A Slice of Beauty on the Side
What passes for a backyard at the Fair residence in Costa Mesa is actually a sideyard, long and skinny, about 1,300 square feet in all but barely 9 feet wide for almost a third of its length. It runs alongside the house--from a pair of shutter-like entry gates topped with a vigorous rose named ‘Dream Weaver’ to an alley at the rear--for 102 feet, enough space to park six Ford Excursions bumper to bumper.
Rather than being restricted by the string-bean shape, Blythe and Jerry Fair have created a garden that takes full advantage of it, with a winding path, raised beds filled with herbs and flowers, a splashing fountain and a rose-covered arbor for outdoor dining. Helped by Christin Fusano, a Laguna Beach garden consultant, they have managed to pack in all the amenities that a good cook, her family and guests could wish for.
“It has everything,” Blythe Fair said. “It’s an edible garden, an entertaining garden, a cutting garden--I can go outside and pick a bouquet or gather lunch.” It’s even a healing garden, according to clients of Fair, a practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu, the Japanese “Art of Compassionate Man,” a therapeutic balancing of body and chi energy.
After hearing Fusano talk on “Creating an Outdoor Italian Room,” Fair, 43, recalls thinking that was exactly what she wanted at home. So
she asked Fusano, who has designed many gardens in southern Orange County, for help with a garden that she could cook from and eat in. And, of course, it had to fit in the skinny sideyard.
“Dealing with cramped, odd-shaped lots is probably the future of gardening, at least here in Orange County,” Fair said, referring to the scarcity of space around many new or remodeled homes.
When Fusano arrived for a consultation, Fair immediately took her to a big sliding-glass door just off the dining area. The area, as well as the kitchen and living room, get their views of the garden through the door. Fusano suggested putting a fountain right outside, to act as the garden’s visual, if not actual, center. It helps disguise how narrow the yard is and fills it with the sight and sound of water. When the sliding door is open, the sound bounces off the stucco wall behind the fountain and into the house.
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At the fountain, there is a respectable 22 feet between the house and garden wall, and previous owners had a concrete patio on the spot. The Fairs tore out the concrete but left the original brick border and filled it in with a handsome Arizona flagstone called Candlelight.
The old brick was not the only thing salvaged from the original garden. Fair and her mother, Marilyn Carson, carefully moved all the old plants--mostly nandina and star jasmine--to Jerry Fair’s Volvo repair business in Costa Mesa.
The 6-foot-tall stucco wall runs the length of the garden and originally was a plain tan color. They re-covered it with a mined-earth stucco finish--called a Santa Barbara finish--that has the effect of “a foggy mist,” said Fair. The mottled finish and the Provencal green of the house make the long sideyard appear less closed in. “It doesn’t feel like you’re in a tunnel anymore,” Fair said.
The wall is bordered by an undulating raised bed 2 to 3 feet deep with a 2-foot-tall stucco-and-brick retaining wall. ‘Blue Point’ junipers, about 8 feet tall, are widely spaced along the wall, looking like little Italian cypress. The beds are stuffed with plants, such as the striking, cream-splashed Duranta repens ‘Variegata’ and Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Silver Sheen,’ two good, smallish landscape shrubs. Mixed in are flowering plants, like a red-flowered Cestrum newelii, “which makes a stunning contrast to the blue-gray juniper,” Fair said.
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The plants aren’t placed in straight rows but, rather, woven in and out in a skillful mix of heights and textures. They mask the wall in an irregular way, giving the bed a sense of depth that really isn’t there.
The Fairs also used flagstone to make the long, winding path that runs from front to back and is bordered with tiny lights, which Fair says is quite magical at night. Intrigued guests talk about taking a “meander” in the garden, while Jerry Fair often suggests that they “walk the grounds” to see the garden from various vantage points and in the day’s differing lights.
Flagstone was chosen for both the path and patio to limit the expanse of unrelieved paving and to allow planting in the gaps between stones. The stones are mortared in place where traffic is the heaviest so they won’t shift and trip someone.
But in less-traveled spots, each piece sits on its own little concrete pad and the space between is filled with ornamental woolly and elfin thyme, erodium and Veronica repens, as well as useful herbs such as lemon thyme and creeping oregano.
It’s almost impossible not to step on the herbs, but that’s what Fusano and Fair were hoping for--each step releases a blast of herbal fragrance.
The final third of the garden, at the rear, is devoted to dining. This area is 14 feet across, just wide enough for a long wooden table that sits on a bed of Del Rio pebbles, its oval shape a nice contrast to the angular patio.
Because the sideyard faces south, it is quite sunny and can get hot, so the table is covered with a sturdy wood trellis draped with one of Fair’s favorite plants, a climbing apricot-colored rose named ‘Royal Sunset.’ The couple frequently dines outside after dark, so the trellis also has dramatic outdoor lighting, including a chandelier.
The flagstone path picks up again on the other side of the pebbled dining area, headed for a fruitless olive named ‘Swan Hill’ that acts as a final focus at the rear gate.
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The frontyard is much more typical, measuring 28 feet by 50 feet. It still has the original lawn, but the flower borders were enlarged and now hold loose rows of herbs and vegetables of all kinds as well as flowers for cutting. Right now there are ranunculus growing next to curly endive, freesias between red lettuce, and the black-purple blooms of an iris named ‘Sensation’ that are set off by red stalks of rhubarb. Other early-spring vegetables include such surprises as turnips (which Fair says get a bum rap and are not bitter at all when young and fresh), leeks and colorful chard. There are plenty of greens, and Fair loves nothing better than to throw together a salad for visitors, using only what’s in season in the garden.
Fair does all her own gardening maintenance and has become quite expert considering she only began--at least in a serious way--when the garden was finished on Mother’s Day 1999. “I sure learned a lot this last year,” she said.
Jerry Fair, 62, doesn’t consider himself a gardener, but he’s become a fan--he’s the one who noticed how good the red-leaved loropetalum ‘Razzleberry’ looked when it was illuminated at night. He’s the one who loves the black stems on the variegated Pittosporum tenuifolium. And he’s the one who gets concerned when visitors tread on the erodium and other ground covers.
The Fairs bought the house in May 1998 but deliberately waited a year before beginning the garden because Blythe wanted to observe how the sun’s path changed through the year. By being patient, she learned which way to run her rows of vegetables and which parts of the yard were the sunniest or shadiest, the hottest or chilliest.
Considering the garden is only a year old, things have really grown. Shrubs look like shrubs already and garden beds look filled in. But, before planting anything, Fair enriched the already good soil with five 1-ton truckloads of special compost made with Bio-Dynamic methods by John P. McAndrew Fertilizer in Pacific Palisades.
Fair is an organic gardener and follows the Bio-Dynamic methods of precise formulas for compost and fertilizers and specific gardening regimens. She fertilizes the garden with a mulch-like cover of compost that she makes on the other side of the house. And she does not use pesticides, so guests can rest assured that what they are being served in the sideyard is as fresh and wholesome as you can get, having only come from the frontyard.
For the fun of it, Fair keeps a book where friends and guests can write comments about meals and the garden. One entry, by a couple from Perugia, Italy, said: “Sitting here it feels we haven’t left home!” And another commented, “What grace--from your heart through your yard to the table and into our hearts. Grazie!”
