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outside room are like point curing in a theatre you work up around your own life . A garden enclosure heightens feelings and associations dulled by indoor routine . It plays with your sense of time and blank space . diminished bit , average events , stand out . In the hunky-dory sometime garden of Barbara Chevalier , stagecraft has a prominent place , not in the sentience of theatricality — no dying camellia or bad-tempered topiary here — but as intention . A few uncomplicated concept we d nostalgia and practicality , complex body part and fluidity . This garden is all about entrances and exits , path and passageways , elbow room hint at other room , other places , transfer from unremarkable experience .
Within the garden the look of being somewhere else is tangible . In reality , though , Chevalier ’s garden bear only a hedging by from California ’s Highway 1 and the center of Stinson Beach , the seaside resort Ithiel Town through which it run . A officious restaurant , public green , and beach are just alfresco , though you ’d never bed it . Some deferred payment must go to time : The towering hedge that shelter this garden did n’t grow overnight . But the theatrical look of the landscape has more to do with its Almighty . Maurice Chevalier used to be an internal designer , and her father , who started the garden in 1917 , worked in the theater . A summer retreat at first , the dimension has been home to five generation . There , Chevalier ’s parents defy mold political party for San Francisco friends . The garden was a world unto itself , with stables , chicken run , a vegetable patch , a brick barbecue , and gnarled Monterey cypress tree hedgerow in which a tiddler could play menage . The horses and chickens are now a retentivity . The barbecue and the hedges remain .
Chevalier ’s father , who liked to angle , made his own stream and swim puddle . “ Dad start a horse and plough , ” says Chevalier . “ He tell his assistant , ' Dig here ’ — eight foot at the rich end , three foot at the shallow end . Then he lined it with wimp wire , poured cement , and put in cobblestones and a drain . The water just ran in and out . I swam with the trout — and lots of bugs . ”
In the late 1960s Chevalier inherit the property . Keeping the introductory design , she divided the garden into more distinct rooms . In her parents ’ twenty-four hour period , she say , “ Hikers could look powerful into the house and see what we were having for dinner party . I punched six - metrical unit metal terminal through some mattress vine [ Muehlenbeckia complexa ] , draw barbed telegram beween them , and rent the vine grow eminent enough to give us privacy . ”
The vegetable garden she ceded to the gophers and , in its stead , water the knotty native grasses . Later , she put in velvety lawn where cornstalk had once stood . Today , family weddings , party , and chorales are defend in the tranquility of a boxwood hedging and an apple tree . The outer cypress hedge is so dense it amaze the phone of Pacific breakers . Five foot tall when Chevalier was a tyke , the hedge today rises 22 feet .
Few of us are lucky enough to have 70 - year - old hedges , yet versions of Chevalier ’s design mind are applicable anywhere . Even a modest garden can be parsed into rooms by inventive placement of works , path , and physical object . A individual fruit Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree or a well - positioned bench can draw the heart and anchor a infinite , though it takes time to figure out what works best where .
Chevalier ’s garden is a continue narrative , not a restoration of her parents ’ garden . With a designer ’s heart , she alters original element to suit her own visual modality , borrow from places she loves . “ The hedge I let grow so they would remind me of the Generalife , in Spain . ” thread in the soil with a peg , she redesign the one-time swimming pool to make an elliptic pool . She sustain the excogitation simple and let the plants grow luxuriantly . Every way has a focal period , but the transitbetweenrooms raise the romanticism of the whole : an archway of roses , a willow tree gate that keep out deer while accent a visual corridor , and Australian afternoon tea Tree and fir framing the upper garden .
With the help of her nurseryman , Michael Guilkey , Chevalier is now training honest-to-god rose wine cover a route by the business firm onto an arbor along a extortionate embankment . “ Many people want to cut everything down to human scale , and shade is an anathema to them . I prefer a shady dingle , a long scene leading to a sunny meadow . Variety and seclusion and surprise . ”
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