Nature’s Last Word

According to Raymond Sodomka, who owns Turk Hessellund Nursery in Montecito, “The finest manure of the field is the patter of the owner’s feet.” Which is why, 17 years ago, he welcomed the chance to help a couple with their one-acre lot. Situated around a 1932 New Orleans-style house designed by architect William S. McCay, the rambling landscape had a few good trees--sycamores, olives and locusts--as well as plants appropriate to a Southern garden: ginger, osmanthus, honeysuckle and wisteria. But more screening was required. Some outdoor lounging spots were too exposed, and others, such as the asphalt terrace outside the kitchen, needed softening.

Working together, Sodomka and one of the owners, an avid gardener, removed the asphalt in favor of lawn and added black acacia, pittosporum, holly and evergreen pear trees and shrubs at the property’s edges. To dramatize the garden’s entrance, they lined the front walk with jasmine. At its end, they planted mayten trees whose weeping boughs visitors must part and step through to reach the house. Elsewhere, they widened and extended paths, put in patios and cut planting beds around the lawn--beds that, over the years, have grown more complicated as the owner has gained experience. “I learn by doing,” she explains, “what works, what doesn’t, what will take a little shade and what withers without sun.”

Apple trees were among the casualties of her experiments, failing to thrive in a shaded site that their replacements, privet hedges, love. Azara trees from Chile have flourished against a sun-dappled wall, making up for the spindly Australian carrot woods they replaced. And a rare tree that Sodomka identifies as Ipomoea gave up the ghost during El Nino. One day, the owner recalls, a stranger paused to admire the tree, which was as old as the house. “The next day, it fell down,” she laments. Yet its death opened up new vistas where a swath of Dutch iris, long hidden, and a vintage path of old bricks curve away invitingly into the distance.

Such “garden bones” provide a framework for further plantings--a lesson, she says, that Sodomka taught her. “There must be order first--trees, walls, paths, perennials--before you bring in explosive elements such as annuals.”

And though she loves spring flowers, especially foxgloves and delphiniums, she has learned to prefer the soothing luxury of greenery that doesn’t fade as the seasons change. Leaf textures are important: the contrasts of large and small, dark and light, dense and feathery. Plants like campanula, agapanthus, potted roses and lavender hold the composition together, and water has been added to cool the hot places. In 1990, a pool went in at the site of a former badminton court. Three years ago, a simple parterre with a spilling fountain replaced an unused side lawn.

“Most people want their gardens ‘done’ all at once,” Sodomka observes. “Here you see the layered, polished, ‘aged-in-oak’ quality that comes with time. Here we’re reminded that we’re not the final orchestrators of our environment. The last word, inevitably, belongs to nature.”

Sodomka’s Perennial Picks for Shade and Filtered Light

* Ground covers: campanula, bacopa, Santa Barbara daisies, ajuga.

* Shrubs: loropetalum, hydrangea, cleyera.

* Flowering perennials: Japanese anemones, foxgloves.