engage the Eye and Refresh the Spirit
If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you might bypass this garden altogether. And that’s the point. Tucked behind a gate, enclosed by high green hedges, it’s a quiet sanctuary from a noisy world, a place where, unobserved, one could fall asleep for the afternoon.
Created by Santa Barbara designer Eric Nagelmann in one corner of an acre-size Brentwood lot, the garden centers on a pond, a path and a wealth of small details that keep the eye busy without stirring up the mind. Ten years ago when he began here, his clients requested peace--white flowers instead of bright colors--and they wanted a simple yet formal structure reminiscent of English and Italian gardens they had seen.
Since the paths and pond existed when he arrived, Nagelmann just augmented them, graveling the walks and adding water lilies for summer bloom, water hyacinths for winter. He enhanced the walls of fledgling hedges--privet and California bay laurel--with Italian cypresses and planted orange trees to shade a bench and divide the 33-by-80-foot space into two discrete “rooms.” The separation adds mystery: Strolling on one side, you hear the splashing fountain but can’t see it; on the other, you glimpse an urn beside a path but can’t be sure where the path leads.
Such tricks make the place seem bigger than it is, and so do half-hidden ornaments the owners brought back from Europe: chipped urns, statuary and a wellhead from England; a giant oil jar from Italy. Nagelmann placed these where they would set off the planting, and he planted to take advantage of certain eye-catching surprises. A stone woman, for example, gazes out through a spray of ferns, while in the pond, a cherub leaps in a thalia thicket.
Elsewhere, Nagelmann built the garden’s borders around the theme of white flowers, starting with ‘Iceberg’ and ‘Gourmet Popcorn’ roses and filling in with creeping Myoporum parvifolium and fragrant old-fashioned philadelphus. “The white palette was a challenge,” he admits, “since I avoided common plants like impatiens and restricted annuals to pots.”
To expand his options, he used yellow-tinged whites such as angel’s trumpet and laced his greens with silver lamb’s ears and Silene uniflora. He added cooking herbs for his clients--sage, mint, oregano and basil--and introduced the formal notes of potted boxwoods sheared in orbs. When a yew died, he replaced it with a 100-year-old olive tree, and when pink ‘Cecile Brunner’ roses jumped a wall and invaded the garden, he let them stay. “It’s still restful here,” he says. “There’s nothing jarring to look at.”
Far from it. In fact, if you spied the scene through the scrolled gates, you might imagine you were dreaming.
