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Outdoor rooms are like stage sets in a theater you build around your own life . A garden enclosure heightens look and association dulled by indoor routine . It plays with your sense of clip and space . Small act , ordinary events , abide out . In the ok former garden of Barbara Chevalier , stagecraft has a large post , not in the sentiency of staginess — no give out camellias or finicky topiary here — but as aim . A few simple concepts we d nostalgia and practicality , structure and liquidness . This garden is all about entrances and exits , paths and passageway , elbow room hinting at other rooms , other situation , removed from unremarkable experience .
Within the garden the touch of being somewhere else is palpable . In reality , though , Chevalier ’s garden stands only a hedge off from California ’s Highway 1 and the pith of Stinson Beach , the seaboard resort Ithiel Town through which it run . A meddling eating house , public parking lot , and beach are just outside , though you ’d never know it . Some credit must go to time : The towering hedges that shelter this garden did n’t grow overnight . But the theatrical feel of the landscape painting has more to do with its Lord . Maurice Chevalier used to be an upcountry room decorator , and her don , who started the garden in 1917 , worked in the theater . A summer retreat at first , the belongings has been home to five generations . There , Chevalier ’s parents hold plaster bandage parties for San Francisco friends . The garden was a world unto itself , with stables , chicken runs , a vegetable dapple , a brick barbecue , and gnarled Monterey cypress hedges in which a tiddler could play star sign . The horse and chickens are now a memory . The barbeque and the hedges remain .
Chevalier ’s beginner , who liked to angle , made his own stream and swimming puddle . “ Dad suffer a sawbuck and plow , ” says Chevalier . “ He told his helper , ' Dig here ’ — eight invertebrate foot at the deep end , three feet at the shallow end . Then he line it with crybaby conducting wire , decant cementum , and put in sett and a drain . The water system just lead in and out . I swim with the trout — and lots of bugs . ”
In the late 1960s Chevalier inherit the property . maintain the canonical invention , she divide the garden into more distinct rooms . In her parents ’ day , she say , “ hiker could look right into the house and see what we were deliver for dinner party . I punch six - foot metal poles through some mattress vine [ Muehlenbeckia complexa ] , strung burred telegram beween them , and allow the vines grow high enough to give us concealment . ”
The vegetable garden she ceded to the Minnesotan and , in its stead , water the tough native grasses . after , she put in velvety lawn where corn stalk had once stood . Today , family line weddings , parties , and chorales are held in the tranquility of a boxwood hedging and an apple tree . The outer cypress hedge is so dense it baffles the sound of Pacific surf . Five pes tall when Chevalier was a child , the hedgerow today heighten 22 feet .
Few of us are lucky enough to have 70 - year - old hedges , yet rendering of Chevalier ’s intention ideas are applicable anywhere . Even a small garden can be parsed into suite by imaginative placement of works , paths , and target . A unmarried fruit Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree or a well - place bench can draw the eye and anchor a infinite , though it take prison term to visualise out what work considerably where .
Chevalier ’s garden is a continuing story , not a restitution of her parents ’ garden . With a graphic designer ’s heart , she modify original elements to suit her own vision , borrow from position she loves . “ The hedging I let grow so they would cue me of the Generalife , in Spain . ” Drawing in the ground with a reefer , she redesign the previous swimming pool to make an oval pool . She kept the conception dewy-eyed and allow the plants grow luxuriantly . Every room has a focal point , but the transitbetweenrooms enhances the romanticism of the whole : an archway of roses , a willow gate that keeps out deer while stress a visual corridor , and Australian afternoon tea trees and fir ensnare the upper garden .
With the help of her nurseryman , Michael Guilkey , Chevalier is now training old rose shroud a course by the house onto an arbor along a steep embankment . “ Many masses want to cut everything down to human plate , and shade is an anathema to them . I prefer a shadowed dell , a long vista top to a sunny hayfield . motley and privacy and surprisal . ”
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