A Subtle Distinction

Crafting comfortable rooms that don’t look overly designed is Kate Stamps’ hallmark, so it’s no surprise that her Pasadena garden is as unassuming as it is inviting. Wherever your eye falls, there’s something to look at: white dogwood, a creamy camellia, the lushness of a pink geranium. “My initial goal,” says Stamps, who is both a landscape and interior designer, “was to make a garden that felt natural for our house--and looked as if it had always grown here.”

Four years ago, Stamps and her architect husband, Odom--her partner in their design firm Stamps & Stamps--chose the 1904 Craftsman cottage primarily for its secluded acre-size lot. Mature oaks, pines, crape myrtles and pittosporums suggested a woodland glade, but rampant overgrowth all but obscured the house, and the grounds were buried under concrete pads and pebbled paths. Nevertheless, says Stamps, “The garden immediately began to lay itself out for us.” Its logical entry, at the property’s sunniest end, features flower borders stuffed with antique and English roses, nodding foxgloves and ruffled waves of scented geraniums. Stamps restricted these plantings to a pair of flower beds, each 120 feet long and 16 feet wide, on either side of a straight grass path. Next, at the property’s midpoint, where trees are clustered around the house and sword ferns grow, it made sense to add dogwoods, hellebores, abutilons and other shade-loving greens. Here the straight walk relaxes into stone-edged curves strewn with oak leaves, and the pinks and purples of the entry beds give way to mostly whites. “Mood changes are important,” says Stamps, observing that in Southern California, “people want color and flowers all the time. What they’re overlooking is the preciousness of serenity--how lovely it is to sit in the shade and gaze into cool, green space.”

Equally underrated, she believes, is evidence of shifting seasons. “Coming from Michigan,” she explains, “I’ve never lost the urge to orient myself to nature’s cycles. When I walk out in December, I don’t want to see June.” Accordingly, she revels in spring bulbs (bluebells, narcissus, watsonia) and roses, summer hydrangeas and the fall flush of crape myrtles, which she plans to augment by planting Chinese pistachios, persimmons and redbuds in a developing garden behind the house. In winter, she and Odom cut back their perennials and strip their rose canes of leaves, which both boosts later growth and lays bare their looping forms.

Overall, says Stamps, her plant choices reflect her resolute rejection of design-world trends. “You won’t see horticultural ‘flavors du jour’ here such as ornamental grasses, tropicals or a lot of succulents,” she points out. Instead, she strives to create “a universal, timeless quality” that moves visitors to linger. “You walk in, you smell wonderful things, you feel at peace.”

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Kate Stamps’ Favorite Roses:

‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’--a shell-pink Bourbon rose with rounded, quartered petals.

‘Paul Neyron’--an enormous, cerise-pink hybrid perpetual.

‘Abraham Darby’--a scented apricot-pink David Austin rose.

‘Cressida’--a cupped, soft-pink Austin selection with an apricot underside.

‘Golden Celebration’--a romantic bloom that fades over time from gold to pale yellow.