A garden for the senses - Raul Rumba and Bob Clark's garden in Oakland, California

Sunset, July, 1996 by Lauren Bonar Swezey

Plants, water, art, and whimsy come together magically in this California garden

Playful, imaginative, and fun. Bob Clark and Raul Zumba's garden in Oakland, California, is all of this and more. It's a garden to get lost in. A browser's delight. A maze of paths, embellished here and there with artful surprises, winds through it. Nothing is linear in this magical garden. "The garden is designed to make people forget the outside world for a moment," Clark says.

At each turn in the path is a new vista. Turn one corner and you come upon a spouting fountain. Turn another corner and there's a mini-amphitheater flanked with raised perennial beds and concrete benches. Roses and salvias are just around another corner. Everywhere you look, a surprisingly beautiful scene asserts itself, even underfoot - steppingstones flanked by lime green moss, for instance.

Clark and Zumba, both masters of the unexpected, enjoy combining "kitschy things with fine art" - a beautiful sculpture displayed against a brick wall that's accented with pot fragments, for example. Even objects as mundane as rubber gardening boots are prominently displayed. Clark describes the garden as "thought-provoking" and one that "makes people stop and look." But, he emphasizes, nothing in it is to be taken too seriously.

The garden is a living laboratory where Clark and Zumba experiment with plants and with design concepts that Clark hopes to use in his clients' gardens. He tests plants such as chartreuse fever-few and Helichrysum petiolare 'Limelight' by tucking in one or two plants here and there. If they're successful, he masses them in other gardens.

"We also purposely leave holes between permanent plantings, where we can use seasonal color and play with new plants," says Zumba.

Clark and Zumba also experiment with color. "I like to try different combinations - to use playful colors such as yellow," says Clark. "If they work, my clients eventually get them, too."

FIVE YEARS IN THE MAKING

The garden didn't go in overnight but evolved over five years (and is still evolving). First, the sloping hillsides in the front and back were terraced into level planting areas. In the back, a brick retaining wall decorated with marbles and random objects supports the upper terrace. Clark and Zumba brought in more than 300 cubic yards of soil. Then the paths went in, and initial planting started.

Clark prefers informality close to the house, formality farther away. Next to the house, his plants are purposely lush and tangled; clematis and passion vines intertwine, and ferns mingle with shrubs. A 25-foot-tall tree stump left when a dying tree was cut down will soon be covered with vines.

Farther out in the garden, low box-wood hedges surround planting beds where Clark and Zumba test new annuals and perennials.

When the perennials go dormant in winter, the garden's structure reasserts itself. Paths and walls become more visible again, as do dwarf and slow-growing conifers. Trunks and branches of deciduous trees stand out. Clark and Zumba don't mind the quietness - it's their time to take a break too.