DemosNews: A Contrarian in the Garden Out West (Berkeley, CA)
A Contrarian in the Garden Out West (Berkeley, CA)
By: Herb Poole

I’ve always fancied that the streets of north Berkeley would make a marvelous garden tour, as an alternate to formal estates. It could focus on the blocks around Cedar and Vine and Rose, for instance, the wide neighborhood between Alice Watter’s Chez Panisse and the kitchen garden she fosters at the local grade school (which the students tend and cook and eat from at lunch.) Berkeley tax laws are peculiar; a householder pays according to the original cost of the house, not its current value. So old timers there haven’t been pushed out, and present occupants remain economically mixed: prim grey haired ladies, aging hippies, university professors, social workers…

Each garden looks completely different from the next. None feels studied or self conscious. One senses the individual owners’ hands, not a crew, at work. Nor does the rich variety seem cacophonous, because similar plants and trees recur sufficiently here and there throughout the neighborhood, to offer a pleasing continuum and unity.

The area basically took shape in the teens and twenties of the last century. Usually five or six houses sit on each side of the block, each different architecturally, clad in brown cedar shingles or light colored wood clapboard with colorful sills. Each has a small garden or lawn between sidewalk and façade, often a large one extending back toward the interior of the block. But in the compact spaces streetside, what exuberance and variety! Wisteria drapes over houses in great swaths. Roses tumble over portals or stand head high like the Duchesse’s in Wonderland. Heliotrope, freesia, night-blooming jasmine and rich star jasmine perfume the air. Berkeley enjoys a Mediterranean climate, so bourgainvillia abounds, lovely old purple blossomed princess trees, tall mallows, and blue flowered natives such as ceanothus. Like the cottage gardens of the Cottswalds, one senses sentiment and personal delight, rather than competition, as motivators. And the show evolves every month.

Behind the houses, there is often a hidden treasure. Because the houses sit close to the street and the blocks are large, the interior space behind them may contain a little shared woods of huge coastal redwoods, Monterey pine, giant sequoia and poplars. Though usually broken up now by cedar fences and sandboxes and tool houses, the old trees still tower overhead to provide magnificent scale and venerable patina. This roll of Berkeley gardens, eccentric and heart-felt, is like nothing else.

© 2024 Herb Poole of DemosNews

September 15, 2007 at 6:52pm
DemosRating: 4.6
Hits: 2286

Genre: Home (Flora & Garden)
Type: Creative
Tags: landscape, wisteria, jasmine

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