At The Edge of The World
In Santa Barbara between a busy highway and the ocean, a giant bird of paradise marks the spot where Larry and Sharon Grassini’s garden began. Five years ago, beneath its soaring, rattling stalks, designer Eric Nagelmann envisioned a tropical scene, rife with mystery, alive with bird song and bubbling water. In place of blighted roses and junipers clipped in lollipops, he saw a quiet pond with shallow fountains and a vine-topped stair among jungle greens. Behind the house, a Monterey Colonial from the ‘20s, the view would open out to the ocean--once Nagelmann axed obscuring ivy, revamped a terrace and wreathed its edge in silver plants.
The Grassinis, who have five children, wanted a landscape they could use for walks, family dinners and beachside sports. They also welcomed the thought of shifting moods throughout their 1 1/2 acres, from formal-feeling entry gardens to a relaxed ocean overlook, perfect for lounging on summer days. Nor did they flinch when Nagelmann, who has a passion for unusual plants, began touring nurseries and hauling back loads of palms, epidendrums, orange cannas, elephant’s ears and pachypodiums, which he arranged and rearranged to make an on-site sketch.
“I wanted to evoke otherworldliness,” he explains. “For me, drawing gardens on paper is too limiting. I have to see the plants together.”
His early choices inspired additions such as boulders, dymondia and echeverias to complete the plant borders around the pond. To screen the driveway from the pond, he picked multicolored mutabilis roses, which bloom in oranges, soft pinks and maroons.
Some of the same plants reappear along the stairs, which Nagelmann laid out to link the lower gardens with the house, recently renovated by architect Marc Appleton. To shade the walk and give the landscape an aged look, Nagelmann covered his steps with a pergola of weathered cypress and faux-finished brick, training trumpet vines over the top. On either side, he introduced more palms, elephant’s ears and echeverias, this time mixing them with beaucarneas, hibiscus and pink fuchsias.
“Repeating plants unifies a design,” says Nagelmann, who, as a final, extravagant stroke, planted 100 white iris ‘Nana’ along his steps, creating a springtime show reminiscent of flitting butterflies.
Anyone stopping to admire them finds places to sit along the way, as well as a fireplace and a fountain in a half-hidden side terrace. Nagelmann uses such concealed details, especially water, to draw visitors through the grounds from discovery to discovery. One, the front-door courtyard, is tucked behind a guava hedge and features pink-tinged blechnum ferns and juncus grass around yet another splashing fountain.
From there, the ultimate water show is still to come, and is itself hidden by the house. But with front and back doors open, you can see it in the distance: the blue, or sometimes gray, Pacific. Lavenders, artemisias, centaureas and metrosideros are woven together on the bluff above, while along the steps to the beach, cannas and chondropetalums dance.
“I kept planting simple here,” Nagelmann says, “so as not to clutter up the view.”
