Lessons in green - how to design a garden

Sunset, Sept, 1999 by Joan Stapleton Rockwell

This serene garden in Sonoma, California, offers inspiration for combining foliage plants

There is silence in this moist, woodsy garden. And there is peace; soft shades of green - emerald, jade, and yellow-green - prevail.

"It's a California-Japanese-with-art Zen garden," says designer Victor Levine of the garden he created for Deborah Hill. The plantings are soothing and simple. Except for a scattering of tiny, pale blooms on the blue star creeper, there's not a flower in sight. Yet the garden is richly textured, thanks to a masterful combination of foliage in shades of green.

"Gardening with compassion is important to me," says Levine, who turned for inspiration to the gentle rolling hills along Sonoma Valley's western skyline and to the region's natural plant communities. To re-create the look of hills, Levine hauled in a ton of soil and shaped low mounds behind the house. He embedded boulders in the "hill," then planted blue star creeper, Mexican feather grass, festuca, and variegated bamboos around them.

Beyond these grassy hills, he created a raked-gravel courtyard encircled by native California shrubs, vines, and trees. Here, a pond is ringed with low grasses and ground covers. And a cluster of silvery artemisia billows over raked gravel. To Levine, these puffs of foliage represent "wispy clouds floating over a lake of gravel."

"Remember how restful it was lying in green grass making pictures of fluffy clouds?" he asks. "In this garden, you don't have to imagine it."

DESIGN: Victor Levine, Sonoma, CA; (707) 939-1712.

SHADES OF GREEN

Hill's garden owes its tapestrylike quality to a pared-down palette of greens.

Cool green to gray

* Artemisia 'Powis Castle'. Silvery mound to 3 feet tall. Grows in all Sunset climate zones.

Festuca amethystina, F. glauca. Tight clumps of narrow bluish or grayish leaves 6 to 18 inches tall. Sun to part shade; all zones.

Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). 'Soquel' (used in this garden) has bluish green foliage. 'Aptos Blue' and 'Majestic Beauty' have deeper blue-green foliage. 'Filoli' and 'Woodside' are distinctly blue. Grows fast to 70 to 90 feet. Sun (part shade when young). Zones 4-9, 14-24.

Warm green

* Bamboos. Levine used golden bamboo and black bamboo; both are running types, hardy to 0 [degrees] . Clumpers with graceful foliage include golden goddess bamboo and Mexican weeping bamboo.

* Blue star creeper (Laurentia fluviatilis, also sold as Isotoma fluviatilis). Apple green leaves on creeping plant to 3 inches tall. Sun to part shade. Zones 4-5, 8-9, 14-24.

Lessons in foliage

Play leaf colors off one another. Place apple green fern fronds beneath a red Japanese maple, for instance, or clumps of yellow-green feather grass next to gray-green woolly thyme. Plant ribbons of blue fescue through low blue star creeper and baby's tears. Fringe the edges with silvery lamb's ears.

Pair plants for shape, texture, and height. Plant billowing clumps of feathery grasses next to low, neat mats of creeping thyme, or variegated liriope (stiff, upright leaves) next to a ground-hugger such as dymondia.

Repeat the plantings. Use the same plants - bamboo, for instance - in several parts of the garden. "Balance is vital," says Levine. "It unifies a garden."

Add art. Tuck water basins, stones, or garden statuary amid the foliage for interest and a bit of whimsy.