A Rustic Change of Scene

If forced to choose between her Santa Barbara house and the garden that surrounds it, Louise Campbell wouldn’t hesitate. “I’d live in a tent,” she says, “no question!”

But the two settings are hard to separate; in fact, each was planned with the other in mind. Six years ago, French architect Michel de Camaret designed the Mediterranean-style house with 23 sets of French doors that make lounging inside only slightly less breezy than loitering amid the lavenders. Each indoor space overlooks a garden room, and most of the leafy enclaves are embraced by pink stucco walls. “We came from L.A. to live surrounded by green,” says Campbell, who co-owns a motion picture equipment rental company with her film technician husband, Colin.

Since Campbell is Italian and she and her husband had traveled widely in Italy and the south of France, they were enamored of the Mediterranean style as a model for Santa Barbara living. In 1989, they found a rustic acre edged with oaks and set above a seasonal creek. There was little on it beyond some horseback-riding rings and a ramshackle stable, where the couple lived for three years while their house was taking shape.

During that time, they consulted with local landscape architect Sydney Baumgartner, who drew up a simple garden plan and helped them develop a plant list to complement the Mediterranean architecture. On it, of course, were plenty of olive trees, Lombardy poplars, rosemary and lavender, along with tough silver-green perennials such as artemisia, westringia and teucrium. Roses also joined the mix--white ‘Iceberg’ and ‘Cherokee’ in the main borders near the house, and pink ‘Cecile Brunner’ trained to climb around the windows, filling the rooms with spring and summer fragrance. “Since the house is so bright, we kept the garden colors muted,” Campbell says. “Flowers are mainly white with accents of blue, pink and purple.”

More vibrant cutting roses, such as the deep pink ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, grow in their own hedged, secluded bed, near a patch of artichokes and tomatoes. And there are two terraced orchards for other edibles--apples, peaches, apricots, plums and tangerines, to name a few.

Both seasoned gardeners, the Campbells did much of the planting themselves and a good deal of the garden construction. Colin dug the reflecting pool and poured concrete that they broke up and stacked for orchard walls. Together, they laid the brick terrace around their boule court and designed its grape-and-wisteria arbor, which was fabricated from iron pipe by a man who bends metal for race cars. “We’ve put it all together bit by bit,” says Campbell, who spent many an out-of-town weekend scouring East Coast flea markets for her garden chairs, which are early 20th century American knockoffs of French antiques. She has also put in time curing olives (“They’re a lot of work for what you get!”) and making Tuscan bean soup using fresh-clipped rosemary.

“After city life, it’s been great fun here,” she says. “In that magic hour before sunset, as the house turns a deep rose, that’s when the garden comes alive.”