Breaking New Ground : Using Skills Honed on Grand Houses, an Interior Designer Turns Her Talents to Taming a Wild Acre
For interior designer Lucinda Lester, it wasn’t a great leap, theoretically, to make a garden. She knew the look she wanted: yards of lavender, gravel paths, greens layered among open-air rooms as inviting as the ones inside her Montecito house. For years she had admired this sort of garden in France. She knew it was right for the house that she and her husband, Walter Owen, had added on to a 1920s cottage. They remodeled five years ago, adding French pavers but preserving garden-friendly French doors and a pergola for twining grapes. But Lester wasn’t a gardener. She didn’t know plants, and she was daunted by weeds as tall as trees that raged across their acre lot.
But after arguing with landscapers who didn’t understand her goals, Lester decided to develop them herself, using the principles of home design to shape the outdoor spaces. “The same rules apply,” she says. “Trees and hedges become your walls, and pavings and ground covers your floors as you mix textures and colors to make distinct yet connected rooms.”
As with a house, an old garden often has elements worth keeping, as cornerstones of new designs. In Lester’s case, 42 large olive trees--once part of a producing grove--made the case for more Mediterranean-world plants: rosemary, thyme, boxwood, Italian cypress. Edging the property, the olive trees also created focal points for views. In fact, the guiding line for Lester’s plan was a vista from her bedroom window across the swimming pool and through the weed patch to a single majestic tree. At the foot of the tree, she envisioned a bench, and leading to both, a straight path hedged with lavender. From there it was easy to place a second path across the first, and conceive a network of paths for multiple walks and views and greater access to the property. The area needed to be cleared, of course, and, because it sloped unevenly, graded into gentle terraces. Then there was the question of planting.
But before she tackled that, Lester had a bigger problem: the swimming pool. Built in the style of a free-form, naturalistic pond, it was a boulder-edged eyesore with vast banks of red flagstone. It was too costly to replace and too useful to scrap, in a family with four teenagers, so Lester softened its outline, axing all but two structural boulders and a rim of red rock, which she muted with additional sandstone pavers. Along this rim, inspired by the foliage collages of a French designer, she installed a sweep of topiaried shrubs--compact myrtle, pittosporum, boxwood, artemisia and teucrium. These established a planting theme: More clipped, mixed shrubs pack the short slope from pool to pergola; boxwood, French lavender and privet flank steps to the raised terrace that Lester added outside her bedroom. And the same motif pervades the upper garden, where rounded boxwoods now line some of the walks.
These ambling walks and the garden’s new dining and lounging spots have had a greater impact on her family’s life than Lester imagined when she drew them. “We eat outside by candelight,” she says. “We’re constantly touching and smelling plants--it’s a whole new, surprising world.”
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what Lucinda loves:
* Vaux-le-Vicomte, legendary designer Andre le Notre’s 17th century
French garden masterpiece.
* “Gardens in Provence,” by Louisa Jones.
* The topiaried-shrub collages of contemporary French garden designer Nicole de Vesian.
* 17th and 18th century French drawing rooms, doors and fabrics.
