Landscaping Award Is Couple’s Just Deserts
Mike and Donna Visnic’s frontyard presents a stark contrast to their neighbors’ in Anaheim Hills. Wind gently sways blooming wildflowers and shrubs. A dry rock creek winds through the garden.
In space traditionally occupied by a lawn, the Visnics have created a desert landscape.
For their use of drought-tolerant plants, the Visnics have won one of two water-efficiency landscaping awards from Anaheim Public Utilities.
Jeff Appel’s Unocal gas station on State College Boulevard and Ball Road, with its animal topiaries and tropical mural, won the second award for its pleasing architecture combined with the use of drip-irrigation and drought-resistant plants.
“Water is a limited resource in Southern California,” said Cathy Templeton, an Anaheim resource efficiency advisor. The utilities department hopes the awards will promote more awareness of water-efficient landscaping and irrigation techniques, she said.
Both the Visnics’ yard and the gas station challenge traditional landscape and architectural models.
Once the Visnics’ frontyard looked like everyone else’s. They had a lawn and three large, water-guzzling ficus trees. The 1997 drought induced the Visnics into change.
With no children, they realized they didn’t need the lawn. Keeping it trimmed and green required too much work, too much water and offered too little variety for the couple, newly retired at the early ages of 50 and 49.
The Visnics set about searching for plants and a design suitable for their aesthetic senses and water-conservation goals. Over the next two years, they pored over magazines, looked closely at gardens they liked and consulted with Donna’s sister, a landscape designer in San Diego. They plotted out a design and had their soil analyzed to help decipher the yard’s missing nutrients.
Today Mexican sage, paper bark trees, California poppies, blue oat grass, rosemary and French and Spanish lavender decorate the frontyard. Behind the yard’s brick wall, a courtyard offers a more manicured scenery with several varieties of roses, sweet peas, digitalis and camellias.
The Visnics say they have no regrets about ditching their lawn. They drink their morning coffee outside, taking in the scenery they created. “We’ve enjoyed it. It’s peaceful and it’s beautiful,” Donna Visnic said.
Decorating the gas station, which Jeff Appel owns with his father, had less to do with water conservation than imagination. “We always go over the edge,” said Appel, who with his father owns 80 stations in Southern California.
The Anaheim station has wide cream-colored columns, a red-tile roof and decorative brick. Large boulders, flowers and fan-shaped shrubs provide a pleasing border. Inside the station’s store, another mural depicting animals frolicking on the beach greets customers.
Creativity costs a lot of money, but Appel says the Anaheim station does good business. Appel says he wrestles with whether the investment generates a good-enough payoff. But he can’t seem to stop himself. “I got into it, and now I’m crazy,” Appel said.
Judy Silber can be reached at (714) 966-5988.
