Room to Grow : Getting Rid of a Lawn Allows Time and Space to Do More Than Mow
SOMETIMES WHAT A GARDEN NEEDS is a fresh start. Soil wears out, plants become overgrown; perhaps the total design needs rethinking. The back yard of the Fairfax-area home of garden photographer Kathlene Persoff was ripe for renewal. Nearly as old as her 1928 house, it was uninspired and hardly inviting--a weedy lawn surrounded by overgrown shrubs. With the help of garden designer Chris Rosmini, Persoff wiped the slate almost clean, killing off the lawn in late summer and saving only one grapefruit tree, a few rosebushes and some privets for background.
“I have always wanted a wonderful little garden and have been lucky enough to see so many,” she explains. A trip to England in June, 1987, was the trigger. “Those wonderful, overgrown gardens in London, some no bigger than a postage stamp, were my inspiration. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I can do this,’ and without a staff of 10.”
Rosmini’s plan substituted paths for a lawn. With the help of contractor Todd Trigiani, Persoff carefully outlined the walkways with string and put in edging. “I was Todd’s helper out there with my little rubber mallet, pounding in the bricks (which are set in concrete),” Persoff recalls. The handsome Bouquet Canyon stone for the paths was laid on a bed of sand and gravel so that water can percolate through.
The two main paths divide the garden into four quadrants, providing access and organization. An elegant concrete pot filled with geraniums is the centerpiece. Each quadrant has its own spigot and hose, and Persoff added smaller paths of gravel six months later “after discovering where I kept stepping in mud” while watering. She set teak chairs and benches (from the mail-order firm of Smith & Hawken) at the ends of the paths where they make a good perch for viewing a flower-filled garden.
For her photographic still lifes, Persoff needs flowers that do not look as if they were purchased from a florist, so she planted unusual perennials and old roses for cutting. She sought advice from Sassafras Nursery and Landscape in Topanga Canyon, which also provided most of the plants.
Photographed when the garden was a year old, the fall-planted ranunculus steal the show. The white sweet alyssum serves as filler while some of the slower perennials--coral bells, statice, dianthus, Japanese anemones and French lavender--become established. The pure-white flowers belong to the permanent ground cover called snow-in-summer; out of bloom, this low, spreading plant is a mass of matte gray. Other gray-foliaged plants, including low lamb’s ears and the taller artemisia ‘Powis Castle,’ edge the path like landing lights at an airstrip.
“I love looking out the window now--it’s another world out there,” Persoff remarks. Though this is a small, in-town garden, Persoff’s back yard proves that there is plenty in a space this compact to keep a gardener occupied.
